Heads up - in this podcast, I discuss some adult issues. If there are little ones around, you may want to grab your headphones.

Just before Thanksgiving, I had gone to my otolaryngologist for a checkup following surgery I had had in the spring for something called idiopathic subglottic stenosis. It’s where you have scar tissue blocking your windpipe. Breathing becomes increasingly difficult as your windpipe opening gets smaller and smaller. Ideopathic means that they don’t know the cause. I had never been intubated and had not been injured in my throat in any way so there was no cause that they could pinpoint.

After surgery, my doctor recommended quarterly followup treatments of steroid shots in my throat. Sounds lovely, right? Apparently the scar tissue tends to grow back repeatedly and the steroids reportedly limit that recurrence. This is a surgery that most have to have 2-3 times in order for the scar tissue to completely diminish even with the steroid shots. I refused the treatments. I was not into the idea of having myself shot up with steroids every three months ongoing.

So at this checkup, eight months after surgery, my windpipe was completely open. No scar tissue. The doctor was amazed at the lack of regrowth considering that I had declined the steroid treatments. “This happens in less than 50% of patients” she muttered.

I knew better than to try to explain that I had been working on healing the issue on an energetic level. The smirk on her face the first time I mentioned the possibility before surgery was telling enough. I wasn’t going to go there again.

On a metaphysical level it is said that issues with the throat revolve around not speaking our truth.

What I am presuming is different in my case versus that of other women with repeated recurrence (this condition is found primarily in white women in their 50s) is that I was addressing the underlying cause. I was repeatedly risking speaking truth. My truth. The unvarnished, un-codependent, empowered truth. With my work colleagues. With my 12 step community. With my friends. And most importantly, with my family - those whose rejection I feared the most.

It didn’t mean going around and beating people over the head with it. It meant speaking from a grounded place. From a knowing place. From a place of resonance within my body.

During the period when I discovered this scar tissue in my throat, my body was also developing symptoms in another way…