Living with Illness. Ep 68

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercam. I'm a mother of four, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah hart Hunger. I'm a mother of three, practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode sixty eight. We'll be talking with Emily Garnett this week about parenting while dealing with a serious illness as well. It is Thanksgiving week for our American listeners, those of you and the rest of the world. Hopefully you're also having a great week that you're grateful for things as well, although it may not be an official holiday to celebrate for it. Sarah, what are you grateful for as we're recording this? Yeah, today, I am grateful that after she ate Jenevie went back to sleep after eating at four thirty am. It's little things, yes, because that was key podcast prep time. For me, and if she had not gone back to sleep, Yeah, I would have been a little bit of trouble, so that was great. Yeah, actually I would have I may have put Josh in charge. That would have been your other plan. Yes, that's true. You could probably deal with that. Yeah, I don't know. I've been I mean, especially this this upcoming episode is really focusing our minds on what we're grateful for. So much in life works works very well, and I know that both you and I and we have our bumps in the road, but we're you know, happy to have pretty good life. I've been thinking of this in the past few weeks have been hit with a number of them sort of expensive misfortunes, is how I would would put it, starting with my broken tooth a few weeks ago, and then extending from there into you know, like our three year old's series of er visits for the whole you know bat encounter. Oh yes, I had rabies, rabies vaccines system. You know, my blog readers or heard that whole saga. I don't need to bore anyone with it, but to suffice to say it was, you know, not just going to the r once, but then you know, the doctor on duty thought we didn't need to do anything. Other people disagreed, and so then there was going back with the whole you know saga with that. The other day, I also managed to rip the front fender off my car while backing out of the driveway. It's just, I mean, it's comical in retrospect, but not so much at the time. And you know, all of those scenarios, I feel like there's a gratitude angle, like we're grateful that your son didn't actually end up having rabies, and we're grateful that you didn't get in an actual like real So it's true, even the bad things, you can kind of think about how much or we're recording this, like while I'm sort of waiting to see when the plumbers will show up, hopefully after we've been recording, because I don't want to deal with them while we're recording it. I spent yesterday waiting for Blum today because like, our house is below the sewer line, you know, So Pennsylvania is really hilly, and so depending on where you are on the hill, you might be below your sewage line, right, and so if that is the case, like it doesn't naturally flow up hill say, you have to have a pump system to get it into the sewage system. And those pumps we got new ones installed in early twenty seventeen and they both broke. I don't know why, but it was this horrible, huge mess, like not mess, but like loud noise alarms. Have plumber's coming out for emergency dealing with that. They both need to be reinstalled. Like the warranty will cover the pumps, but it won't cover the labor. Like it's just all this stuff. I mean, I would say all this crap literally then then, and that all really does suck. But it's like, wow, thank God for the Suis sewage system. I know, like that it's not like pile up here because we're south on the hill from the sewer line. You know. Yeah, the little things right, talk about you that in general, when our toilet's flush, it goes somewhere, not here, and when our lives are going, right, we don't always think about this. We don't always think about that. Yeah, so you guys for Thanksgiving, you tend to stay in Miami, right, Yes, it's kind of a cozy tradition not to travel anywhere. And although I'll say even when we didn't live here, we used to fly down because it's it's a bigger holiday, I guess from my husband's side than it is for my side. So sometimes my parents used to come with me to Miami, but we almost always came, and then since moving here, we have not left the area during that time ever, So either one of us have been working or we're off, and this year we're actually both off, which is really nice. So I'm looking forward to it. Are you guys traveling only locally? So we generally, for most of the past few years have either gone had it at our house, which I don't mind it all. I don't find it that big a deal to cook Thanksgiving dinner. It's actually sort of you know, other people contribute dishes and so all I really have to deal is with the main ones, and you can buy things like pies, so you know, it's not that big a deal. Or we go to my brother's house, who lives in New Jersey, and that's only an hour away, so you know, it's not a huge deal. Like, you know, we're not having to travel overnight generally, so we're going to his house this year, so I'm not even on Turkey duty. I think I'll make make my coni. Well, hopefully some listeners will get to enjoy this, you know, while traveling or while doing that pre Thanksgiving workout that is so common to get back to get all ready for that meal. So yeah, yeah, Well, we're happy to bring you our interview in this upcoming segment and so looking forward to