Back from her parents’ house Danielle is keen on sharing how witnessing the ridiculousness that is modern medicine. She goes into details about what she and her parents experienced with a trauma surgeon, how discouraging the experience was and how it’s so easy to slide into the “Am I even worth helping?” questions of identity. When you’re hurting you need hope. When you’re ready for healing, you need help. And that is found in being seen and known by your health care team.
Email Danielle: hello@cryinginmycheesecake.com
Learn more about Danielle’s services: https://cryinginmycheesecake.com/services-info/
First Steps Clinic: https://cryinginmycheesecake.com/firststepsclinic/
Grab Danielle’s Activated Essentials: https://cart.lifevantage.com/US/shoppingcart/share/2cbb8705-cfad-4083-b853-451db92d23db
Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cryinginmycheesecake/
Transcription
Welcome to The Crying in My Cheesecake podcast, where we are in pursuit of living life, abundantly not held back by our body size or symptoms, nor are we held back by our hurts, habits, or other obstacles in life. Learn the secrets to crush it in your health and wellness and relationships and spiritual life.
I am Danielle, your host, and in today’s episode we are talking about being seen and known in our health journey.
If you’re an Instagram follower who pays attention to my stories, you probably know from July 4th to the 14th, I was at my parents’ house for three hours. I was three hours away from my kids and my husband and my dogs, my chickens, and I was taking care of my mom for her total knee replacement on her right knee.
She already had. Her left one done, I think two years ago, recovered from that fantastically. She was driving quickly. Um, didn’t use a whole lot of pain management for that one, but because it was her right knee, you know, you can’t really drive and slam on the brakes with your right leg. All the things she was still driving before three weeks anyway.
Um, that’s kind of where I get my head strongness from. And then, um, I was there to truly, honestly, um, relieve my mom and take care of my dad. You see, he had fallen on Friday, June 30th. So that Friday before I was up there, he fell and he broke his arm. And what had happened was he bent over to feed the dogs and he doesn’t remember how it happened, but he landed on his right side and he had.
Um, his glasses on his right side were shattered. He had some kind of, um, I guess wound open wound cuts and things on his right side, but he broke his left humerus, um, right above the elbow where the only place that there wasn’t a seal rod in. And then he also, we found out, loosened up his, um, left shoulder replacement and then the rod that was already in there, he had loosened all of those things up and so forth.
So, While I will totally unpack all the things that occurred while I was up there with my parents. One thing I want to address today is this thing that’s, it’s on my heart. Um, and I’m trying to say it in a way I know many of you would understand, and I don’t want to go out there and bash things. That’s not, that’s not who I am.
But when I see something that is, Not helpful or something that is wrong, I am going to bring it to the surface. So I don’t want it to come out that I’m just like this, you know, oh, everything else is bad, blah, blah, blah. But we know since 2020 has happened, and many of my listeners get this, many of my clients and members get this, that 2020 unearthed a lot of things that we just took for granted and a lot of things that we did not take ownership over, and we didn’t.
We didn’t. Care. We didn’t have a reason to care. We didn’t have a reason to slow down to care. So this thing I want to address today is the monopolization. I just totally made up yet another word, monopolization of modern medicine hospitals that treat their patients. Like a number now in northeast Indiana is where I was.
Um, if you’re not from northeast Indiana, you probably won’t know the system, the hospital system, but you could literally do a quick Google and find out. ’cause there’s only really two that are available up there. Um, and one of them truly monopolizes the whole area, like the whole area, and it is so much so that they have pushed out all the little guys.
So there are no really any small little practices anymore, and we know that hospitals are, they’re business and they need to make money, so thus you do things in order to make money, right? They’re treating their patients like a number. The waiting rooms I was in, I had totally forgotten. I had been in them before, but I had totally forgotten just how large they were.
And they’re large because they have so many doctors that need to see so many patients in a day. And no one knows you. No one knows your story, and no one knows your journey. So I sat in many offices that two weeks realizing no one heard my dad. No one heard my mom, the nurses and doctors and their. Had their orders.
