Speechless: Finding Voice After a Medical Nightmare | Vanessa Abraham

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Today's guest is Vanessa Abraham. She's a certified speech pathologist, she's an author, and a survivor of a life-altering medical crisis. Vanessa's journey began with a sudden and mysterious illness that left her in the ICU unable to speak, move, and even swallow. As a speech pathologist who once helped others find their voices, Vanessa was now the patient and she was learning to navigate the silence.

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and rediscover her own voice and ability to move in the way that she used to. In this episode, Vanessa shares this harrowing experience recovering while also battling post-intensive care syndrome. We explore the mental, the emotional, and obviously the physical toll of survival and the strength that she found in the love for her daughter and the vital role of resilience and community in her recovery.

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Vanessa also opens up about her advocacy for trauma-informed care and the life lessons she's carrying forward through her memoir, Speechless. This is a conversation about survival, identity, and really the power of connection. So without further ado, here is my conversation with Vanessa Abraham. Fell asleep, woke up, and I said, looked at my husband, I said, wow, I am not feeling good at...

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all. I feel like I just got hit by a semi. What's going on? I feel nauseous and just kind of chalked it up to just a very bad case of a cold. As the week progressed, I started losing my voice and I thought, wow, this is just some very rare, bizarre bug I got, you know? I'll go to urgent care and they'll give me something and I'll be fine in a couple of days. And unfortunately, I kept getting worse. So within one week's time, seven days, I was in ICU.

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intubated and rapidly declining. I went to emergency and they tested me for all sorts of things, me CT scans, MRIs. I had diagnoses from MS to botulism to NMO, neuromyelitis, optica. They said to my husband, said, we're sorry, your wife's going to die of a slow paralysis. I woke up one day unable to talk.

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I was intubated, I had a tracheostomy, I was using my eyes to communicate. So as a speech pathologist, I had come full circle, I helped students learn to communicate. I worked with them on using communication devices to communicate. And now I was the patient in the bed. The speech pathologist was looking over my shoulder, assessing me and bringing me.

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communication devices. I was eventually tube fed, which is another area that speech pathologists work on in the medical setting. So again, it was just sheer terror of me now being the patient and going in for swallowing studies. I'm Mackelhule, and this is The Life Shift, candid conversations about the pivotal moments that have changed lives forever.

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Hello, my friends. Welcome to the LifeShift Podcast. I am here with Vanessa. Hello, Vanessa. Hi, Matt. Thank you for wanting to be a part of the LifeShift Podcast. It has been this kind of like healing journey that I never knew I needed. So selfishly, it's been a really, really fun journey of hearing other people's stories and and resonating with people that I otherwise probably never would have come in contact with in my life. So it's just such a great opportunity.

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So before we get into your story, maybe I can tell a little bit about what the Life Shift podcast is for anyone that's tuning in to listen to you and your story. The concept of the show really stems from my own personal experience when I was eight, my mom was killed in a motorcycle accident. And that moment in time, that line in the sand moment when my dad had to tell me that she had died, like from one minute to the next, everything that I had dreamed about my life and the future in my life was no longer a possibility. And...

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Growing up, I just didn't have the tools to grieve. Like no one around me also had the tools to help a little kid grieve. And I always wondered, do other people have these like line in the sand moments in which everything has changed? I know your story is hard, but I'm excited to hear your story and how you've moved through these moments. And in hopes that someone out there that might feel alone or might be going through something similar will feel a little bit of inspiration from hearing your story. So thank you for being a part of what is my healing journey.

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even though you haven't told your story yet, I know it's going to be a little part of that. You are so right that hearing other people's stories are part of our healing journey. I've been tuning into your podcast now for a while and hearing all your guests talk have helped me in my own journey. And you said something to your line in the sand moment, hearing that your mom had passed away and.

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It really reminded me a little bit about my journey too of my near-death experience and what my child's life was going to be like if my husband had to sit down with her and say, honey, mommy just passed away in the ICU. We don't know what happened. One day she was fine. The next minute she was paralyzed on life support, unable to talk, unable to move. And I thought daily what that conversation was going to look like for my husband sitting down with my own child.

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She wasn't eight, but she was three at the time. And wondering how her life would shift completely. Where would they move to? Who would help raise her? Where would she go to school without her mother present? And hearing your particular story and your journey was very inspiring to me, but it also very heartbreaking. I can't imagine what you went through. Yeah. Well, thank you. And I'm sorry that you had to envision that because I know

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that it's probably not the easiest thing as a parent to think about what if I'm not there and how is this child going to go through it? Before we get into your specific story, maybe you can just tell us who Vanessa is in 2025. Like how do you identify in the world? Oh, good question. So I am a speech pathologist. I'm also in my 40s. In 2019, I became critically ill overnight, pretty much overnight. Went to bed one night.

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Feeling fine, was a busy, active mom, healthy, never experienced anything over a head cold, never broke a bone in my body, felt very blessed. Fell asleep, woke up, I said, looked at my husband, I said, wow, I am not feeling good at all. I feel like I just got hit by a semi. What's going on? I feel nauseous, very exhausted.