that. Well, Sarah and I are very happy that Emily Garnett agreed to come on the podcast this week. We were so grateful to learn that Emily is a long time listener of Best of Both Worlds podcasts, so that is very exciting. She also just started podcast herself, but she's going to tell us about that. So Emily, introduce yourself to our listeners. Well, thank you so much, Laura, and thank you Sarah. I'm so honored to be here. This is super exciting for me. My name is Emily Garnett and I am. In a previous life, I was an elder law attorney in New York City, so I did a lot of wills, trusts, estates, adult guardianships, and public benefits, so medicaid planning and medicaid applications. And I left my law practice when I was thirty after a few years. My background is also in nonprofit work and care management and case management for different sorts of marginalized populations, and so I left that sector when my son was born in twenty fifteen to stay home with him and was doing a little bit of work from home here and there. And then last fall, last November, I was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer twist and you know, right, it's like and what a twist. And we had just moved out of the city into a suburb about forty five minutes north, and I had been having some really really awful postpartum pain issues that we couldn't put our finger on, and so I kept going to these two different doctors and they couldn't really it was like no one could figure it out. And my primary care doctor finally found a lump in my breast last September and said, okay, you know what, go get this checked out. I went for the ultrasound and the ultrasound tech immediately flagged it as looking abnormal, pulled in the radiologist who did a mammogram and then a biopsy, like immediately like it wasn't like come back next week, it was clear. Your schedule for the day and I was diagnosed with breast cancer and they originally thought it was earlier stage and we're going to do surgery and chemo. And then I went for a second opinion and they were they kind of connected the dots between my I'd been having really bad back pain and hip pain and mobility issues, and they connected the dots between those issues and the breast cancer and said, you know what this is. This is likely metastatic because those are symptoms of bone metastases. And so they sent me for a scan and I the scan. You know, I like to be a little bit glib about it because it's kind of a coping mechanism, but it was right after Thanksgiving last year, and my husband and I say, the scan lit up like a Christmas tree, like it was not. It was very clearly metastatic. And so so I started treatment right before Christmas, and I went into chemical menopause, which I'm very much like an open book and I'm happy to talk about all of these issues because if we're not talking about it, we don't realize how much, you know, discomfort we have around them and how difficult it can be to talk about it. So I'm very much I very much tried to be as open as possible about talking about all of the different facets of my illness and our family challenges and what this means to have metastatic breast cancer in your early thirties. And so I've been on treatment now for almost a year and my last scan was very stable. It was a little bit better than stable, so things are going well. But yeah, so that's the that's the TLDR. Yeah, I mean, what were your first thoughts when you you got that diagnosis. I mean, you know, first you're you just have the breast cancer diagnosed. You're like, well, okay, that's bad. And then and then you get the scan and you're like, well that's that's worse. It's really good, that's really bad bad. Because I mean, of our listeners, I don't know, you know what our listeners know about this, but obviously the prognosis for people with metastatic cancer is is not how did they? And I'm curious and from a well we don't have we probably do have actually a number of physician listeners, So tell us what you know. How were you given these kinds of diagnoses, what were you told about prognosis and what was helpful from your from your doctors, and what wasn't well, So I I currently I went for a second opinion at one of the major cancer centers in New York City. I was at a smaller regional facility where I first got my diagnosis and wasn't really comfortable with the standard of care there. I didn't feel like they were. They were more upset about everything than I was in a lot of ways because I was so young, and they didn't seem to see a lot of young people with with breast cancer, and I don't. I'm sure it didn't help that I had my son with me at the appointment and he's you know too, and bouncing off the walls, and you know, so they were. I wanted to go somewhere where I was not the most upsetting case, and I found a outliar. You didn't want to be the out I didn't want it to be another You wanted them to feed. You wanted it to feel like there was confidence on their end because they had seen a million like you, Right. I wanted to be the boring case. And so when I went for my second opinion at the cancer center in the city I was. I found that that team where they were very much just like they are that like wonderful mix of optimism and realism, Like they're not going to eat around the bush and are very straightforward, but they also are not going to I don't know if they keep a good poker face or if they're just really really spectacular doctors. I tend to think it's the latter, But they really have been, you know, they've my life hasn't been in