They had their orders and their agenda, and we were just simply to comply to it all. For example, the trauma surgeon my dad went to, I had to take him there on Wednesday the fifth, the same day my mom had her knee replacement. It was kind of a crazy, it was a crazy week and a half that I was there. So I took my father to this trauma surgeon appointment, and when we got there, I’m always perpetually early.
I will never, I do not understand how people can use excuses for being late unless like something happens on the road. But even when I had kids, I’m still at least 15 minutes early and sometimes I’m accidentally like 30 to an hour early to everything. It’s just, it’s just who I am. Okay. So we got there about 15 minutes early and we checked in and I like see that there’s just like these vast.
Expanse of reception desks and checkout desks, and I’m like, holy crap. That’s a lot of people. A lot of people being employed, a lot of people like whatever. And then I look over and I realize I’m the only abled body that was in that place. Everyone was limping or in a wheelchair or on crutches or on that little knee scooter thingy.
There weren’t any able-bodied people there. So all that to say, we sat there and we waited. We, the doctor was late or whatever. They were late, they were running behind. So we sat there for a little bit and I started to get frustrated. I’m like, oh my gosh, this is, this is a doctor’s office that. Should care that my 71 year old father broke his arm and he is in stage four heart failure.
What are we gonna do? How are we gonna keep him from feeling all this pain all the time? So we, anyway, we get back there and the nurses go ahead and like get his vitals. They kinda ask me why we’re there. And then he goes and they take him back for x-rays. They X-ray his shoulder. The X-ray, his, like his arm and elbow area, and then the x-ray his hip.
So he comes back and he, I could just see that my dad was getting irritated that no one was listening. And I’m gonna say this, I’ll be the first one to say, my dad talks a lot. I talk a lot, but my dad has gotten to a place where he doesn’t stop talking. And it’s, that’s a whole nother story, a whole nother story for the other thing.
So I get it. Like people just don’t wanna hear him talking anymore. Right. I get it. So, Anyway, we sat there, um, waiting on the doctor to come in, and he came in just kind of like, uh, like opened the door and just like burst forth and in a whirlwind, then sits down, starts typing at things, and looks at me, looks at my father, and he doesn’t wanna hear anything my dad says.
He looks at me and I’m trying to talk to him, and he doesn’t have any answers. He’s like, well, we need to just figure out what the cause of these falls are, which I agree with, so that he doesn’t break anything else again, and his heart’s so weak that we don’t wanna do surgery. And I totally get that. But usually when you go to a doctor’s office, You want some kind of support, some kind of feel like, oh, he sees me, he’s going to help me.
He’s going to help relieve something. We did not even leave with a sling that day. I had to ask for something to help keep him in line. And the only thing that the best they could do was put a strapper on his neck. It did nothing. So the doctor was trying to get up and leave and I was, and my dad was like, well, what about the x-rays?
And the doctor said something like, well, they’re, you know, obviously it’s broken. That’s it. We didn’t get to see the x-rays and then my dad said, well, what about my hip? And he was, and the doctor said, well, I didn’t even know you got an x-ray of the hip. All that to say, both my father and I spoke up.
Because we weren’t getting answers, we were not even able, that we were so rushed that if we didn’t, if we weren’t on it, we would not have been able to even think of asking questions in that moment. So my, both my father and I spoke up and made that doctor sit back down. But the problem is that we still left with no answers, no support.
And I took him home with a broken arm and no sling other than what he’d had before. No support, no splint, nothing. And you know what? That experience is disheartening. It’s hurtful. It makes you, and it made him question just like my dad did. Am I even worth helping? And you know, like my mind always goes to like the broader picture, like, what’s actually going on here?
And I’m like, if this is happening to my dad, This must be happening to everyone else in that waiting room. This must be happening. Furthermore, everyone else in that community, that whole Northeast Indiana community and the hospital systems don’t get their ideas of how to run their business at willy-nilly.
They must be getting it from other ideas, and there must be this other like platform or framework of how you run a hospital. So my question is, how many people are being treated like this? How many people are walking away from their doctor’s appointments wanting help, and all they come home with is this identity crisis of, oh my gosh, am I even worth helping?
