Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the Be Therein 5 Podcast. I'm Kate Kennedy, your host. Sorry for the hiatus last week. I actually was planning on putting out episodes through my quote-unquote made up mat leave that I was trying to pre-record episodes for, but I ended up getting induced.

Three, four weeks early, even though we all, as we, you all know, if you listen to spot, guess I always thought my due it was wrong anyway.

So what's funny is slash not funny at all is in this. So I recorded this episode that I'm calling part of the under the influencer series because I think Ashley's five year guest is an incredible influencer and advocate for women.

You know, over 20,000 members inspired these book club. I followed her slash doctor since her days on the bats are on Brad Brad will max season, which if you listen, it was maybe a Kate Lila episode, the most recent Kate Lila, where somebody called in asked my favorite bats are memories and I basically just went into how like my entire beauty routine in, I don't know, 2011 was deeply inspired by Emily Maynard.

I used to be like such a fan of the franchise and I was deep in like bats or nation Twitter early in the day early on in the franchise.

And yeah, like Ashley Spivey, despite coming in 11th place on Brad will max season, she has this magnetism and incredible spirit and incredible sense of purpose and the way she uses her platform.

And I've just followed her forever and I'm just laughing to you about all the random contestants that maybe was interested in at one point that fell off over the years, like I'm not still like knee deep and Jade and Tanner's life. I don't know, like not to compare, but like there's something there's something special about her and I know a lot, there's a lot of overlap in our audiences and a lot of you love her to and she's been really open and transparent about her story with fertility with loss with stillbirth, but there's a lot of funny funny and lights.

As far as this conversation to a lot of talk about bachelor nation and her arc ever since and, you know, us meeting our husbands at bars in New York City and whatnot and her being a mom to her daughter Penny.

And in this episode, we talk about how she is a person that inspired me to not trigger warning everything I do not because I'm being insensitive, but because there should be a level of honesty in normalizing in our difficulties.

So we're, you know, if you're the one experiencing it, like it's kind of tough to trigger warning your own life and while I do think it's important in certain instances, when you have a platform where you want your tragedies to be thread into what you're doing in an organic way that doesn't make you have to feel guilty about them, not setting aside that trigger all the time is kind of freeing in that you're just allowed to be a person that coexist with your own pain.

It's not that you want to trigger people it's that you want people to know like if you're going to follow along with me in my life, this is part of it. So just, you know, if you don't mind disengaging, that's probably the easier thing than me always warning you.

So I guess that in the sense is my sister trigger warning because we do talk about fertility and loss and her advocacy work with the stillbirth prevention act and I think we get into like the last half hour or so.

You know, not great at time stamping topics part of what we talk about is how and I fall into this category of avoiding mom content that I found scary because I had a feeling if I sought or if I learned about it, it would like manifest into existence when really learning about things that can go wrong, even though it can be anxiety producing it can also be educational and as scared as I was of so many things going wrong.

Being in my third trimester, especially like I didn't find this conversation triggering I found it important and I just wanted to tell you that we do talk about this stuff, but also that I was a pregnant person who wanted to talk about this stuff because her stories what made me go get checked out so many times to relieve my anxiety when I would have told myself I was overreacting, which leads me to why I didn't have an episode last week.

So this is my first time on Mike after having a baby, but I am going to I'll there's a lot to.

There's a lot to the story so I need to figure out how and where is the right place to tell it, but I didn't have an episode last week because I ended up getting re admitted to the hospital for postpartum pre-clampsia and like near stroke levels of blood pressure and a level of fluid in my lungs that now when I listen to episodes like this, I hear it.

I think I had a lot of excess fluid in my body that didn't need to be there for quite a bit of my pregnancy and it got to a very terrifying point in the middle of night where I could not breathe and had to go to the ER and this was the day after I was discharged to come home and it it's a whole thing and but I'm home now and I'll tell you more about it.

Oh, I bring that up because in this conversation, I say part of what I was struggling with at the time is how to talk about pregnancy because I really hated it and I, you know, two things can be true. I was also grateful.

But now that I am on the other side, I now understand that how bad I felt wasn't I don't think was normal.

And I present this in the context of being like people keep diagnosing me because whenever you share something like that's difficult, people are like, oh, go get this checked out and like it kind of can wear on you because you're like, oh, I trust me, I have a doctor, I medical providers, blah blah.

But when I was recording my audio book, I started getting insane smelling like couldn't like was having trouble walking and I was getting in and dated with messages be from you guys being like, please be in people like in my meat, they have like, please be mindful of pretty clumsy, like you have a lot of the symptoms.

And I went and I got checked out and at the time I didn't have protein in my urine and I, but I did have high blood pressure and they ultimately decided to schedule an induction for high blood pressure, but I developed pretty clumsy at like the last minute.

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