their hands for the last year, and I feel like I trust them so implicitly. So they basically told me based on my hormone receptor status and where my metastases were located. So breast cancer is broken down into different categories based on hormone receptors, so estrogen positive, progesterone positive, both estrogen and progesterone positive, herto positive or triple negative, which means you don't have any hormone receptors. And I'm estrogen positive, which is the most common and there's the most treatment types available. And my metastases are only in my bones, so there are no major organs affected. And I have a lot of metastases, but they're not big. They're like like little Dalmatian spots, so they're not there. They were painful, but they weren't like interfering with like the bone structure and stability. So my my oncologist said, look, this is you know, she was very matter of fact, She's like, this is stage four. We're not going to give you a life expectancy. We're not going to give you a prognosis because at the beginning they're like, we just don't know. We're not going to tell you information that we that we are, you know, only going off statistics and breast cancer is you know, it's it's a learning, it's a progressive learning. Well because I guess there's so many variable so many variables, and so she said, with this, with this makeup, we like to think that they that you'll have many, many years unless we start to think otherwise. And obviously the median life expectancy for metastatic breast cancer is about three ish years. But that's the median, so that's you know, statistically, there is going to be a lot of people on either side of the curve. Like I know people who have lived for twenty years with metastatic disease, but I also met people very early on that are no longer with us that passed away very quickly from their diagnosis, so you you can't predict it's they're working on predictive models, but it's in the early stages of research. How do you how do you handle the uncertainty and or is it in some ways is the uncertainty sort of positive because with that comes, you know, the possibility for more hope. Well, I so my husband jokes about this a little bit, and we we try to have as much of a sense of humor about it as possible because it's it. It helps us cope, and it helps us realize that it's we don't have to be morose all the time. We're not walking around like zombies. So he jokes that this setup was the most ideal setup for me if I'm going to get a terminal illness, having one where I have you know, I'm not going to go downhill really quickly, but it's you know, I have I have time to plan, and I'm I'm a planner by nature. I'm an obsessive list maker, and so now I have this kick in the pants to say, Okay, I'm I'm going to plan out the next five years of my life. I'm going to sit down and say, what does my family need? What can I organize for my family? What can I organize for myself? What are the things that I want to accomplish in my life? And can I how many of those can I do? And so I've just I have been in super planning mode of like I don't necessarily have you know, forty or fifty years. I think of myself as like, Okay, I have five years. What can I do in those five years? And that's a really reasonable chunk of time to address. So I've I've taken that as in some ways, you know, a positive in disguise because I can you know, I can really start to get down to business. Wow, Like if you've thought about you know, these are the five years, what are you right? Well? And it's in a lot of ways five years is a lot less daunting to think about five years or one year or two years than like fifteen years or twenty years. Like I had always wanted to start a nonprofit, had always been kind of my ultimate career trajectory, was like that was my hope that I would do that, And I realized, well, I'm not guaranteed to have a twenty or thirty year career arc and I had started putting into place the foundation for starting a business right before my diagnosis, like a consulting business for elder care, special needs issues and both legal and care management issues. And as soon as I got diagnosed with breast cancer, I realized a lot of those issues translate really well into the needs of the breast cancer community, and so I was able to kind of pivot and am now actually later today, I'm filing the paperwork to start a nonprofit to start addressing some of those needs of the young metastatic community with you know, with small children, the legal needs, the case management needs, kind of helping triage all of the issues that I just went through and was cobbling together all the resources for myself. So now you're the most qualified person ever to be able to do that. Go ahead. What were you going to say, Yeah, Well, of course you're doing all that while also managing a pretty complex treatment plan, right, And I wonder you could share a little bit about that with our our listeners. Because my hormone based mostly right hormone based, right, so my my treatment plan is actually my my oncologist always says, it sounds so much easier than you think it would be because I take two pills a day and then I go and those pills are One of them is an aromatase inhibitor, which is and Sarah, I'm probably mashing up all of these. Oh, I can help you with that. So in aroma case inhibitor blacks is that in my practice for different reasons. But it can blocks the conversion of testosterone to estrogen, blocking the rumatase enzymes. So it's gonna greatly lower your estrogen