Oh my gosh, am I ever going to get better? Does life get better than this? There is a significance of feeling seen and known by your healthcare team. And that emotional and psychological impact of feeling seen and heard by healthcare providers is so overlooked in modern ME medicine today. And I can say even in some functional doctor’s offices too, it’s seeping into the functional doctor’s offices as well.
You see, when you’re in pain, you want change. You want to experience health and healing. And you’re treated like a cow in the field with no personality, no time to build rapport, and it’s so hard on that psyche. We know when we feel satisfied with our healthcare teams, that we will have improved outcomes that we desire, like we get excited about it.
We feel like we’re part of that change. The holistic healthcare, that approach that I offer is so different from a one size fits all approach because I do my darnedest to learn who you are. I wanna know your spouse’s name. I want to know what you do for work. I wanna know sometimes your co, your coworkers names, and you can ask some of my one-to-one clients about that.
I do ask them about their, their coworkers. I want to know what brings you joy. I wanna know what your strengths are and weaknesses are, but not from you telling me, but by experience. And that experience requires relationship. I desire for you to be an active part of your healthcare team and not just a bystander that’s told, go do X, Y, Z, and you don’t get a single piece of input, or you don’t get a, a single piece of help implementing X, Y, Z.
We can see that this, we can see this and even believe this for modern medicine practices, but when I said it’s seeping into the functional doctor’s offices, it is because I was on the phone recently with a friend who went to a functional doctor’s office near me and was ordered a thousand dollars worth of tests.
Thank goodness she’d already had some of those done. So she doesn’t, she didn’t have to do all of them, so she didn’t have to pay the thousand dollars. And then when she went back, she was just handed a binder. A binder. A binder. No follow through, no support. Just a glorified template that just comes in this binder.
And friend listening here, and I don’t care where you’re listening from. I don’t care if you’re my friends in India that are listening. I don’t care if you’re in Europe. I don’t care if you’re in South America, Australia, wherever you are, I want you to know that you deserve more than that. You deserve more than a dang binder.
You deserve more than a template. You deserve more than that. And that’s why many of my one-to-one clients come to me. They know instinctively that their healthcare team isn’t working with them, and they need something different. They need something that doesn’t start with a pill or a template.
Some of you have been here long enough to know that I had a pelvic floor reconstruction surgery in 2020, and you should know I’m still rehabbing that. Yes, three years later I’m still rehabbing it. And yes, I have many benefits from that surgery. Like so many, my life has changed because of it, but to live the lifestyle I want, I need more rehab.
And so much so that just the surgery, like, let’s think about this. Most people think that, and we’re conditioned to believe that a surgery is a fix all to everything, have a surgery and do nothing else. Nope. I still struggle with issues that cause me to have to have that surgery in the first place. So I’m rehabbing and working with a healthcare team.
To work on those root causes of my issues. And my healthcare team right now consists of a doctor of physical therapy, her assistant, a personal trainer that is trained in pelvic floor and functional fitness, my OB G Y N, who is also a CrossFit coach, a holistic pain management doctor that understands the functional fitness lifestyle.
I am a mental health therapist. I’m a nutritional therapy practitioner. Yes, I am a nutritional therapy practitioner too. But we also need help. And if your practitioners are not seeking help from other practitioners and don’t have a team around them, that’s a problem because they are not leading by example.
We all need to have a team around us. And I have a massage therapist. I have a lot of other things like for, um, fascial work and emotional decoding and things like that. All of that kind of stuff is. A huge team around me is basically what I wanted to get at. So then a few weeks ago from the airing of this episode, I finally got to run again.
Now I know if you’re listening to this podcast episode, you’re probably like running. Who Caress? I haven’t been able to run due to pain. And I want you to think about this ladies that are listening. I want you to think of a Charlie horse or that crazy cramp you get in your calf, but in your lady parts down there.
That is the kind of pain I’m talking about, and the pain management doctor asked me to hold off, so I hadn’t been running since she asked me to hold off on running, but there was a time just recently that my mental health was off and I was feeling fun. K. Fun. K. And I wanted to go run, but the air quality here, because of the whole Canadian fires and all that stuff made the air quality so terrible.
I wasn’t able to even go outside and do things. So I finally got a day that the air quality was great and I felt fantastic. So I did a few um, exercises with under the bar, under the barbell and weightlifting, and then I went out for a jog and my physical therapist told me, like, when I’m feeling funky, she said, go.