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And just kind of chalked it up to just a very bad case of a cold. As the week progressed, I started losing my voice. And I thought, wow, this is just some very rare, bizarre bug I got. I'll go to urgent care, and they'll give me something, and I'll be fine in a couple of days. Typical, right? And unfortunately, I kept getting worse. So within one week's time, seven days, I was in ICU, intubated.

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and rapidly declining. went to emergency and they tested me for all sorts of things, me CT scans, MRIs. I had diagnoses from MS to botulism to NMO, neuromyelitis, optica. They said to my husband, said, we're sorry, your wife's going to die of a slow paralysis. So that's when those thoughts came into my mind of what's my daughter's life going to be like.

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Pure anxiety, pure fear. But I kind of equated to like Russian without like somebody was holding a gun to my head and maybe I was gonna die, maybe I'm not. It was horrific. I was in two ICUs. eventually, let me back up a little bit, I'm a speech pathologist. So for me, I woke up one day unable to talk. I was intubated, I had a tracheostomy. I was using my eyes to communicate.

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So as a speech pathologist, I had come full circle. I helped students learn to communicate. I worked with them on using communication devices to communicate. And now I was the patient in the bed. The speech pathologist was looking over my shoulder, assessing me and bringing me communication devices. I was eventually tube fed, which is another area that speech pathologists work on in the medical setting. So again, it was just...

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sheer terror of me now being the patient and going in for swallowing studies, again, being assessed for communication devices. I used everything that I provide my students. Like I said, I used eye gaze where I would just look at letters or look at words and they would have to track what I was saying with my eyes. Eventually I was able to at least type letters on a piece of paper that was like an alphabet board or keyboard.

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Eventually, as a speech pathologist, said, managed to not tell them verbally, but type, I need my phone. I need text to speech. This is going to be a much faster way of communicating than typing letters like H-E-L-P on a piece of paper. So I progressed to that and eventually was able to use a thing called a Passy-Mir valve that they tie or not tie, but they put onto your tracheostomy tube.

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which allows you to communicate verbally. What was that time period like? That was about a month's time. And you were fully like coherent and all this. So you're trapped essentially in your head. 100 % trapped in my head. I knew exactly what was going on. The first week, not so much because I was very heavily sedated. So I was kind of coming in and out and the memories are very blurry. But after that, I was very aware.

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And that also led to anxiety because I knew I was in bad shape. I knew that there was a speech therapist looking over my shoulder. I knew there was a neurologist and a critical care doctor and a PT and an OT and nursing. I knew that I hadn't seen my daughter in weeks. I knew that ICU is not a good place to live. So it was just a very, very traumatic experience. And now I'm really talking to people about this concept called

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post-intensive care syndrome, PICS, PICS. So that is a lot of the psychological things that we deal with as ICU survivors. I equate it to PTSD. When I came home from the ICU after a month in the ICU and another month in rehab, just learning to walk and talk and swallow food again, I will never forget sitting down with my parents and telling them, I feel like I just came home from war.

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Fighting for your life and fighting to try to stay alive, fighting to learn to talk, swallow food again, move your body was so traumatic. So now, yeah, I have FICS, post-intensive care syndrome. I would imagine. And you said that before this harrowing experience, you were seemingly healthy adult doing normal things. Like, yes?

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100%. I was walking miles. would hike with my daughter on my back. She was very little at the time, but hike with her 8,000 feet foot mountains through Colorado. I would do yoga. I was at the gym every day. I was very healthy and fit and overnight, literally, I fell asleep one night, woke up the next day. And then within a week's time, I just spiraled out of control. Yeah. So going to bed that night, you felt like a normal human being and you woke up feeling like, oh, this is

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Did it, you said it felt maybe it was a cold or you just dismissed it as such? Dismissed it as such just because I had never had anything critical happen to me in over 30 years, know, 39 years of life. Right. And then you naturally, I think most people are like, oh, it's a cold, I'll get better. Like that's just, it just needs to run its course, but you're running its course as was essentially just getting worse and worse and worse. At what point did you know like hospital time?

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Like were you seeing those symptoms at home? Well, when I was at home, I just knew that, wow, I'm just not getting better. And my husband even said that too. So one week, seven days from the initial symptom till the next week, seven days later, I woke up in the middle of night, 1 AM or so, and I kind of fell out of bed. And that's when my husband says, you're not getting better. This is really weird. We got to go into ER. So that's what we did in the middle of the night. And then when I finally got to ER,

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I really, within that hour, maybe not even that, I regressed even further. I started seeing double. I remember waiting in the waiting room and pointing at the clock on the wall and the TV. And I told my husband, said, I see two clocks. I see two TVs. There's two nurses there. Everything was double. So that's another sign that, OK, this is really weird. I couldn't even get off the chair. And they didn't know what was going on, right? You said they'd like...