levels and increase your testosterone levels a little bit. Yes, yes, so it I'm on an aromatase inhibitor to decrease the estrogen. I'm on a CDK inhibitor, the CDK four six inhibitor, which is a brand new drug and has been really changing the face of metastatic hormone based breast cancer treatment because it's been so people have been so responsive to it and that's great. Yeah. Yeah, And so that between those two, I take those pills every day. I'm not doing chemo, I'm not doing radiation. I didn't have breast surgery because for metastatic disease that was not the most recommended course of treatment. It was now having these more specifically targeted therapies. I'm able to go to the doctor once a month for follow up, and I get a couple of injections to strengthen my bones as well as was put into chemical menopause, and then I get pet scans every ninety days to check on the you know, stability of my disease. I also had a hysterectomy at the end of the summer, and so I could go off of a couple of the the lupron, which is the chemical menopause medication. So I had a full hysterectomy upherectomy, which is ovaries, and I had my ovaries, tubes, and uterus completely removed, so that that would shut down all almost all the estrogen production in my body from chemical menopause to surgical menopause right right, Which was I mean, honestly, that's been the hardest part is the grappling with the menopause symptom and the kind of fertility, the fertility issues, the fertility, the fact that we are never going to have another baby. I mean, we had been trying to get pregnant when with a second baby when I was diagnosed, so that was really challenging. That was that that has been I think for me the hardest part. Wow, are you considering any other means of expanding your family or is that we kind of on the table for now. We we shelved it pretty quickly. We shelved it because we didn't have time or the financial resources to do the appropriate fertility preservation. And then when we realized I was metastatic, we thought it seems like too much to take on to kind of have the possibility of another baby kind of sitting out there in the ether. We have one son who just turned three yesterday, So happy birthday, Felix, Happy birthday. And he is awesome, and and kids are a lot, I mean, one kid for me has been a lot, Like I've yeah, So I just I was like, you know what, we're We're good. We have one baby that may not be how we envisioned it, and it's hard to think that we're never going to have another one, especially being in that kind of like early mid thirties time of life where everyone else is having more children and knowing that we're not, you know, ever going to get to do that. But you know, the fact that we did get to have one baby before before my diagnosis was wonderful, and I don't want to take that for granted. And I'd rather spend as much energy on him rather than, you know, trying to figure out how do we have another baby while I'm sick and can't do you know, nearly as much as I could when Felix was a newborn. So what does Felix know about the situation? I mean, what have you and your husband discussed with him about it? So we are pretty open with him, I in whatever age appropriate ways possible. I try to make it a point not to I try to be pretty matter of fact with him because I don't want him to ever have that moment of like, this isn't something I can talk about, or this is something that my family is afraid of. I think that it's going to be such a huge part of his narrative as a person that his mom had breast cancer that he needs to be able to grow with that and process it in whatever way is is, you know, whatever way he needs to. So, I mean we're not sitting down and being like, well, mommy has X, Y and Z, but we include him in conversations Like when I had my hysterectomy, we talked to him about well, mommy had an operation and mommy has scars, and he said, can I see them? And I said sure and so and I said that means you can't jump on mommy's stomach and he goes, okay, Mommy, can I kiss your booboos? And it's like sure, I know. And he is so empathetic and sweet, and he's got a very nurturing side to him, and he feels he feels much better when he's included in whatever the family is going through. So I also think it's important to give him the opportunity to see, you know, instead of just saying, well, mommy's at the doctors a lot. Because the first six months were so many doctor's appointments because it was you know, scanned and my oncology appointments, but then also genetics and I can't even remember. I felt like I was just and like integrative medicine and support groups, and I felt like I was constantly at appointments, And so I tried to take him with me whenever it was appropriate and let him kind of see a little bit of what mommy was doing so that he could say, see, Okay, you know, mommy's at the doctor. That's not a scary thing. That's just part of part of life. Yeah, and I you know, kids what every experience is different, but a lot of kids can be very matter of fact about those things. They can actually understand a lot. Yeah, wells he said anything that like indicates that he understands it. Or he's only three, so maybe maybe it's just it's like how it is for him. It's just how it is for him. He he he's very he is very matter of fact about a lot of it. When I don't feel good, I tell him, and then I feel like I'm by doing that I can create an example for him if he doesn't feel good, he can you know, he can have the tools to communicate that. Like it it's I