Go run. You have your team in place to catch you if you hurt yourself, but the running is a necessary piece to your mental health right now. Do it. So I did. And I smiled and I shared a, a video, uh, might’ve been a boomerang of me smiling. And I said, you know, you’re gonna hear about this in a podcast episode coming up.
And it’s because of that, my team met me where I was, knew what I needed, cares about my progress, and knows the type of help I need. That isn’t just the physical, it’s also the mindset. And the thing is, is that I had to have this type of relationship with my healthcare team. Because it gave me that freedom, it makes me feel like I can do more than I think I can because you know how it is when all those negatives in life just seem to cloud over all the positives.
They pull me out. They helped me take charge of my health and continue implementing sustainable lifestyle changes. So they had to get to know me. They had to know that running helps clear my brain. They had to know that run what running means to me. And that’s a huge goal of mine. And conventional healthcare has its challenges and limitations because the doctors and medical staff are overworked and being forced to run a numbers-based business.
My one-to-one foundational holistic wellness package can fill that gap. While you may not be able to get to your, into your doctors for months with me, you’d be seen by your telehealth portal nearly daily. But also in a frequent pattern of one-to-one calls with me and my assistant practitioner that we are just focused on you.
Medical offices don’t have the time to support you long term when it comes to your root causes of your health issues. They need to have you in and out. And the best way to to approach that is to give you relief right now, which is usually a pill or a surgery. But here in my realm, here at the Cried in My Cheesecake Virtual Holistic Health Clinic, I see you as a whole person, not just your symptoms.
My one-to-one clients come to me for this benefit and so much more. Together, my one-to-one clients and I build strong client practitioner relationships that allow them and me to build this trust bond. It empowers them to try something new and quote unquote fail and yet still see the results they want in a safe space.
Because how many times have we been taught that you have to be perfectly on this diet plan or you have to be perfectly, um, adherent to X, y, z, and that’s not the case. You can still get results with consistent. Progress. A consistent behavior trumps perfection any day because perfection means all or nothing and you are not gonna get success with that, especially long term.
My clients and I, we talk about very personal things and there’s nothing that’s too t m i here. In fact, many of them send me their. They’re poop pictures. Um, because that’s where a lot of our health can be seen. Just kind of like with dogs. I’m not calling you a dog, I’m just saying like dogs. You take a stool sample in for the dog and you can learn a little bit more about their health.
Same thing here. But if you’re, I wanted to, um, I approach those of you that are already working with a holistic practitioner and I wanted to empower you in this place, in this space right now. I wanna give you a takeaway. So if you wanna start working with me or you are working with a holistic healthcare practitioner, I wanna give you some tips on how to start effectively communicating with that provider.
Because it starts with communication and when we have communication lines open, we can build relationships that last and we can build, um, Not just relationships, but we can build that trust and understanding and get to know and be seen. So first things first, tell your story At your appointments. You should be leading the appointments as the, as, as the, um, client or patient.
It should not necessarily be led by the practitioner. Now, there are some things that we do have to lead because of like, you know, tests, follow ups and asking questions and things like that. But, You can in your follow-ups, be the leader or take the lead on sharing your story that appointments for you.
After all, it’s not for the doctor or the practitioner. Your story is the summary of your experience that week, that month, that season, and every single piece of your story matters to your healthcare plan. So start speaking up and sharing your story. The second thing you can do is when the practitioner is speaking, ask questions or reflect back to them what they’re saying in your own words.
This makes sure that you understand. What is going on and what the practitioner is asking you to do or talking about. But it also clarifies that the practitioner or to the practitioner that you are really honed in and wanting to take action once you leave that office. That you’re motivated, that you, you’ve got it, and you’re gonna hold onto this nugget and you’re going to do that thing.
So that’s the second thing. The first one is tell your story. The second one is reflect or speak up, asking questions when the practitioner is speaking. The third thing I would recommend you doing in in building this known, um, being seen and known trust value thing is to ask questions. Ask questions, and don’t hesitate.
