Do you know exactly what's considered an emergency?
Stick around and find out.
Welcome to the Own Your Health Podcast.
I'm Cyndi Lynne, and I can't wait to
help you step into your health power.
In this episode, we're going to talk about what exactly
constitutes an emergency for your health and we're not going
to spend ton of time on that because it's actually
the inverse that I'm much more interested.
And that is if we know what is
an emergency, we know what's not an emergency.
And there's a lot of value in that.
So let's dive in here.
What would you consider an
emergency from a health perspective?
Now, I can tell you as years of practicing as
a cardiac nurse, heart attacks are right up there.
Stroke, really, any kind of
blood clots are an emergency.
Massive trauma from, say, a car
accident or that type of thing.
Uncontrolled bleeding, those kinds
of things are emergencies.
Anaphylactic shock.
So extreme reactions, extreme allergic reactions, that
would also be considered an emergency.
So did that list include things that you hadn't
thought of or had you thought of a bunch
of things that aren't necessarily on that list?
I'm not going to claim that that's
absolutely inclusive of everything that's an emergency.
But the point of this, and what I really want us
to focus on today is that most of what happens to
you in the doctor's office most of the time when you're
sent for tests and you go back in and you have
a follow up appointment and you get a diagnosis, even if
it's something that's serious like cancer or autoimmune disorders or any
one of the plethora of things that we can be diagnosed
with these days, it most likely is not an emergency.
And I know that may sound like I'm trying
to minimize that experience or minimize how frightening it
is to hear the words you have cancer, but
the value in knowing that you are not in
a medical emergency means that you can stop.
You can pause and you can think.
There is time to ask questions.
There is time to look for solutions.
There's time to investigate different options.
And that's frequently not the case in an emergency.
If you're picked up in an ambulance, having a heart
attack, go to the hospital, many, many things are going
to happen automatically without you making any decisions.
And they need to because it's
that much of an emergency.
But when we have other health conditions,
even if they're very scary, even if
they're serious, serious doesn't equal an emergency.
And that's an important distinction to make because I want
you to think about times in your life and probably
if you're listening to this, you have had times in
your life where you've gotten bad health news or you've
had an emergency and think about the emotions it evokes.
Think about the things that rush
through your mind or maybe nothing.
Maybe you just go blank in those kind of situations.
Now, what if you take the approach to
the non emergency situations, that okay, this is
a big piece of information I have gotten.
However, I have time to digest this, I have time
to process this information, I have time to investigate.
And that's where when you take that pause,
it can make a world of difference.
And I want to share with you
the story of one of my clients.
Excuse me.
And I've shared it before, but I think it's a
super important one to make in terms of owning our
health, owning our decisions, and actually having the time to
gather the information, to make informed decisions.
So I had a client come to me, and she
came to me long after the fact, as she was
beyond her treatment time, was having some difficulty with her
body, wanted help with movement, and came into my office.
And so I'll call this woman Sarah.
She came in and she was quite upset with how
her body was performing, I'll say, how she was able
to move, how she was able to exercise.
And she said nothing had ever been the
same since she got her breast cancer diagnosis.
Much of the movement that she was attempting to do
and many of the things weren't really directly, physically related
to what she was experiencing at the moment.
And so we sat down to talk
and kind of unpack the story.
And this is something that we really
do a lot of in the Community.
Look at what our story is
around, the experiences that we've had.
And I can shortcut here an emergency experience gives
you a very different, very frightening story that's much
harder to go through and to live with, than
if you have a story of a diagnosis in
which you are managing your health and you are
owning your health and your decisions.
So let me get back to Sarah.
She shared with me that she went
in for a routine mammogram one afternoon.
She took off of work a little bit
early, was going to go for the mammogram
and then pick up her kids from school.
Easy peasy.
Many, many of us have done that.
I'm sure most of you women can
relate to that kind of experience. Make the appointment.
You don't look forward to it, you go in and do it.
So she had the mammogram.
She was sitting in the little waiting area, and they
were just going to have someone look at the films
to see if films I'm dating myself there to see
if the images actually came out well or if there
was movement or the images need to be retaken.
So she's sitting there waiting, and someone
comes out, a technician, and says, you
know, we've seen something suspicious.
We'd like to take you back for a biopsy.
And at the word suspicious, Sarah recalls
kind of blanking out after that.
Her mind was stuck on that thought that okay.
Oh, my gosh, there's something well, when
you go for a mammogram and you
see something suspicious, what does that mean?
Cancer is what they suspect when they see it.
So on hearing that, she got up, and I think
many of the women listening to this can also relate
she got up, she had her slacks on, she had
her gown on the top half, and she had her
blouse and her bra and her purse in her arm.
And she was taken into the next
room, and she met with someone there.