try to think of it in a lot of ways of like how can I model behavior that I want him to pick up on as much as it is what am I talking about? Like, I've definitely noticed that he is picking up on a lot of the words that you know, if my husband and I are having a conversation, he's picking up on the words that we're using and he's starts to try to understand them, and so he'll ask he goes mommy, what's cancer? And I'll say, cancer is a disease. Cancer is a sickness that mommy has, and there are a lot of different types of it, and mommy has one type and that's why she goes to the doctor a lot. And he's like, oh, okay, and and he was like, do you need a band aid for it? Like, oh, I sometimes sometimes, you know, do you have a band aid anything? Yeah? And like, what advice do you have for other parents who are trying to help children through a challenging medical situation in the family, or advice for other parents who receive such a such a difficult diagnosis. Circle your wagons in such a big way, find the people who are going to support you, and be really clear about what support that you need. I it was really really hard for me the first probably two months to just function. I stayed in bed and cried for a good chunk of the day because I was just processing everything. And once I kind of started coming out of that, I was like, Okay, what support groups are available to me? And I found some. I went to a few different ones and I found some really great support groups. What's available for my husband and found some different support networks for him? And I talked to him. I was like, you need to have a support group that you can talk to, or a group of friends, or something that you do on a regular basis that gets you, that reboots you, because I can't necessarily be that for you in this respect and you need it. So, you know, finding him his regular support network, and then starting to find the resources available for Felix for our family, And that's where I started thinking, like, there are not that many really specific resources available and maybe I just haven't found them. But like I went to a cancer organization that has really fantastic child life specialists and they have groups, but they're for five to twelve year olds, and I'm like, I think that we're missing the boat with what you know, young kids need. Like we found a great preschool that we started sending my son to, and we went on sitter City. We got a thirty day free coupon and found some really good babysitters so that we would have childcare in place in a few different ways when I was not well in the mornings. And then you know, started looking at what sorts of resources and supports we can build. But but that's really hard. It's it's and it's very time consuming and very complex, and that brought me to the idea of, like, this needs to be something where it can be a hub of resources instead of everyone having to fend for themselves, which that's what you're going to be. That's working forwards with your exactly great segue to your blog and your podcast. Yeah tell us, I mean because you're you were becoming that resource that that wasn't there for you, So so talk about what you're trying to do. Yeah, that has That has been my whole goal is to create the resources that I felt like I wanted. So I started blogging about my diagnosis and my treatment and how I feel about it and the whole process in kind of the I think about it, like, Okay, if I'm dratting a legal document, how would I spell all of this out? And so I tried to use that structure in a lot of my less emotional blog posts and my more informative blog posts. But I started blogging about everything that I went through from you know, the biopsies and the diagnosis, the genetic testing, the fertility questions and the hysterectomy. All of those pieces I tried to amass in one place and I hope that someday Felix is going to be able to read those and you know, recognize what his family, you know, what was happening in his family because of those because of those those essays, those narratives. But it also has become a resource for and like a safe haven for a lot of other people who are going through similar things. Who absolutely, I mean, I can imagine if this did happen to me, that's exactly what I'd want to read somebody else's yeah, thoughts and experiences and that I'm not alone in this, and that, I mean, that's incredibly valuable what you're doing. Thank you. It's I mean, it's it's kind of selfish too, because I really enjoy doing it, and I I appreciate you know, in the same way that when you have a small kid, you want to keep track of what happened at different points of their lives. This is like my cancer kid, Like I want to keep track of the things that happened at the different points of my diagnosis and treatment because I'm not going to think about it in the same way now as I did in real time, and so I try to keep my blog as real time as possible. So if I'm you know, I started blogging. I was diagnosed November ninth of twenty seventeen, and I think I started the blog November tenth or eleventh, So it was very very much real time. And so our listeners said, that's beyond the pink ribbon, right, which is yeah, well in the show, yeah, and then the podcast is recently launched too, that you're you're talking about the intersection of cancer and life. Yeah, so so tell them that's so. The podcast grew out of the conversations that I was having with people who were reaching out to me because of the blog that we're saying this is, this is a really