That Wasn't The Plan

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(Fair warning: Emily's mouth was fully uncensored this episode — blame the tech gremlins. Also, our earrings nearly derailed the whole thing. You'll hear it. We kept it in.)

This week, Emily's co-host Courtney Holland is out due to an emergency — but honestly, today's guest doesn't need a wingman. Hilary Morris Pawlik has been Emily's ride-or-die since the eighth grade, and she shows up today to talk about something that affects 1 in 10 women and yet somehow remains one of the most underdiagnosed, underfunded, and dismissed conditions in medicine: endometriosis.

Hilary is a professional dancer, award-winning choreographer, and co-director of Artist Entrance Dance Company in Los Angeles. She's performed with The Hollywood Pinup Girls and the Mental Head Circus vaudeville show, and she's basically done everything short of the Iditarod. But today, she's here to tell a different kind of story — the one about years of painful periods, fertility struggles, a missed diagnosis, a baseball-sized cyst, sepsis, and an emergency surgery that revealed her organs had started fusing together.

What they cover:

• What endometriosis actually is (and why so many women — and their doctors — have no idea)
• The surprisingly wide range of symptoms, from painful periods to shortness of breath, leg pain, and GI issues
• Medical gaslighting: being told you're not in "enough" pain to have endo
• IVF, a uterine septum, and the winding road to becoming a mom
• Going from "watch and wait" to hospitalized with sepsis — while her husband was in Thailand
• The surgeon who quite literally saved her life (Dr. Richard Freeman at the Disney Cancer Center in Burbank)
• Why your regular OB/GYN may not be equipped to handle this — and where to find a specialist
• The Huberman Lab episode with Dr. Thaïs Aliabadi that every woman should listen to
• A Long Island research study actively enrolling women who haven't been diagnosed yet — and why that matters
• The hormonal birth control decision Hilary resisted and then reversed — and why she's so glad she did
• Community, support groups, and why both Emily and Hilary swear by themIf you have a uterus, know someone who does, or you're just a decent human who believes women deserve better healthcare — this episode is for you.

📎 Resources mentioned:

• 🎙️ Huberman Lab — "Female Hormone Health, PCOS, Endometriosis, Fertility & Breast Cancer" ft. Dr. Thaïs Aliabadi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMzfGZnaPN8
• 🔬 ROSE Research Study (Northwell Health / Feinstein Institutes) — endometriosis research enrolling participants: https://feinstein.northwell.edu/institutes-researchers/institute-molecular-medicine/robert-s-boas-center-for-genomics-and-human-genetics/rose-research-outsmarts-endometriosis
• 📲 Find Hilary on Instagram: @hilarypawlik

💌 Have a story about a plan that went sideways? We want to hear it. Reach out to us at [email protected] or www.thatwasnttheplan.com

📲 Find us on Instagram | TikTok | YouTube — search @thatwasnttheplan_podcast

🎧 If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a friend who needs to hear it. It genuinely helps us grow the show and reach more people.

And as always — whatever plan you had? We're glad you're here anyway. 🥂

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Most of us learned to look at our bodies and immediately catalog what's wrong with them. Too big. Too small. Too much. Not enough. Wasting away. Filling out. The wrong shape for the wrong season for the wrong man's opinion.

This week, we're trying something else.

Two world-class athletes — ice mermaid and U.S. record holder Melissa Kegler and former NCAA swimmer Sarah Beth Wood — sit down with us to talk about what it's actually like to live in a body that's been measured, weighed, commented on, and critiqued for as long as they can remember. Not by strangers on the internet. By coaches. Teammates. Parents. Other women. The lady on the beach who told Melissa she'd need to "slim down to keep a man like that."

Melissa tells the story of being told she was too heavy in September and too thin in March of the same year — nothing changed except there wasn't a Wendy's in her college town. Sarah Beth talks about the eating disorder she didn't know she had until her body literally stopped working mid-race. Courtney shares getting boobs in fifth grade and spending decades convinced they meant she was fat. And we all reckon with the moment a friend (or a stranger, or a coach, or a parent) said something about our bodies that we still hear in our heads twenty-plus years later.

