Hey, what is up friends? I am so glad you’re here. Welcome to the podcast. I have something really, really exciting that I’ve been working on for forever. It actually started out as a, an idea, a thought, and then it was a bunch of post-its on my wall for a really long time. And then I decided I got to do it.

I need to. A little ebook. It’s a workbook and it is coming out on the 15th. You’ll be able to buy it this Saturday. I’m so, so excited. This is for anyone who is trying to decide if they should have another baby after loss. I know this question can be really hard. You can feel really, really stuck because it’s scary not knowing what’s going to happen, but I made it really easy for you.

I have gone through every. Problem and issue and question that you could possibly have, and I’ve put it all in this book. You’re going to get answers. You’re going to pull out what you’re afraid of and what you want and all sorts of things. It’s really easy to get. All you need to do is go to smooth stones, coaching.com forward slash ebook.

That’s just one little E and the word book altogether. And. It’s only $9. You guys. It’s amazing. I’m not, it’s, it’s a really good workbook. It’s more than 40 pages, but it’s really simplified. Like this is not a long read. It’s just going to have enough information to help you. And then all the worksheets to work through.

  You will end up after finishing this book, having a plan and next steps for what you want to do. Can you buy it for a friend if you are not in that stage? Yes. By ever a friend send it to their email, you can do that as a gift.

Y you need this book is because listen. I’ve been there after my stillbirth, I had three pregnancies. I had a living rainbow baby, another loss, and then another living rainbow baby with a really high risk pregnancy. I have been there. I understand I may not have your exact situation, but I know how difficult that can feel to make that decision.

And have the faith and the hope or to make the decision like, Hey, I really don’t want to put myself through this again. I think my body’s done. I think my heart is done and I want to be done and I want to find peace with it. This is not a book to convince you either way .

It’s going to give you all the options. It’s going to let you open your mind up to maybe things you haven’t even thought about and ways to grow your family. Cause you don’t need to stay stuck anymore. I’m asking all the questions you probably haven’t thought of yet and teaching you everything you need to know to make decisions quickly and confidently.

So go get your. Even if you’re not sure if you’re ready yet, I would just go get it and then you will have it. It’s going to be so good. Just one of the many topics I cover inside this book is how to build the very best care team and then make sure that you all work together for your health and any future baby’s health.

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Now. It’s, I’m going to be a little bit focused on if you’re going to get pregnant again, but really this is for everything. Our health is so important. And so this applies to all humans who have a body, which is each one of us. Right. And we like to think that they would just take care of themselves, but they really need extra help if you want to stay your healthiest.

So why do we need to talk about this? Why is it a problem? Why do we need to prioritize our health and have someone tell them. Well, uh, moms in general put themselves last. We know that women and moms, we, we put ourselves last a lot and we can really put things off. There is also a mistrust of medicine, depending on your situation.

, your experiences, you may not really trust hospitals or doctors or, or midwives or any of those things.  

You might have a history of mistrust where you feel like because of where you live or how much money you make, or the color of your skin that you can’t trust doctors, or you can’t trust hospital. There’s a big fear of going back to somewhere very traumatic. For most of us, we have gotten a lot of bad news in a clinical setting.

Sometimes you might feel limited in your choices based on your insurance, uh, government health, directives, location, or other factors, right? You might not feel like you have a choice. So how do you even create a care team or get what you want when you don’t feel like it’s possible? It’s also really easy to procrastinate going to the doctor or getting certain things checked out or going back, if you feel like you’ve brought it up before and nobody’s listened to you, but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

I truly believe that. It’s so important to get things checked out now, rather than putting it off, it doesn’t make things easier emotionally, right? Like if you’re scared to go to the doctor, it’s not going to be easier to go to the doctor. If you just wait a year or two, . It’s not going to be a physically easier.

Like if we put off going to the dentist, cause we’re scared of the dentist. We’re probably going to end up with more cavities, more drilling, more shots, more, more costs. All of the things that we really wanted to avoid when we were avoiding the dentist. But we know that if we just go every six months, like we’re supposed to, we’re going to avoid a lot of problems and it is the same with our physical health.

Uh, you might be wondering why would I talk about this on a mental health podcast is because when you are not physically healthy, it’s so hard to work on your mindset. If you are in pain, if you are in turmoil emotionally about your body and, and all the things, medical, it’s really hard to be aware of your thoughts and manage your emotions and take care of yourself.