valuable resource. I disagree with you on things. I agree with you. I my experience has been different, and I realized that there are not enough conversations about life with cancer that are taking place in a way that is going past the kind of you know, general understanding of life with cancer. It's hard, you often have chemo. You know, you're tired, like it's there are a lot of tropes there that we're not digging deeper. And I also noticed that there are a lot of aspects of life with cancer that translate into challenges and struggles and pieces of the human condition that are relatable on a very very broad spectrum, and so I wanted to create a platform to have those conversations and to put those conversations out there, both for people who were dealing with cancer to have basically have a relatable conversational space to listen in on and say, yeah, that gets me, but also for people who are not going through cancer, going through cancer treatment or life with cancer that could learn something from that and say, you know what, that's still applicable to my life. And if one in three people in our lifetime is going to get a cancer diagnosis, we're not talking about a small section of people who are going to be affected by aspects of life with cancer. We're talking about everyone. So it seems like yeah, in some way, right, and even if it's not yourself, it's your child or your parent or your friend or your relative, and right, yeah, it's you know, and having that having that space to unpack a lot of the harder topics about living with cancer, about fertility, about death and dying, about having small children and potentially leaving them before you wanted to, and you know, not being able to be alive for parts of their childhood or adulthood. Those are really tough conversations, but they're really important conversations because they're conversations that a lot of people think about and don't really know how to approach. Well, that sounds like I felt, there are lessons from those. Yeah, they would apply to a lot of realms. Oh my gosh, Emily, well, thank you so much. We're so key that you're putting all of that out there and that you've come on our podcast. I think I was just going to say, why don't you just real quick talk us through a day in your life now, because I mean, it's it's it's fascinating. There is this strange juxtaposition of like, you know, you think about these you know, deep things, you're also just taking two pills a day, as she said, So it's very strange. It's You're exactly right, Laura, it's a very strange juxtaposition. And there are kind of two different types of days in my life. There's like appointment days, which are very long and intense and exhausting, and then there are days like today where I wake up with Felix. You know, Felix wakes us up around seven. He you know, and he comes in and he usually kind of shoves my glasses on my face and he's like, Mama, get up, and so we get up, and we go downstairs and have breakfast. And he goes to preschool three days a week. So I drop him off at preschool. I come home and put on some coffee, and I have a little office. I call it my cancer cave. It was supposed to be, you know, a second kid bedroom, but when that was off the table, I staked my claim in it, and I was like, well, if we're not going to have a kid in it, I'm going to use it as an office. And this is going to be my space. So nobody touch it. So I sit down and I go through our family paperwork, so medical bills, explanation of benefits. I kind of sort through all of the financial and logistical stuff. If I need to follow up on prescriptions or appointments, I sit down and you know, make those phone calls or send those emails. And usually, you know, we'll draft a blog post or work on some podcasts. Scheduling. Sometimes I just call my mom and then I pick feel except from school. We have lunch together. He goes down for a nap. Fifty percent of the time, I go down for a nap with him, and then you know, sometimes I'll go, uh, you know, we'll go I have a really fantastic gym with Jim Childcare, and so we'll go over there and go for a little bit, and then in the evenings we take a walk around the neighborhood, fix dinner, do bedtime. And it's it's so like heartbreakingly normal in a lot of ways, because it's just it feels normal and yet not at the same time, it's normal and it's special. It's to see the specialness of it. It is well and thank you so much for doing this. As you know, as a Best of Both Worlds listener, we always like to end our segments with our love of the week, and it doesn't have to be cancer related. It can be whatever. You know, it's definitely not definitely no cancer related. You know, there's something that we're enjoying this week and we can go first because that sometimes helps. So, so, Sarah, why don't you why don't you talk about yours real quick? Yeah, So, as you all know, I started a parenting book club earlier this year which is going strong. I think we're at our fourth or fifth meeting, and this this meeting, the book was Small Animals by Kim Brooks and Man, some parents of books have been more dry, not as enjoyable to read. Maybe torture is to read. I'm not going to say which one this one is not. This one is fascinating. It reads like a memoir. It is so thought provoking. The premise is it's about this woman who was pursued by the criminal justice system for leaving her four year old unattended in the car for five minutes. I heard about that. It's so terrifying fascinating. Yes, it is. And the actual book is well