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No idea. Once I got into ER, they ran a bunch of tests, but it was very inconclusive. They were throwing all sorts of diagnoses at the wall. And all they could say is, don't really know what's going on. It looks like this, but it could be this. And all we know is that she's getting worse. Yeah. And that can be really overwhelming, too, I'm imagining, because if they think it's this and there's a treatment or something towards that, but if it's not that and it's this,

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Could that be going, like could that treatment be hurting it in this way? So I would imagine that that's, did you experience that where they were trying to treat something and then it made it worse or? No, they did try to give me some different treatments, but that basically did nothing. Okay, well at least it didn't make it worse, I guess, but it just continually got worse, right? You said it just was a natural, to a place where, did you say you were paralyzed mostly? So my upper body was paralyzed.

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This takes me into the next conversation of how I was diagnosed. So what they ended up finding about four months or so after the initial symptom was that I have a variant that's beyond rare of Guillain-Barre. So typical Guillain-Barre is that your feet are paralyzed. Well, my feet were fine. My toes could wiggle.

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Technically, I could stand up, but due to so much atrophy of just laying in the bed, standing up and walking three, four feet was absolutely exhausting. I'd have to sit down. And that's just because of laying in a hospital bed, your body just gets so weak so quickly. know, eventually that four feet was 10 feet and then that 10 feet was 15 feet. But my feet essentially were not paralyzed. It was all my upper body. So everything, you know, I have what's called the PCB.

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pharyngeal cervical brachial variant of Guillain-Barre. So again, they actually tested me for Guillain-Barre and the first thing they said is her feet are fine because Guillain-Barre usually ascends from your feet up. Well, mine did the exact opposite. So they just dismissed it. So back to my variant, PCB. So pharyngeal cervical brachial, that is everything speech pathologists work on. So everything, your vocal cord, your swallowing muscles.

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So I went full circle and that's what's so unique and why I wrote the book that I did, Speechless, is that I went from the provider or the therapist giving the service to now learning what it's like being the patient in the bed, the anxiety, the depression that you go through. These are all things that they don't talk about in grad school. They're not teaching. So now that's kind of my mission now is to educate people on what it's really like. Yeah, what it feels like inside.

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when you can't do the things that maybe you know you want to and could before, I can imagine that that is debilitating. Like, how do you push through that mentally? Is it your daughter? I mean, what was it for you that was the driving force to keep going? For me, it was my daughter, 100%. I can honestly say, if I didn't have her, I don't know if I'd be here. I understand that, and I think it's real. I think...

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It's really hard to work. like, especially if you had everything taken away from you, essentially. Like, I mean, communication is like the key to life. And if you had it before and now you're you're losing the ability to do it easily or the way that you were doing it, I can imagine what that feels like. like, why go on? Why push? I lost my identity. I lost who I was. I was there pain involved as well. Yeah, there was pain. I see you. was heavily sedated.

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because of the extreme pain. But the loss of identity, I couldn't shower, I couldn't get myself to the bathroom, I couldn't brush my hair, I couldn't dress myself. I went from doing all of those things to overnight losing that ability. And you mentioned too the driving force. In the ICU and in rehab, my husband and the doctors and my team decorated the wall in front of me.

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So my bed was facing this big giant white wall and in the wall in front of me they printed out pictures of my family and my daughter. And it was like wallpaper. The whole wall was just covered in pictures of her. And when my team would walk in and I couldn't talk, I was using gestures and I would point at that wall in front of me so they knew. This is emotional, but they knew that by me pointing to that wall meant that I was fighting for her.

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And that's what got me through it. And I can honestly say, if I didn't have her, the depression and the dark places were so deep that I don't know if I would have fought. Did it feel hopeless at times? once you knew, like how long was it until you got the diagnosis, I guess, is probably the first part of that question. And at what part do you start to feel a little hope? So it was about

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four-ish months before they actually gave me a diagnosis. And honestly, the hope, feeling that hope lasted years because healing from neurologic disorders is not something that happens in weeks, days, months. It's years. And yeah, you feel a lot of hopelessness. You feel a lot of social isolation. People all of a sudden like, hmm, now Vanessa's critically ill. I don't know what to say to her. So let's just give her her space.

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That's the way a lot of society handles it. Friends, family, just think she needs some space right now. Let her just be alone. But that's also not healthy for the survivor either because you're just leaving them alone in their deep dark thoughts. Yeah, that's tough. I think it's probably very similar to when someone loses a loved one and it's like people are there, they send flowers for the first week.

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and then they don't really know what to do, so they just don't do anything, and then it creates that space. So I can imagine as a survivor, as you're going through this, it's really hard. You're like, where is everybody? Like, I need somebody, but at the same time, those people are like, I don't know what to say, I can't fix it. Everyone wants to fix something, right? Yeah, the first couple weeks or a couple of months, everybody was very involved in my care, texting me, reaching out, and then their life has to go on.

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They've got to go back to work and that's understandable, but mine didn't go back to life. I didn't go back to work. My life didn't go back to where it was. I didn't just wake up and, now it's time to be mom again.