But here's the reframe  — courtesy of Melissa's friend Randy, who said:

Stop looking at a body and asking what it can't do. Look at it and ask what it's capable of.

That one sentence rewires everything. Your body isn't a problem to solve. It's not a before picture. It's the thing that's carried you through every hard thing you've survived — and it's still here.

Plus: 25 cat condos, the Wendy's spicy chicken sandwich that ended a swim career, why "you look like you're having fun" might be the best compliment you can give a stranger.

Two things can be true. Usually they are.

This one is for anyone who's ever stood in front of a mirror and listed everything wrong. Spoiler: there's nothing wrong. There's just a body. And it can do a lot more than you've been giving it credit for.

Just because it wasn't the plan doesn't mean it wasn't supposed to happen.

📬 [email protected] 🌐 thatwasnttheplan.com

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Carrie Edwards bought a lottery ticket online (against her Army buddy's advice), let ChatGPT pick her numbers (also against his advice), forgot she'd opted into a second draw, and won $150,000.

Then she gave every cent of it away. And $42,000 more out of her own pocket to cover the taxes.

The story went viral worldwide — Tamron Hall, Inside Edition, Fox News, Korean headlines at her nail salon. An estimated 6 billion media impressions. And she got there by calling the Virginia Lottery's PR team herself and pitching them on a press conference.

Sitting alone at her kitchen island, she heard a voice — clear as if someone were standing next to her — say it's not your money. And she listened.

The money went to three places: AFTD (in honor of her late husband Steve, her best friend of 47 years, who was at the Pentagon on 9/11 and later died of frontotemporal degeneration), Shalom Farms (the food justice nonprofit in Richmond that healed her hands-in-the-dirt back to life), and the Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society (in honor of her dad, Captain Peter Swanson, a Navy fighter pilot — whose wife, by the way, took the kids to peacefully protest the Vietnam War while he was flying missions over it).

This one moved us. We talk about the still small voice and how to actually hear it. The Army friend who's now taking full credit for her windfall (of course, he is). What it's like to lose your favorite person slowly, and then all at once. And how Steve walked their daughter Kelly down the hallway to get married two weeks before he died.

Plus: why your tax dollars aren't feeding active-duty military families, why Mark Nepo's The Book of Awakening should be on everyone's nightstand, and Carrie's quiet rule for life — reach behind you and bring the next one in line.

You may have caught the headlines. This is the part they didn't tell you.

Donate where Carrie did: 🧠 AFTD — theaftd.org 🌱 Shalom Farms — shalomfarms.org ⚓ Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society — nmcrs.org

Just because it wasn't the plan doesn't mean it wasn't supposed to happen.

📬 [email protected] 🌐 thatwasnttheplan.com

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Last week, Melissa Kegler said she was going to get her record back.

This week, the universe said, we’ll see about that.

What follows is five months of waiting for water that is somehow both too warm and too frozen, a logistical nightmare involving flights, storms, dams, and one very specific 24-hour window where everything finally (and briefly) aligns. 

It is, by all accounts, the worst swim of her life.

Naturally, she does it anyway.

There’s something quietly unhinged about preparing your body for hypothermia on a biweekly basis, dragging friends and coworkers into the chaos, and then—when it finally happens—thinking, “This feels terrible. I might die. Let’s keep going.”

And yet.

Somewhere between the near-bail, the dead-man float (briefly considered, quickly abandoned), and a very well-earned post-swim pizza, Melissa figures out exactly what she’s capable of—and, more importantly, how she wants to do it next time.

Also: hypothermia. Surprisingly...fun??? 

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There are people who set goals.
 And then there’s Melissa Kegler—who hears a mildly unhinged suggestion and thinks, yes, that seems reasonable.