Emotionally. And if you’re needing to care for a future pregnancy or just regular checkups, or it’s time to head in for a mammogram and you have a huge pile of fear and mistrust in your way, you are stuck and it feels miserable. And I don’t want you to be stuck and I don’t want you to feel miserable.

And so many of us think we are stuck because of our past and the things that have happened, but really you’re stuck because of the way you are thinking today, our thoughts, driver feelings, which drive our actions. And this is the best news, because it means that you can change the way you are thinking you can change the way you are feeling, and you can change the things you are doing or not doing.

We have all the power ladies, so let’s clear away some of those obstacles, so you can focus on what you really want with way less bank. And I have to preface this as I talk about it. This is my take from a person who lives in the USA. I am Canadian. I have a lot of friends in Canada who are dealing with the Canadian health system.

 But I live in the USA. I acknowledged that I have privilege. I have insurance. I have competent providers available. I have options. I know that is not the case for every. I also know that wherever you are, if you aren’t happy with your care, you are much more likely to get what you want by trying, and by asking, and by following the steps, I’m going to tell you than by just sitting back and believing you have no options and feeling like you’re trapped.

So want you to think about your reasons and what they may be for not prioritizing your own health? It could be any of the things I just mentioned or something completely different, but the first step to make things better is always becoming aware of where you are right now. What is standing in your way.

And like I just said, you might say, well, I live in a small town or I live far away, or I there’s only two doctors in town, or my insurance only covers this one clinic. Right? All the things that get in our way, you have to be aware, be aware of what your brain is telling you, because that is what’s actually keeping you stuck.

Now you and your care providers are a team. It is so important to have the best team you possibly can. So I want to get you excited and invite you to get creative and be open to all the options as you build your team. The first I want you to identify what’s most important to you in this relationship.

This is a step we often skip because we don’t even realize that we have choices. But you are much more likely to get what you want when you have it defined and right in front of you. For some people, it’s a good bedside manner, right? They want the kind compassionate doctor that will sit and talk to them for, you know, an hour, if they need to, for others, they don’t care how nice the doctor is.

They want the best experience and skills for others. They want minimal interventions. What about you? What do you want? Once you have an idea of what’s important, go to work, finding the people that will best fit your goals. Now, as you go through this process, be very gentle with yourself. You may still be in a tender place and even calling around to people or doctor’s offices seems really overwhelming.

Let alone going in to meet people and do consultation. To make it easier for yourself. Write down the steps you will take to accomplish this, make them simple and doable, narrow down your choices and give yourself a timeframe. This means an actual deadline on the calendar you want to take action, not stay stuck researching for forever.

 We want to limit those. The Google searches. We want to quit asking around to everyone that we know. And we just want to say this is important. And within the next month, I am going to call five different places and, and choose one of them.  So narrow it down, give yourself a deadline that may be uncomfortable, but I want you to choose the uncomfortable of moving forward and checking things off your list rather than the uncomfortable of staying where you are.

Your brain likes the familiar uncomfortable, but what gets you somewhere is choosing the uncomfortable of taking action and actually doing something. And once you’ve gone through this process and decided on a care team, that is something you can stop stressing about. It is done.  

What I want for you is to be able to say, I trust my doctor or midwife or whoever it is that is going to bring a lot of peace and confidence. And it really is something you can just decide. Maybe you don’t have a ton of choices, but you can still decide that you are going to get the exact care that you need and know that if anything changes in the future, you will handle that to choose to trust for you.

And choose to believe in yourself and your ability to advocate for yourself as well. You will then be able to deal with your other concerns. What I want you to understand is it takes a lot of emotional energy to be unhappy with your medical care team, no matter where you are. In your life and growing your family and your health in whatever, it’s a lot of stress, anxiety worry that comes from not trusting your care team, not having the peace that comes from saying I trust them, or I know that at least we can work together.

Right?   Once you take that away from yourself, you are going to feel so much lighter.

You’re going to be able to deal with the other things that come with taking care of your health. And we’re going to drop all the drama about who we’re going to. We’re just going to choose and we’re going to choose to trust in them. Some of those other concerns are many lost parents feel anxiety around doctors, clinics, and hospitals.