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didn't happen and that's very, very depressing, very isolating. What was the switch in which things started to feel hopeful that you were going to get better? Was there like a, was it the diagnosis when they knew something so there was a way to approach it? Like, was there a moment where you were like, okay, I can do this in like a more positive way, not necessarily fighting for your daughter, but like fighting for yourself? I don't think so much getting the diagnosis.

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really changed things because in my mind I just knew that whatever I had was just going to take time. Whether or not there was a label for it or not, I knew I had a neurologic disorder and recovering from neurologic disorders takes time. Rome wasn't built in a day. But I think now looking back six years,

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For me, going back to work gave me a semblance of who I was and distracted me too. And I always use this term post-traumatic busy, because that's how I kind of feel like I navigated it. I just became super ultra busy. Not that I think that that's right way of handling it, but that's just was my way of coping.

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And I went back to work during COVID, so it was a really weird, awkward time. But I think that kind of gave me hope that, I can work again. I can provide for my family again. can... Help others? Did that help? Yeah. Yep. Helping others, being around other people that were critically ill and fighting for life. But at the same time, there were some triggers going back to work as a speech pathologist. Seeing people with communication devices and assessing them for those.

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helping them verbalize. Going to conventions for me are very triggering where I go to conventions and there's medical equipment around. I went to one a few months ago and I had to walk out because it was, yeah, too many triggers. Not safe, yeah. Did you find yourself approaching work differently because you have that experience? Like when you were working with people directly that maybe had a similar...

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struggle because now you really do like you knew before because of books and education and and practice and those kind of things but now you like knew what it was like to that change how you approached your work. 100 % I the first thing I look at now is mental health. I am so much more trauma informed. First thing I asked to or not one of the first things I asked but I'm always curious if there's been a nice you stay.

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A lot of the little children that I work with have been in the NICU, they've been in ICU, they're critically ill for some reason or another, and have been in the ICU setting. And that's one of the first things I'm kind of curious about is if they've ever had any of those experiences. I had a student recently that the parents said that they don't talk, they have selective mutism, only with doctors.

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So to me, the red flag went up thinking, okay, why doctors? Why is this little child that's three afraid to say a word to a doctor? And I thought, okay, post-intensive care syndrome. He had a traumatic event in the ICU. Whenever he sees a white coat now, he shuts down. It only makes sense to me. So yeah, I am fully focused on their mental health because if somebody...

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wants to die, is depressed, severely anxious, how are they going to fight for their life? Right. Was there ever consideration of not going back to that line of work and doing something else? Because of the triggers and stuff? Not really, because now I feel like I have a gift. mean, but it's scary to approach that. So good on you for being brave enough to do so, because I could I would imagine there's a lot of people that just wouldn't. Yeah, I

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There was a small part, but not much because now I just feel like I'm a better speech pathologist for it. Not that I want to relive this or wish it upon anybody, but I get them. Yeah. What did the journey back to being you, this new version of you, what did that look like? What were the steps to first I was able to do this and then I was able to do this? Or did it all come back at once? Or how does that even work for someone that's naive like me?

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Yeah, it's a long, slow, depressing process. And being the patient, living in the body, I don't see the changes, or I didn't see the changes during that critical period of time, but there would be people that would say, wow, Vanessa, I haven't seen you in a week. You look so much better. And I would be thinking, no, I'm not. I still am in bed. My arm's still not moving. I'm still not able to shower on my own, and so on.

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But the process is very, very slow. But for me, I spent my days before I went back to work, I was at the gym all the time, just walking. At first I mentioned a while ago, four feet, 10 feet. Next thing you know, was a quarter mile, then it was a half a mile. And this is over the course of months. I certainly wasn't walking a half mile in the first two months of my life, post-ICU.

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but just continually progressing. I would write it down in like a journal, okay, today I two laps or whatever and then next week at this time I'm gonna increase that to two and a half or I walked on the treadmill for 15 minutes, I'm gonna increase that to 20 minutes or I'm gonna do an incline today or last month I was able to lift a water bottle, a little 12 ounce water bottle. Well, maybe next month I can lift two water bottles.

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I wasn't lifting weights because weights were too heavy. I needed something very, very light at first. So just measuring that progress, but it's slow. And that slowness just adds depression. Yeah. How about the speech? What was that coming back to you? So the speech, I was what we call non-verbal, non-speaking for about a month.

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And then I was extubated where they removed the tracheostomy and I'm able to communicate verbally. And that was really, really hard. I was in an interview recently and I told them, I said, there's only one thing that was harder than that in my life and that was childbirth. Childbirth was very hard. Nothing similar to that, but learning to talk again and just go, with the passing mirror valve on my tracheostomy was...

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think the first time I was only able to have it on for like 10 or 15 seconds because it was so exhausting, so much work. Most people don't experience that, but the nature of my disability or my disorder and the nerve damage to the nervous system that I sustained made it more difficult. So once that was removed, I was able to communicate verbally and my voice did take a change during that time just because of the nerve damage.