written. It's not terribly long. It's like it's got a real voice to it. And I'm really excited about our book club meeting coming up this weekend. But I recommend the book. Oh man, So I'll say my love of the week it can be. This is Thanksgiving week that this is airing, And I like my cranberry sauce recipe. It's, you know, like a lot of cranberry sauce is kind of an afterthought of the mealers that's horrible. Slice stuff out of the the cans of careful of my husband love that stuff. Oh my goodness, I'm totally on team homemade cranberry. You're on tama. Okay. Good. So it's so good on leftovers, it's like the perfect binder for leftovers. Well, I like the as leftovers better than antre. I don't really like it on turkey, but I'll have it as part of a yogurt parfe the next day, and it's you know, good that way. But I make it by a big bag of cranberries at Costco, and I mix it. I boil the cranberries in apple cider, which I swear I must have gotten this out of Real Simple several years ago or something. That's probably where I get like ninety percent of my recipes. But anyway, so I boil the cranberries in apple cider, cook them down, you know, they sort of explode and cook down into the into the jelly sort of sauce. Add sugar to taste, and you can control the sugar. If you like more tart cranberry sauce, then don't put a whole of sugar in. You gotta put some in. I learned this kind of the hard way. I was like, you don't even have to add sugar yeah, you do. You do have to add sugar. You'd think with the apple cider maybe you don't, but but that's not the case. But yeah, it's really good. So shout out to that. All right, Emily, what do you have for us? We so, Felix's birthday was yesterday, and our wedding, our sixth wedding anniversary was Saturday. So and then my one year cancer diagnosis anniversary is coming up on Friday. So we had a very a lot of very big emotional events this week. So we started a family tradition yesterday where my husband would take off work and we would go have an adventure as a family. And so my love of the week is Lego Land, which is where we went for our adventure. We yay Florida, Legoland, Florida, Lego Land in Westchester. It's yeah, it's it was, but Legoland, Florida is now on our list. I've decided we're going to become that family that tours the world to go look at like all of the Lego Land. We love Duplows. My husband is an engineer, so he's really into the Legos and duplows and I love them because it's it's kind of creative, open ended fun and my son loves them, and so we can sit around as a family and build du blows for hours and it's like our family thing. And so we went to Lego Land and it was amazing. It was so fun and I don't know who enjoyed it more between the three of us. So that's absolutely my love of the week was Lego Land. I will totally give it about out for Lego Land too. It was awesome. You should definitely do the one in San Diego. See, and I actually didn't realize there were so many Lego Lands. But yeah, we love Lego Land too, Lego Land all around, Lego Land, Legoland for the win. We are grateful for Lego Land this week. Family, thank you so much again, we really appreciate it. Oh, thank you for having me. This was so so wonderful. Well that was all intense, but here we are with our Q and A again as we always do. So. This week's question comes from a mom of two boys who are four years old and three months old. She is a partner at a big law firm in the Bay Area. Her husband is an anesthesiologist also affiliated with the university, and she had written to Sarah and said, I know you, you know well based on you and your husband's jobs, like your life is full like ours I saw. She says she loves paper planners and journals, but has essentially given them up entirely because so much of her planning and coordination has to be seamlessly integrated for her husband and herself. You know that they because they both have intense jobs, One or the other often needs to take over one hundred percent of the household and childcare responsibilities when the other person is underwater or on call, or you know, in a case or anything like that. So they share a Google calendar, Apple reminders, Apple notes, and homemade laminated two week calendar on the fridge. I love that we both have to know what everything that is going on, as it's a true partnership, She says. I'd love to hear more about how you and Josh plan as a couple. I think frequently about the invisible workload of women, and I worry that any planner system that one person uses and a two parent household that isn't shared will have that invisible workload put on the person more interested in planners. So have you seen or developed good ways to divide the personal place and journaling from the family need to know planning well, first of all, very interesting. I had never thought of the planner industry as maybe one of the engines driving female oppression, but maybe maybe maybe he plays a role. I don't know. I will say I think that probably more men out there could benefit from planner use than women could benefit from leaving their planners behind. I also, as I've mentioned, don't think that everybody needs to use paper. So if that's not the solution for your family, that is certainly not wrong. But I will tell you know what we do, and we're not perfect by the way. In fact, sometimes my husband will love to remind me that's not how best of both world says to do. So now he can throw my own recommendations back at me when we are not following them, as sometimes things do get a little