(We open with Courtney's puppy accidentally getting marijuana poisoning. This is relevant because it sets the tone perfectly for an episode about a man whose life has taken approximately seventeen unexpected turns.)

This week's guest is Richard Ault — and his coworkers call him the most interesting person in the world. After about ten minutes, Emily and Courtney stopped arguing with that assessment.

Richard is a biologist by training, a technologist by accident, and a high school teacher by something that can only be described as the universe intervening at exactly the right moment. His story runs from a latchkey childhood in Bethesda, Maryland to the Arctic tundra, from a rooftop party in San Francisco that accidentally launched his tech career to the inside of Napster during one of the most chaotic moments in music industry history — and then back down: addiction, bankruptcy, almost moving into his car, and finally, improbably, joyfully, back into a classroom.

He's been sober for 13 years. He hiked to nearly 12,000 feet with his students two weeks ago. His favorite band is Tool. He is exactly who he appears to be.

Richard's closing answer to "what's the kindest thing anyone's ever done for you?" might be the best we've ever gotten on this show.

"It's stupid and corny, but — that wasn't the plan." — Richard Ault, nailing it.

💌 Have a story, a question, or something you want to share? Email us at thatwasnttheplanpod@gmail.com or visit us at thatwasnttheplan.com

📲 Find us on Instagram | TikTok | YouTube — search @thatwasnttheplan_podcast

🎧 If this episode moved you, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs to hear that the bottom isn't the end of the story.

That wasn't the plan, and we will talk to you next week. K bye. 🥂

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No guest. No agenda. No plan. Just Emily and Courtney showing up, catching each other up on their weeks, and somehow covering: shoplifting ethics, a stolen Power Ranger backpack, a suspicious kid at Target, toad venom, recovery, sitting with your feelings, and a stroller left alone in a parking lot that may or may not have had a baby in it.

This is one of those episodes that was never supposed to be anything — and ends up being kind of everything. Grab a coffee, put your earbuds in, and hang out with us for a bit.

"Life is not glossy and beautiful. It's fucking nasty. But it's also... real." — Emily White, 2025, exhausted as usual

📎 Reach out: Have a story, a question, or something you've been carrying? We read anonymous submissions. Email us: thatwasnttheplanpod@gmail.com or visit thatwasnttheplan.com.

💌 Reach us at thatwasnttheplanpod@gmail.com or visit us at thatwasnttheplan.com

📲 Find us on Instagram | TikTok | YouTube — search @thatwasnttheplanpodcast

🎧 If you like what we're doing, subscribe, leave a review, and share us with a friend. It genuinely helps more than you know.

That wasn't the plan, and we will talk to you next week. K bye. 🥂

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(Courtney's back, everyone. Let the drinks flow. Also — Courtney's tooth made a brief unscheduled disappearance. We kept it in. You're welcome.)

This week, Emily and Courtney sit down with someone doing some of the most quietly essential work in grief support: Lindsay Brockman, licensed veterinary nurse, certified pet loss grief specialist, and founder of EverKin Pet Loss Support out of Richmond, Virginia. Lindsay has fifteen years across ER, end-of-life, and community animal medicine — and she's seen firsthand what happens when the humans in those exam rooms are left to navigate loss with nothing but a sympathy card and a parking validation.

Her framework is built around disenfranchised grief — the grief the world doesn't quite know how to honor. The grief that gets "it was just a pet." Or "you'll get another one." Or the silence where a casserole should be. Lindsay's entire practice exists to say: no. All grief deserves support.

But Lindsay brings more than professional expertise to this conversation. Earlier this year, her son Jack was stillborn at 38 weeks. And in one of the most honest, tender moments we've had on this show, she talks about how both losses — the ones she holds for clients, and the one she carries herself — share the same language. The same weight. The same need to be witnessed.

What you'll hear in this one:

• What disenfranchised grief actually means — and why pet loss is one of its biggest, most overlooked forms
• What fifteen years in vet ER looks like from the inside — and why grief literacy training for veterinary teams matters so much
• Compassion fatigue: what it actually is (and why it's not the same as burnout), and the org Not One More Vet fighting to support vet professionals
• Courtney's story of losing Rooster during the pandemic — and arriving at a locked ER door at 2am, sobbing, saying "I'm coming"
• "We don't move on. We move with." — what honoring grief actually looks like
• What NOT to say to a grieving person — and what to say instead when you genuinely don't know what to say
• Curly Sue — Lindsay's new rescue from Richmond Animal League, who weighs almost exactly what Jack weighed, and only wants to be held
• Weighted Angels, a volunteer organization making weighted stuffed animals for parents who leave the hospital without their baby
• Lady Chunk's live cameo (the cat had opinions and made them known)
• Human names for animals: Alan, Susan, Patricia, Gary, Frank — we stand by all of it
• And the grocery store pasta sauce incident, which is one of the best grief stories we've ever heard on this show

Lindsay's tagline is a Ram Dass quote: "We are all just walking each other home." By the end of this episode, you'll understand exactly why.