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So my voice, I remember my husband saying too, like, don't sound the same. But that has come back. My voice, I feel like, is the same tone as it was pre-injury. There's still a little weirdness with my vocal cords. I have this thing called PVFM, paradoxical vocal cord motion disorder, where I get these things called striders, where the vocal cords, they just don't move as they should. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's pretty scary.

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Feels like I can't breathe. Yeah, that's frightening. That's more than scary. Yeah, it's terrifying. And what's even more scary is when my daughter sees that. But I would imagine, the post-traumatic stress that you get from, like, is it happening again? Do you have that? Do you have those moments? Is there a chance of all of that coming back? Like, how do you navigate the world to avoid being in that situation again? It comes back all the time.

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I try to remind myself that it's rare to come back again, try to manage stress, try to be grateful, try to be mindful that the chances of it coming back are pretty slim. But boy, when I have those moments where the vocal cords stop working correctly or I have difficulty swallowing food, because I'm not healed. I'm not where I was. There's still a lot of weaknesses. Am I a lot better? Oh yeah.

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But there's many PTSD type moments where I think, okay, am I gonna die in front of my child? Is she gonna see mommy not breathe and I'm gonna turn blue in front of her? And is that gonna be her line in the sand moment where her life completely changes where she sees mommy die in front of her? Is there a trigger that...

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would put you back in that same situation? Like when you went to bed, was there a trigger or is it just some kind of natural thing that happened in your body that For me, was nothing. was, I don't know if it was my time or stressful. I was raising a little child, toddler at that time, working full time. There wasn't for me. Some people do have triggers that brought it on. For me, they had no idea. They searched everything. They even looked over my body for tick bites and

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different bug bites, thinking, you know, checking my scalp and, but nothing. Do you wish there was so you could know that there was like what to avoid? Feels much scarier on the other side. Yeah, I wish I knew so I could say, you know what, don't eat that, don't take that, don't whatever. But for me, it was just out of nowhere. Went to bed one night, woke up the next morning and something just paralyzed, some virus paralyzed.

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the medulla and pons in the lower brainstem. That's what they found on the brain imaging scans, that there were lesions in the medulla and pons of the lower brainstem. I'm no doctor, physician, or neurologist. I don't know how a virus can do such things, but it happens. Do you approach life differently now that you're out of this and you saw a close near death, as you say, experience?

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Do you approach life differently? Do you live your days differently than you did before? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Like I said before, I'm far stronger than I ever imagined I was. I look at so many things in my life and other people's life, and I think, oh, you have no idea. You have no idea. You're complaining about a broken finger, or you backed into another car and you've got a bumper that's bent.

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really, truly, there's big problems and there's little problems. I think I could total my car and if I'm alive and I'm able to walk away from it, it's just a car. You don't sweat the small stuff as much? Would you say that's true? Yeah, small stuff just rolls off my back. Before, did it bother you? Did those things bother you before? Not a whole lot, but now it's even greater where I just look at things and I think my house could burn down.

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It's just a thing. As long as we're all safe. We're all safe and healthy. health. Yeah. But you're still challenged with the post-traumatic aspect of this, So is that debilitating in any way of you living your life to the fullest, or is that just a byproduct that you kind of walk with now? And if that's too much of a question, I apologize. Yeah, no, it's OK. There's a lot of things that

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still are triggers for me that I have to just stop, take a breath and accept it and just say, okay, this is gonna be a trigger. Here's a classic example. Ambulances are my trigger. I wrote in three ambulances. There's ambulances of different colors. There's some that are like red and yellow. The one that gets to me is this ambulance that's colored red, blue and yellow and white. Because that was the first one that I got into.

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And when I was getting into that one, when they put me in, I was hallucinating on, they had me on like medical fentanyl and I was seeing like kaleidoscope of colors. So when I see this particular colored ambulance, I just, palms sweating, heart rate starts to increase, kind of tears in my eye. And yesterday I went to an Indy 500 car race.

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and the car race are very dangerous situations, you know? And these ambulances that are red, blue, white, and yellow were everywhere in case one of the drivers crashed. And sure enough, one crashed right in front of me. Well, I'm sorry, he didn't crash. The car caught in fire. So what comes racing down the track? An ambulance that's red, white, blue, and yellow. And right in front of me, there are

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doing all their stuff to save this guy and he was fine. There was nothing wrong. You know, they got him out and they, but talk about a trigger. I'm sitting there and this is happening right in front of me. And I thought, oh, lovely. Of course it's gotta be a red, white, blue and yellow ambulance. And there wasn't just one, there was dozens of them around just because this is a very dangerous environment. Yeah. Well, exposure therapy, did it help? you think it, do you think it was like, you're kind of forced to see it?

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Did you face it or is it something that, I guess, was it helpful? I faced it and I just accepted, okay, Vanessa, this is gonna be traumatic. When I got to the race grounds, I knew I saw these ambulances everywhere and I thought, okay, this is gonna be an entire day, eight hours of reliving trauma, but I just accepted that, okay, this is gonna be hard, but I'm alive. That ambulance is not here for me.