It is so normal and can be related to trauma inside your body. But just because it’s common doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do about it. Now I did NST, which is non-stress tests, which I always think is a funny name because they are very stressful in the same room that I delivered Lauren, same doctor, same clinic, same hostel.

I knew I would be scared, but I also allowed for those feelings, I took a lot of deep breaths. I knew why I was there because I wanted to do everything I could to take care of my baby.  And I, at that time where I lived, when I lost Lauren and had my first rainbow baby, we lived in a really small town, really tiny hospital, really tiny clinic.

. I did not have a choice to change locations, but I actually didn’t want to. And even though it was difficult, I knew that I could do it and that I was going to do it and that I would get through it and it was worth it. And so if that’s the case for you, you have to find those thoughts that are going to help you manage the anxiety.

Then the feelings that come up when you enter those spaces. Now I also decided to change providers later on and drive an hour to a highly re recommended OB GYN group for our last pregnancy that I knew would be high risk. So we had moved to a different town. I had been through a miscarriage and a really, , difficult DNC where I had a bled out and I.

I did not trust the doctor that I had with river anymore. I did not want to continue to go to the same small clinic.

I did end up doing NSCS at the same hospital. I had my DNC with river, but that was okay. Um, I was able to manage the stress going in there multiple times a week. And I want to give you a little out of the box tip, but the way I found this really great OB GYN group was I call maternal fetal medicine or MFM at the hospital.

And ask them who the best doctors they worked with for high-risk pregnancies were, and they kind of gave me a recommendation. And I don’t know if all places will do that, but they did. And I just thought maternal fetal medicine sees all the tricky situations. And so if they are going to be the ones that.

Uh, great doctor to go to because I didn’t have, I didn’t really have anyone else to ask, but I also knew that was a great place to ask because they are right there on the front lines and they know. So again, if you get a recommendation from someone you trust, then you’re going to feel so much.

And then after my last rainbow baby was born, I knew I would need a different kind of care. As I moved into a new stage of my life, which was not being pregnant. So I made choices in relation to that. Whatever your reason for needing care is you deserve to get the best you can. At the minimum. I recommend finding a place that will listen to you and.

Has a way to get answers to questions. I do not recommend Facebook groups for medical information, but I see it every single day. People asking a medical questions in Facebook groups. To me. That’s a symptom that either you don’t trust your doctor or you don’t know what resources are available to you, you need to find out, can you call labor and delivery?

Is there an after hours nurse? Is there a website with frequently asked questions? Is there a doctor on call? What can you do when you have questions or concerns? This is one of the things you can have on your list of questions. When you walk in to talk to people, it’s important to have a plan and have your questions ready before you arrive.

And that way you’ll be able to remember what you wanted to say. In my ebook. I have a list of questions to ask that will help you really get the essential information you need. If you’re planning to have more children, or if you’re not. The last point I want to touch on in this episode is that in order to take the best care of your body, you need to love it.

So many women have terrible relationships with their bodies and especially in the new year when diet culture is everywhere, it is so important to cut through the noise and find the truth. As a lost mom, you may also have an extra layer of disdain for your body and feel like it failed you. You may have done everything right.

And still has had a loss. So it seems like it doesn’t even matter what you do. Sometimes you might try to punish your body without even knowing it, staying up too late and drinking more than you should eating whatever sounds like it will comfort the pain inside of you throwing your sadness into overexercising, whatever it is for you, please.

Your body is a miracle. Just as much as your babies was, your body is doing the best. It can just like you are, your body is not the enemy, it’s you, and you deserve the best. It’s worth it. To spend some time finding a place you can choose to feel safe in  it’s worth prioritizing your. It’s worth it to do things that may be scary now in order to get the best results in the long run for you and for everyone who loves you and cares about you.

I really hope that you will take this podcast and the things that I’ve taught you and take some action, look at how you’re taking care of your body. And maybe you already love your medical care team, and that’s not a concern. Then see what else you can do to be a great steward of this body that you have been given.

It is a gift. And if you are thinking about having another baby, and you are all my questions to ask when you are choosing a care team or going in for that first appointment, go to Smith stones, coaching.com forward slash ebook. And get your copy now. You’re going to learn all about how to build a care team and is so much more, you’re going to choose what to do and whether or not you should have another baby after loss.

We’ll see you next time.