And they took her into the next little room and
actually did a biopsy right there on the spot.
And the whole time she was in there, she had two
thoughts I have cancer and I can't pick up my kids.
And it was tremendously stressful.
It was so stressful for her, that experience, that
the trauma of that stress stayed with her through
the entire course of her treatments and even afterwards.
And I'll share the rest of her story at
some other time because it is quite interesting.
But that feeling to her of being out of
control, of being stuck in these thoughts, of being
in kind of a panic mode, because and this
is the point in all of this here, because
her mammogram results were treated as an emergency.
And I promise you, mammogram
results are never an emergency.
And that may ruffle a few feathers in the medical
community, but let me tell you how this works.
If you're there on site and they can keep you on
site and keep you in the system, they can keep you
as a patient, and they can do the treatments that they
want to do on you and for you.
And once you're in that stream,
there's very little informed consent given.
You're just kind of like my client stated this, it
was like being on a conveyor belt where she didn't
actually even remember herself walking from room to room.
But she still has this vivid image in her mind of
her purse and her blouse and her bra on her arm.
So how could this experience have been different?
Well, if Sarah knew then what she knows now, and
let me tell you, she is an extremely strong advocate
for her health, she would have known that any results
you get from a mammogram are not an emergency.
An ambiguous result from a mammogram may require that more images
are taken if, for some reason, like I said, the images
didn't come out well, and that can happen, or they may
want to proceed with a biopsy, but there is absolutely no
reason that a biopsy cannot be scheduled for the next day
or the next few days or the next week.
So you might be thinking,
what difference does that make?
Well, it makes a huge difference when it
comes to owning your health and staying in
some sort of sense of control.
How could this have gone differently?
Well, sarah could have gotten her results or
gotten the preliminary results saying there's something suspicious
and we would like to do a biopsy.
And Sarah could have easily said, OK,
that sounds scary, but I'd like to
reschedule that biopsy when's the next opening?
And by taking that time, by rescheduling it for a day
or two or three or a week down the road, Sarah
would have time to not worry about picking up her kids.
Sarah would have time to prepare, to investigate, to
ask questions, and then go into her next appointment
with the physician that would be doing the biopsy.
Dressed.
Because, face it, who feels confident in a gown
carrying your bra and your purse around, truly.
But to go in as an equal partner in
her health, to ask the questions, to learn about
the risks of biopsy, because guess what?
There are risks.
There are risks beyond pain and tenderness at the site.
To ask questions that she wanted to ask,
and even more importantly, to bring someone along.
And this is one of the things that I advocate for
folks almost all the time, is that find a trusted person.
Not someone who's going to make decisions for you, but
someone who can be an extra set of ears.
Because when we hear those words, when we hear
suspicious, when we hear possible cancer, when we hear
biopsy, which is an invasive procedure with possible complications,
with side effects, when we hear these words, we
get scared and we become anxious.
And when we are anxious, our body is
not allocating brain energy, our body is allocating
fight or flight or freeze energy.
So by having someone along, you have someone who's
listening, someone who can know what questions you plan
to ask, what questions you have written down.
Another thing that we talk about in terms of being
the best health consumer that you possibly can be. But
an advocate for you, if you get a little bit
frozen up or a little bit freaked out and it
can happen to anyone, you can go in with the
best of intentions, your list of questions.
The healthcare provider starts speaking and all of
a sudden it's like, oh my gosh, this
is real, something could be happening here.
So knowing, first of all, that that is not
an emergency, that test results are not an emergency.
If you're sitting in your doctor's office
getting them, then knowing that you can
take time because it's not an emergency.
Now, do you want to take six months? You know what?
It's up to you.
But you always can take several days or
a week maybe where you got your mammogram,
where you got your testing done, isn't necessarily
where you'd want your treatment done.
Maybe there's family members who've had similar experiences that you
wish to talk to, maybe not all of them, but
maybe some that you wish to talk to.
There's ways that we can communicate so that
we can get support for things like office
appointments or procedures and owning your own health.
Owning our own health means that we know that
we're able to exercise all of these options.
So I would like to have you think about make your list.
What do you really think about as an emergency?
And then what kind of things do you think
about in terms of your health that are serious
or that are important or that absolutely deserve attention.
But are you taking the time you need to
gather the information so that you can truly make
an informed choice and own your health?
Now, I'll put a couple of resources in the show notes.
One of them is talking about your diagnosis.
And this is a whole communication guide for really
any kind of any phase that you're in with
healthcare issues or healthcare situation and how you can
talk to people, share what you need to get
support, and still maintain your privacy.
I'll also share the link for The Heal Your Life Circle,
which is a great spot because monthly we dive into all
kinds of topics related to owning your own health.
Until then, let's own it.
And I'll see you next time.