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It's there for them. My time is over. But it's a mind game. It's a mental shift that you have to keep telling yourself six years, 10 years, some people 20, 40 years later that these traumas are still with us. They don't just poof go away with counseling. Yeah. Is that something that's part of your healing journey with any kind of like mental health counseling or is this something you're trying to tackle on your own?

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Yes, I have been through so much counseling. Have you found one that you like? Well, I'm going to get to that. So I've done cognitive behavioral, I've done hypnosis, I've done... Tapping? Yeah, tapping, ACT, gosh, can't even think of all of EMDR. EMDR. But the one that's helped me the most, honestly, is my ICU support groups. Stories. Hearing other people's stories, sharing your own. Yep.

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and listening to podcasts like this, knowing that I'm not alone. I'm telling you, the power of story is so underrated, I think. And I think from multiple perspectives, but definitely from hearing other people's stories, because we're like, oh, I'm not alone. can, you know, I'm not weird for thinking that particular way. But I've seen in this podcast space.

35:53

people telling their story for the first time, or maybe this is their first venture into sharing their story, and what it does for them to just get it out of their mouth. In your case, I don't mean it to pull from your story, but being able to communicate it out loud can help so much, right? Or writing it down or putting it in outside of your head. And so I think of you in that bed not being able to communicate in your normal way. I can't imagine what those thoughts.

36:22

you know, kind of were swirling around. And so hopefully by you writing your book and telling your story in this way, that's also healing. Are you finding that? Yeah, to the point that the book took me five years to write because of the emotional toll it was taking on me. I would type a little bit and then I would walk away from it for months or a year. When it launched in January that day, I walked away from the launch interview and I thought, I feel so

36:52

relieved and so much lifted off my shoulders that I thought I wish I would have done this sooner. Yeah, but you did it in your time. Yeah, there was just such a release though at that moment that but two years ago I emotionally it was hard but yeah, releasing the book now and now talking about it, educating people, educating colleges, universities.

37:19

medical professionals on what post-intensive care syndrome is. Going back to the mental health therapies and those types of things that I've received, I've asked so many mental health therapists, do you know what PICS is, post-intensive care syndrome? Not a single one has heard of PICS. And my heart breaks because I think, how are you going to help an ICU survivor if you don't even know this exists?

37:46

So that's where I'm at now with my book. I want people to become educated and aware of the traumatic experiences that we go through fighting for our life. Yeah, the awareness is so important. I can't help but also think about the people around, like the loved ones of the people that are experiencing this, right? Like your husband or your family members or your friends that stuck around, if they had more awareness, like when they read your book or, you know, people in that kind of space.

38:15

to just know how to approach or help or not help or just be there for individuals that are experiencing what you experience, I think is also a huge win. They don't have to be medical health professionals in that case, but just general people having this understanding that this exists, this is how it feels from Vanessa's experience and her perspective, take that in. And I think that's helpful in itself. Are you seeing that with your book out now?

38:43

Oh yeah, educating the family is huge. Not only do we as the patient have PTSD, PICS, but there's PICS family of what the family goes through, seeing their loved one in the bed, unable to talk, unable to swallow food, unable to move, unconscious. There's a lot of trauma that the family goes through that they need counseling too, and their needs need to be met and addressed.

39:11

emotionally, mentally as well. So yeah, I'm all for and a big advocate of educating the family too on what they need. As a patient, when the hospital sent me home from rehab, insurance provided me with all sorts of medical equipment, shower chairs, medical equipment for tube feeding and cleaning my G tube that I had in my stomach. But the big thing that was lacking was the referral to mental health.

39:40

And that I remember thinking when I came home from rehab and I'm seeing all of these boxes and boxes and boxes of medical equipment and cases of tube feeding materials. And I thought, what good is all that when I wish I was dead? I don't even want to be alive right now, much less be tube fed. So I think when we're discharged from rehab or ICUs,

40:04

We all need referrals to mental health therapists, EMDR, hypnosis, whatever you want to try. Throw it all at the wall, see what sticks for you, but it needs to be addressed. Yeah, I think that's a big issue. think just in general, feel mental health is seemingly like the ugly stepchild of health services, right? In a way that I think it's better now. I think people are more willing to say that they get mental health care.

40:33

Because mental health care is health care, right? I feel like it should not be an offshoot. It should just be part of that journey. think that you don't have to go through something super traumatic like you do to still find benefits in mental health care, right? But to your point, if you do go through those really extreme moments, there definitely should be some aspect of that.

41:00

I'm sure some people will be like, no, I'm fine because they're not ready for it. But if you're ready for it, you should have some kind of referral that gives you the resources you need and not just the boxes of physical supplies that can get you through the day. Because that's not going to get you through the day if your mental health is not good. Yeah. I think we're becoming more trauma-informed as a society. seeking mental health services is not such a bad thing as it was 10, 20, 30.

