(Courtney's back, everyone. Let the drinks flow. Also — Courtney's tooth made a brief unscheduled disappearance. We kept it in. You're welcome.)

This week, Emily and Courtney sit down with someone doing some of the most quietly essential work in grief support: Lindsay Brockman, licensed veterinary nurse, certified pet loss grief specialist, and founder of EverKin Pet Loss Support out of Richmond, Virginia. Lindsay has fifteen years across ER, end-of-life, and community animal medicine — and she's seen firsthand what happens when the humans in those exam rooms are left to navigate loss with nothing but a sympathy card and a parking validation.

Her framework is built around disenfranchised grief — the grief the world doesn't quite know how to honor. The grief that gets "it was just a pet." Or "you'll get another one." Or the silence where a casserole should be. Lindsay's entire practice exists to say: no. All grief deserves support.

But Lindsay brings more than professional expertise to this conversation. Earlier this year, her son Jack was stillborn at 38 weeks. And in one of the most honest, tender moments we've had on this show, she talks about how both losses — the ones she holds for clients, and the one she carries herself — share the same language. The same weight. The same need to be witnessed.

What you'll hear in this one:

• What disenfranchised grief actually means — and why pet loss is one of its biggest, most overlooked forms
• What fifteen years in vet ER looks like from the inside — and why grief literacy training for veterinary teams matters so much
• Compassion fatigue: what it actually is (and why it's not the same as burnout), and the org Not One More Vet fighting to support vet professionals
• Courtney's story of losing Rooster during the pandemic — and arriving at a locked ER door at 2am, sobbing, saying "I'm coming"
• "We don't move on. We move with." — what honoring grief actually looks like
• What NOT to say to a grieving person — and what to say instead when you genuinely don't know what to say
• Curly Sue — Lindsay's new rescue from Richmond Animal League, who weighs almost exactly what Jack weighed, and only wants to be held
• Weighted Angels, a volunteer organization making weighted stuffed animals for parents who leave the hospital without their baby
• Lady Chunk's live cameo (the cat had opinions and made them known)
• Human names for animals: Alan, Susan, Patricia, Gary, Frank — we stand by all of it
• And the grocery store pasta sauce incident, which is one of the best grief stories we've ever heard on this show

Lindsay's tagline is a Ram Dass quote: "We are all just walking each other home." By the end of this episode, you'll understand exactly why.

📎 Find Lindsay & Resources Mentioned:

• 🌿 EverKin Pet Loss Support: EverkinPetLoss.com
• 📲 Instagram: @EverkinPetLoss
• 💙 Not One More Vet: nomv.org
• 🤍 Weighted Angels: https://www.weightedangels.com/

Lindsay's books reopen June 1st — if you or someone you love needs support, now's the time to reach out.

💌 Have a story about a plan that went sideways? We want to hear it. Reach out at thatwasnttheplanpod@gmail.com

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

🐾 If this episode moved you, please subscribe, leave a review, and pass it along to anyone who's ever loved an animal — or a person — and been told to just get over it.

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

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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 thatwasnttheplanpod@gmail.com 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.

📬 thatwasnttheplanpod@gmail.com 🌐 thatwasnttheplan.com

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