📎 Find Lindsay & Resources Mentioned:

• 🌿 EverKin Pet Loss Support: EverkinPetLoss.com
• 📲 Instagram: @EverkinPetLoss
• 💙 Not One More Vet: nomv.org
• 🤍 Weighted Angels: https://www.weightedangels.com/

Lindsay's books reopen June 1st — if you or someone you love needs support, now's the time to reach out.

💌 Have a story about a plan that went sideways? We want to hear it. Reach out at thatwasnttheplanpod@gmail.com

📲 Find us on Instagram | TikTok | YouTube — search @thatwasnttheplan_podcast

🐾 If this episode moved you, please subscribe, leave a review, and pass it along to anyone who's ever loved an animal — or a person — and been told to just get over it.

And as always — whatever plan you had? We're glad you're here anyway. 🥂

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(Fair warning: Emily's mouth was fully uncensored this episode — blame the tech gremlins. Also, our earrings nearly derailed the whole thing. You'll hear it. We kept it in.)

This week, Emily's co-host Courtney Holland is out due to an emergency — but honestly, today's guest doesn't need a wingman. Hilary Morris Pawlik has been Emily's ride-or-die since the eighth grade, and she shows up today to talk about something that affects 1 in 10 women and yet somehow remains one of the most underdiagnosed, underfunded, and dismissed conditions in medicine: endometriosis.

Hilary is a professional dancer, award-winning choreographer, and co-director of Artist Entrance Dance Company in Los Angeles. She's performed with The Hollywood Pinup Girls and the Mental Head Circus vaudeville show, and she's basically done everything short of the Iditarod. But today, she's here to tell a different kind of story — the one about years of painful periods, fertility struggles, a missed diagnosis, a baseball-sized cyst, sepsis, and an emergency surgery that revealed her organs had started fusing together.

What they cover:

• What endometriosis actually is (and why so many women — and their doctors — have no idea)
• The surprisingly wide range of symptoms, from painful periods to shortness of breath, leg pain, and GI issues
• Medical gaslighting: being told you're not in "enough" pain to have endo
• IVF, a uterine septum, and the winding road to becoming a mom
• Going from "watch and wait" to hospitalized with sepsis — while her husband was in Thailand
• The surgeon who quite literally saved her life (Dr. Richard Freeman at the Disney Cancer Center in Burbank)
• Why your regular OB/GYN may not be equipped to handle this — and where to find a specialist
• The Huberman Lab episode with Dr. Thaïs Aliabadi that every woman should listen to
• A Long Island research study actively enrolling women who haven't been diagnosed yet — and why that matters
• The hormonal birth control decision Hilary resisted and then reversed — and why she's so glad she did
• Community, support groups, and why both Emily and Hilary swear by themIf you have a uterus, know someone who does, or you're just a decent human who believes women deserve better healthcare — this episode is for you.

📎 Resources mentioned:

• 🎙️ Huberman Lab — "Female Hormone Health, PCOS, Endometriosis, Fertility & Breast Cancer" ft. Dr. Thaïs Aliabadi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMzfGZnaPN8
• 🔬 ROSE Research Study (Northwell Health / Feinstein Institutes) — endometriosis research enrolling participants: https://feinstein.northwell.edu/institutes-researchers/institute-molecular-medicine/robert-s-boas-center-for-genomics-and-human-genetics/rose-research-outsmarts-endometriosis
• 📲 Find Hilary on Instagram: @hilarypawlik

💌 Have a story about a plan that went sideways? We want to hear it. Reach out to us at thatwasnttheplanpod@gmail.com or www.thatwasnttheplan.com

📲 Find us on Instagram | TikTok | YouTube — search @thatwasnttheplan_podcast

🎧 If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a friend who needs to hear it. It genuinely helps us grow the show and reach more people.

And as always — whatever plan you had? We're glad you're here anyway. 🥂

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Most of us learned to look at our bodies and immediately catalog what's wrong with them. Too big. Too small. Too much. Not enough. Wasting away. Filling out. The wrong shape for the wrong season for the wrong man's opinion.

This week, we're trying something else.