41:29

and more years ago, it's okay to admit that, I am seeking counseling. I am trying this, or I have tried that. I'm not afraid to admit all of the different, I just said them all, EMDR act. Yeah, why should you be afraid? Why should anyone be? I mean, it's just like, if we want to equate this to something really simple, it's like going to the gym. Like if you get your mental health care, it's kind of like going to work out. You're getting...

41:57

whether they're negative thoughts, whether they're harmful thoughts, whether they're semi, you know, positive thoughts, like getting them in order with a neutral third party is like, I don't see why there's such a stigma to it. There's not as much to your point. Yeah, I don't think there's a stigma to it, but I know there's a lot of people that still are living in fear of that. And I feel sorry for him because my support groups, my fixed support groups are what got me

42:26

through it. They were always there for me. They understood me. That's the big thing. That was my community. And I talk about that in the book, Speechless, as well. I needed a community of people that understood me, that understood trauma and the depression and trying to be a mom again and the loss, the grief. And for me,

42:50

I know a lot therapies, they were great. I took little pieces from each different therapy and try to employ them in my life daily. But just being around people and my community that supported me and they may not have Yon Bray, but they may have something else. And we understand just the grief, the loss, depression, and they're just present for me. They don't have to fix my problems. You mentioned people feel like, I need to fix this. They certainly don't fix it, but they're just

43:20

present. Yeah. And they understand. I think that's important. think as much as the people around us care about us and will listen and everything, they might not understand it. But these people in the support group, and that's probably the whole reason that support groups for all sorts of things exist, is that so we don't feel like we're alone in that and we know that there's someone out there that also understands. Like I may be having this thought that on the surface sounds really bizarre, but

43:47

if I go to the support group and I say it out loud, other people are like, yeah, I think that all the time or whatever it may be. And you're like, okay, cool. I'm not a weirdo. You know, like, and sometimes we have shame about like, why am I thinking that? That's terrible. Just the other night, I, one of the things that I experienced is insomnia. I just cannot sleep through the night. And I started thinking about this and I even texted one of my support group people. And I said, I wonder if

44:15

The reason I cannot sleep through the night is because I went to bed one night fine, eight hours later woke up and my life was never the same. Sand in the moment, line in the moment as you call it, happened to me overnight. And I wonder if that... Oh yeah. Yes, on a deep level that my body knows six years later...

44:39

Hey Vanessa, at night is when bad things happen to you. When I was in the ICU, a lot of traumatic things happened to me at night. And I think my body still remembers that and knows that I'm gonna wake you up every night around one or two a.m. because that was the time I went to ICU or when I went to emergency with my husband. It's when it all started. And ever since then, I wake up at one or two o'clock and I sent my support group.

45:06

friend this information and she's looking at me just like you are and saying, yeah, but supporting me through and saying, Vanessa, you're onto something. Yeah. And no, I mean, it makes so much sense. It's like, especially the fact that like when you're sleeping, you're so vulnerable. You're not awake. So like there's nothing you can control. Right. And so your body's like, I'm going to say I'm going to be vigilant in a way and be up at those moments. It makes total sense to me.

45:35

I think that it, and that's great that the support group was like, yeah, I totally do the same thing. And so I can see how a support group becomes just like an extension of your family of people that just understand what you do and how you think because they've had similar experiences. Yep. It goes back to community. Community is so big. So important. If you could go back to.

45:58

like the Vanessa, like two days before you went to bed that night and started feeling a little crummy. Is there anything that this version of you would want to tell her? Gosh, you know, I'd want to give her a big hug and just give her grace and say you can do hard things. Because yeah, two days before there's, I had no idea that this was going to be unwinding in my life. And there was going to be that major.

46:26

shift in my life that would change the next half of my life. And I was in my 30s and, but I would definitely want to just give her a hug and say, you can do hard things and you're amazing and you're a good mom. Yeah. You know what? I think it's not funny, but a lot of people say that they would give that earlier version of them a hug because they just need to know that someone was there for them and some, you know, not that you didn't have people around you that were there for you, but

46:56

to know the love that others have of you is so important and know that we can do good things. A lot of people are like, it's gonna be okay. And in that moment, or like two days later, you probably didn't think it was gonna be okay. No. And the people around you might not have thought it was okay. And somehow, like we started this conversation out, day by day, week by week, month by month, you're still going through it, but you're still probably progressing, right? You're still getting better and...

47:25

and feeling better and feeling more whatever this version of Vanessa is, am I assuming correctly? Well, yeah, yeah, with each day and now with launching the book, it's just getting better and better. Because you're reaching people that you'll never ever meet, which is mind blowing, right? Yeah, I've had nurses message me through Instagram that are, you know, on the East Coast or in different places and say, wow.