In Part 1, we trace the origin story: from pool swimmer to open water wanderer, to casually knocking out the Triple Crown (Catalina, the English Channel, Manhattan… as one does). Along the way: crocodile-adjacent panic, questionable water conditions, dolphins, bioluminescence, and just enough vomiting to keep things grounded.

It’s a story about curiosity, momentum, and the dangerous power of someone asking, “Have you ever thought about…?”

Unfortunately, someone did.

And next week, it gets cold.

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Courtney's tooth fell out again. Emily's hair is orange. Sarah Beth's pit bull has a pink belly. We're off.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, we talk about Rosemary — Courtney's dear friend, gone two years this week. She spent her life helping traumatized kids and reminded us that hurt people don't just hurt people. Hurt people heal people.

Then it gets weird (weirder?). We cover:

• Why every woman should embrace being called a bitch (hint: it just means you have a backbone)
• Sarah Beth's theory that not wanting to pet her dog makes you a bad person (retracted, sort of)
• Emily's hair falling out in clumps 
• How to actually like yourself (Courtney Googled it — we'll share the results)
• Clay Play™ — which is, allegedly, pottery

Plus: why your fallopians go feral around baby animals

No agenda. No plan. Three women, like eight dogs, one squirrel, and a HOT TAKE!

Warning: Contains one unsolicited dog vasectomy offer

📬 [email protected] 🌐 thatwasnttheplan.com

Just because it wasn't the plan doesn't mean it wasn't supposed to happen.

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This week, we dispense wisdom. Some of it useful. Some of it… less so.

From brain candy books and existential dread to air fryer eggs, dry skin trauma, and the radical notion of simply not giving up, Emily and Courtney share the life advice they’ve collected, ignored, rediscovered, and occasionally weaponised.

There are thoughts on fear, presence, kindness, and why you should probably talk to your knees. Also: why teenagers don’t know how keys work, and why calm might be a superpower (unconfirmed).

Take what you need. Leave what you don’t.
 We’re all just doing our best.

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This week, we sit down with my friend Jen Quam Howell (JQ), who—on an otherwise unremarkable night—was woken up by her husband with the words no one prepares for: “The house is on fire. We have to go.”

What follows is exactly what you’d expect and nothing like you’d expect.

Three young kids. One terrifying exit down a burning staircase. A total loss. A hotel room that becomes “hometel.” And a community that quietly, relentlessly shows up—with spreadsheets, sweatpants, and the occasional replacement bra.

We talk about what happens in the immediate aftermath of losing everything, the strange logistics of starting over, and the long tail of trauma that doesn’t politely disappear once the house is rebuilt.

It’s about resilience, yes. But more than that, it’s about people—neighbors, friends, family—who step in when life goes completely off-script.

Equal parts devastating, darkly funny, and unexpectedly hopeful.

Because sometimes the plan burns down.
 And you build something anyway.

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Los Angeles, as it turns out, is less a city and more a series of increasingly poor decisions strung together by sunshine.

This week, Courtney shares a perfectly normal collection of experiences: flagging down her own mugger, accepting a ride from a man who openly admits to past home invasions, being called a “loser” by a spiritual-looking stranger, and—naturally—being offered a glimpse of someone’s testicles before breakfast. 

There is crime. There is confusion. There is alarming optimism.

And against all odds, she survives all of it.

A masterclass in what not to do—and why it somehow makes for excellent storytelling.

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What happens when you grow up in a deeply religious household where sex is forbidden, masturbation is sinful, and heaven is apparently keeping score?

You wait.

This week we’re joined by our brilliant friend Sarah Beth Schooley Wood—champion swimmer, Antarctica bride, and (for a surprisingly long time) a very committed virgin.

We talk purity culture, religious guilt, awkward first times, late blooming, and the strange realization that maybe… sex isn’t actually a moral emergency.

There are penguins.
 There is back hair discourse.
 There are some truly questionable decisions involving condoms.

And somewhere in the middle of it all: honesty, laughter, and a reminder that everyone arrives at their own timeline.

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