(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

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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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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.

📬 thatwasnttheplanpod@gmail.com 🌐 thatwasnttheplan.com

Support the show