47:53

I just graduated from school and they never said anything about PICS. I have a university in Florida actually that's going to be using my book in their voice and swallowing class. So they're going to be talking about these conversations in school. So it's very impactful when I'm, and I'm proud to be part of that journey with these schools now and having these conversations. And hopefully this next generation of therapists and nurses

48:23

Understand, you know and are more trauma-informed as a result of my book, right? It's that ripple effect. I think there's gonna be a lot of power in that What is the structure of your book? Is it written as like a like a story about you or more of an instruction? What how what is the structure of it? It's a memoir Definitely my journey from the initial onset through, you know, obviously the rehabilitation process

48:48

to going back to work. So it's just a story, a timeline of events of how it all unfolded, what it was like for me going back to work, the anxiety, the depression of going back to work, what it was like going back to work during COVID. And it talks about the role of a mom too and what it's like trying to be a mom again and the depression, the loss of self, you're losing your identity, the grief. It talks about...

49:13

the community and how important community was and how important my doctors and the relationship that I had with my nurses, what that was like. I was very, very fortunate that in my ICU I had a phenomenal team. My doctor actually wrote a prologue to my book because he was so amazing, the story that I have with him. It was really ironic because I was his last patient as a student.

49:41

So he was a student in the grad program there, working towards, obviously, becoming a doctor. And I was his last patient. He wasn't even really supposed to be there. He chose. He said, you know what? I've got an extra week or two before I graduate. I want to get some more hours or more experience in the ICU. So somehow he got assigned to me. And we talk about that relationship of patient-doctor and how

50:07

He changed my husband and I and how his care influenced us. So yeah, it's a memoir. It's the whole journey of also being a speech pathologist, what it's like, speech pathologist being in the bed and unable to communicate and what I learned. That's fascinating. Yeah, the teacher becomes the student at some point. And it's probably really difficult to have another teacher, like a teacher teaching a teacher. can probably, were there any challenges in that aspect? No, no.

50:36

them all. were all wonderful. There's another thing that came full circle to me too is that one of the speech therapists that I worked with or I still do to this day work with, worked part-time or PRN in the rehab facility that I was at. She came to work in the hospital setting as speech pathologist. We can work as school-based speech therapists or we can be in the hospital setting. Well, she was working part-time in the hospital that I was

51:06

at for rehab. So my friend slash colleague ended up giving me therapy. So there was so many different things that just came full circle for me. And I'm just so grateful. Right. Yeah. It seems like you had a good team for as dire as the circumstances were. You had good people around you. I'm sure there were some OK people, but it sounds like you had a bunch of good people around you too. Yeah. Great people. And I talk about that in my book too.

51:32

Yeah, so important because like you said, there was that little kid who had a bad experience with someone in a white coat and you know, so there sometimes there are bad players or people that don't connect with you in the way that you need them to in the moment. So I'm glad that you have those people around you. If people want to check out your book or find you like what's the best way to get in your orbit? So my book is on Amazon. You can just go to Amazon, type in Vanessa Abraham. Speechless is the name of the book.

51:59

the book title. I'm also on Instagram, speechless underscore SLP. I'm also on Facebook speechless SLP. So those are different ways to reach out and find me. Awesome. Well, we will put all those links in the show description or the episode description so it's easy to get to. So I'll make sure to put the link to the book and then your your other platforms. How do you feel if someone wants to reach out to you about their own story and just share a little bit or how your story impacted them?

52:26

Are you OK with that? love it. I yes, 100 % love hearing other stories. That's why I listen to podcasts like this all the time when I'm in the gym. It's always if someone were to ask me what's on your what's in your headphones, it's always podcasts trying to, you know, communicate and reach out to other people that are going through. You know, you have to be critical illness, just making traumas. Yeah.

52:51

No, I think it's beautiful and I think that I hope people listening, if you're inclined to reach out, please do, because I think Vanessa would like that. I always ask if someone in your life needs to hear Vanessa's story, we would love it if you share this episode with them, because I think you never know what part of someone's story is going to resonate with you or someone around you. It might not be the peak of our stories that...

53:17

people connect with, right? It might be some other part of that journey that they need that puzzle piece, right, to fill in and help. So if there's someone in your life and you think this episode would resonate with them, we would love it if you share it. I think you would agree, right, Vanessa? Yes, 100%. People don't realize that an ICU stay, a hospital experience, is traumatic. I've spoken with so many people over the past five, six years, and they say, oh my.

53:43

niece and uncle, nephew was in the ICU and they've come home and they're never the same. And I say, yeah, it's because there's this thing, there's a label for it. There's a term for it and it's called post intensive care syndrome. Are they experiencing brain fog, depression, anxiety? Yes. Yes. Please share this show. Yeah, no, I love it. Thank you for coming on the life shift journey with me. I like to call it a journey because I never know where these conversations are going to go. And I kind of look at these as

54:12

the conversations that I wish strangers would have in public so other people could overhear. So that's kind of how I look at this podcast. So thank you for just being willing to come on the show and not know exactly where we were gonna go with the conversation. No, thank you. I'm so glad to be here. Thank you all for listening. Thank you, Vanessa, for being here. If anything that Vanessa said resonates with you, please reach out, follow her on Facebook and Instagram, get her book on Amazon.

54:39

We will give you all the links in the episode description. And for that, I'm going to say goodbye, and I'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Thanks again, Vanessa. Thank you.

54:59

For more information, please visit www.thelifeshiftpodcast.com