you know, mixed up when things get very busy. However, we do have a fairly functional system most of the time, and we do actually use an electronic calendar for those shared events. So if there is any event that I feel that we both need to know about, and that includes any weekend child event, so pretty much any birthday party, any piano lesson unless he's on call, because if he's on call for that weekend, then I really it's kind of on me. So but unless he's on call, any weekend child event, any kind of after hours evening event he would need to know about, that's pretty much it. Anything that's during the work day I don't necessarily find. I mean generally, I don't have a lot of kid centric items anyway during the workday that I have on my own system, So I guess it just doesn't typically come up unless it was something like a parent teacher conference, in which case that would go on the shared calendar. So I guess what I'm saying is the paper is for me. It has all of my work items, my workouts, my own personal to do items, It has scheduling stuff. But you know what's funny, planners have certainly evolved. A lot of people are not using them as much as schedulers. They're using them more for to do list and thought managers and brain dumps and less as I need to be here there at a certain time. So I do still keep a lot of scheduling and time blocking, but that's more like how I want to arrange my free hours, and anything that's going to affect both of us does get shared electronically, and we did learn from a prior guest on this show to get a shared Google address, which like copies itself automatically to our own inboxes. I believe he actually has that one on his phone, but it also ses a copy to my main email address. So anything for school sign ups or like her panel lessons, anything where they're going to email us and they want one central, it actually does go to both of us, so we can track that as we see fit. And generally, of like if we get an invite on there and we say add to Google calendar, we'll go to our shared Google calendar. So I guess I would say the shared part is generally electronic, the physical part is generally me. And then we do have a hanging calendar for like really big items like any's day is off, we track on there, and like if we're going on vacation, so that's just on a paper calendar that has family photos that we all look at that. Yeah, so that's that's kind of our system. There's certainly not one right way. If you find that you are putting everything in your system and that is leaving your partner out of crucial planning, then that absolutely may be a reason to try to move toward a more electronic system, particularly for the time sensitive appointment type things. Yeah, I think that's great. I mean, we really try to do our calendar meetings just so that we can each be aware of stuff coming up in our own independent systems we would not do. We've tried in the past to sort of have some sort of shared it just I like to do paper. He can't do paper because he's got you know, the work outlook stuff that is, you know, coming in and getting scheduled often by someone who is not him. So it's and I would just panic when I'd look at his outlook calendar because that I'd be like, he's got a meeting at something that I know he can't do because he's got to do this thing. And he's like, but I wasn't planning on going it. They just put it on there and not somebody else will take it, you know, like you need him as an active translator. I need him as a translator, so I can't. It just was was making me unhappy to see that. So, yeah, we have our calendar meetings and we trust that both of our individual systems have these things, and you know, it's each of us have the things that we're more into. I guess in terms of planning, I certainly don't think about swim meets at all. In my world. There would be no swim meets whatsoever. My husband cares about that, so he's the one who's scheduling that, and then make sure I know when they are whereas in my case, like something like a piano recital, he would never, you know, think that they need to do a piano recital, so's it winds up being some sort of split. And I mean, well, yeah, you cultivated a split, which is cool because not every family does. But exactly, yeah, exactly. And I will say one more thing, Oh can I just finish? Because I just read what I here and I was like, oh, I want to read that out loud. I was just going to say, let's read it out loud. Some people do, like me, prefer the slower and physical properties of paper because it tends to be more of a focusing agent. That may not be true for everyone, but when I pull that out, it's like a queue to get focused and stop my mind from wandering where I find the phone and electronic devices to kind of do the opposite. So again that's personal preference, and that's why I would probably say that there are some men who probably could benefit from paper, and maybe there's a stigma that keeps them away from it. But I hope maybe partly. So many planners are bright pink, so it's a little bit more of the gender neutral or more masculine looking ones. Maybe that would help people with them. All right, well, this has been Best of Both Worlds Episodes sixty eight. We've been talking about Thanksgiving and also parenting with a serious illness, so lots to think about from this one, but we'll be back next week with more on making work in life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the Best of Both Worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.