If you’re like many of my one-to-one clients and you forget in the moment what questions you had, write them down ahead of time. In fact, something I usually have my clients do is I have them keep a journal. I have them keep a journal where I give them journaling assignments maybe, or I have them like track things or document a few things for me.
But in that journal, it’s also a place where they can write down their questions to prepare for our call. I do also give them, um, a check-in form that they fill out just to kind of give me a heads up of what’s going on and what I need to address, what needs to be, you know, handled and those kinds of things.
But also gives them a space to write out their questions. But journal keeping a journal is huge alongside that. But the Journal also, Can stand as your reference, that reference piece, that you can make sure that you didn’t miss anything in your story. When you go back to number one as you’re telling your story, that journal should be a piece of your story and you don’t wanna miss anything because there could be something that could help you on your healing journey.
And then number four, the four thing I would recommend doing on improving your communication with your practitioner is if a protocol or recommendation seems too difficult to implement right now. Speak up. Ask if there is a way to break down that protocol or recommendation into bite-size pieces for now, ask for help with accountability for that too.
Don’t hesitate to ask for what you need. And that’s a whole nother episode that we can go into is like, how do I ask for what I need if I don’t even know what I need? So we could talk about that another time. Um, but communicating like this will help you build a deeper connection with your practitioner and empower you to continue these lasting results you’re going to get.
I’ve shared with you how to tra how transformative it is to have a healthcare team that sees you and knows you. So now what do you do with that information? In my episodes, I’m always going to give you action steps that you can take. So this is one recommend. One recommendation I recommend, I recommendation, recommend you doing is start talking to your providers you already have.
If they are not responsive in a way that makes you feel seen and known, if they are pushing pills versus root cause and accountability, I’d start looking for a new place to be treated. It is vital to seek out healthcare providers who prioritize understanding their patients on a personal level, and that’s why I’m opening my one-to-one foundational holistic wellness package applications very soon.
And I only open them very few times throughout the year. And in fact, at the time of this recording, uh, it’s still in July, but this is gonna come out in August. Um, I didn’t, I have not opened my one-to-ones in over a year, and so that’s just how much I feel that people need to be seen and known in their healthcare.
I want you to feel it. I want to make sure that I don’t have that cattle mentality and just hustle each person in and out and disengage from each client. That’s not fair that we deserve more than that. The open application period open soon, and if you are new here and you don’t know what the foundational holistic wellness package is, just a quick overview is that it’s a 12 month minimum commitment.
Because healing does not take place in 30, 60, or 90 days no matter what the magazine covers, the MLMs or whatever else say, and it included in the package. I’ve put three new labs that I’ll be running throughout those 12 months. So there’ll be three labs run over the course of the 12 months specifically that are included.
You get a three-way chat with me and my assistant practitioner, and you meet with me monthly, plus other appointments throughout the month and other personalized attention nearly daily, all inside your telehealth portal. Now, if you’d like to get to know more of what it’s like to, if you’d like to learn more of about what it’s like to work with me, especially in this Holistic Wellness package, please feel free to email me hello at crying in my cheesecake.com.
This package is the only package that provides you accountability, action, attention, and the results that you want. Now, all this to be said, I hope that this episode has helped you open your eyes to what’s happening in modern healthcare and slipping into the functional medicine space as well. It’s vital that you demand to be seen and known by your healthcare providers for the most positive outcomes you desire.
Take charge of your health. And send me that email hello at crying in my cheesecake.com. I have very limited seats opening and the applications will be opening soon, and I only go through those applications and I interview people to make sure that we are a good fit, to make sure that I can provide you what you need, and make sure that you are ready to come to that table with exactly what you need as well and what you need vulnerability.
Patience, commitment, and integrity, and that’s all you need to come to that table. But there’s so much more and it’s so much deeper, and I would love to work alongside you with that. So again, my email. Send me an email and just say, you know, Hey, I’m interested in the one-to-one package. Hello, at cried in my cheesecake.com.
Thanks for listening to The Crying in My Cheesecake podcast. I hope it encouraged you to make a next best step for your health. Take a look at the show notes for more information or other links I mentioned in this episode. And if you got to this point in the episode, come find me on Instagram and send me a dmm.
Tell me that you listened to this episode and what you got out of it. Have a great day.