Two world-class athletes — ice mermaid and U.S. record holder Melissa Kegler and former NCAA swimmer Sarah Beth Wood — sit down with us to talk about what it's actually like to live in a body that's been measured, weighed, commented on, and critiqued for as long as they can remember. Not by strangers on the internet. By coaches. Teammates. Parents. Other women. The lady on the beach who told Melissa she'd need to "slim down to keep a man like that."

Melissa tells the story of being told she was too heavy in September and too thin in March of the same year — nothing changed except there wasn't a Wendy's in her college town. Sarah Beth talks about the eating disorder she didn't know she had until her body literally stopped working mid-race. Courtney shares getting boobs in fifth grade and spending decades convinced they meant she was fat. And we all reckon with the moment a friend (or a stranger, or a coach, or a parent) said something about our bodies that we still hear in our heads twenty-plus years later.

But here's the reframe — courtesy of Melissa's friend Randy, who said:

Stop looking at a body and asking what it can't do. Look at it and ask what it's capable of.

That one sentence rewires everything. Your body isn't a problem to solve. It's not a before picture. It's the thing that's carried you through every hard thing you've survived — and it's still here.

Plus: 25 cat condos, the Wendy's spicy chicken sandwich that ended a swim career, why "you look like you're having fun" might be the best compliment you can give a stranger.

Two things can be true. Usually they are.

This one is for anyone who's ever stood in front of a mirror and listed everything wrong. Spoiler: there's nothing wrong. There's just a body. And it can do a lot more than you've been giving it credit for.

Just because it wasn't the plan doesn't mean it wasn't supposed to happen.

📬 thatwasnttheplanpod@gmail.com 🌐 thatwasnttheplan.com

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Carrie Edwards bought a lottery ticket online (against her Army buddy's advice), let ChatGPT pick her numbers (also against his advice), forgot she'd opted into a second draw, and won $150,000.

Then she gave every cent of it away. And $42,000 more out of her own pocket to cover the taxes.

The story went viral worldwide — Tamron Hall, Inside Edition, Fox News, Korean headlines at her nail salon. An estimated 6 billion media impressions. And she got there by calling the Virginia Lottery's PR team herself and pitching them on a press conference.

Sitting alone at her kitchen island, she heard a voice — clear as if someone were standing next to her — say it's not your money. And she listened.

The money went to three places: AFTD (in honor of her late husband Steve, her best friend of 47 years, who was at the Pentagon on 9/11 and later died of frontotemporal degeneration), Shalom Farms (the food justice nonprofit in Richmond that healed her hands-in-the-dirt back to life), and the Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society (in honor of her dad, Captain Peter Swanson, a Navy fighter pilot — whose wife, by the way, took the kids to peacefully protest the Vietnam War while he was flying missions over it).

This one moved us. We talk about the still small voice and how to actually hear it. The Army friend who's now taking full credit for her windfall (of course, he is). What it's like to lose your favorite person slowly, and then all at once. And how Steve walked their daughter Kelly down the hallway to get married two weeks before he died.

Plus: why your tax dollars aren't feeding active-duty military families, why Mark Nepo's The Book of Awakening should be on everyone's nightstand, and Carrie's quiet rule for life — reach behind you and bring the next one in line.

You may have caught the headlines. This is the part they didn't tell you.

Donate where Carrie did: 🧠 AFTD — theaftd.org 🌱 Shalom Farms — shalomfarms.org ⚓ Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society — nmcrs.org

Just because it wasn't the plan doesn't mean it wasn't supposed to happen.

📬 thatwasnttheplanpod@gmail.com 🌐 thatwasnttheplan.com

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Last week, Melissa Kegler said she was going to get her record back.

This week, the universe said, we’ll see about that.

What follows is five months of waiting for water that is somehow both too warm and too frozen, a logistical nightmare involving flights, storms, dams, and one very specific 24-hour window where everything finally (and briefly) aligns.

It is, by all accounts, the worst swim of her life.

Naturally, she does it anyway.

There’s something quietly unhinged about preparing your body for hypothermia on a biweekly basis, dragging friends and coworkers into the chaos, and then—when it finally happens—thinking, “This feels terrible. I might die. Let’s keep going.”

And yet.

Somewhere between the near-bail, the dead-man float (briefly considered, quickly abandoned), and a very well-earned post-swim pizza, Melissa figures out exactly what she’s capable of—and, more importantly, how she wants to do it next time.

Also: hypothermia. Surprisingly...fun???

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There are people who set goals.
And then there’s Melissa Kegler—who hears a mildly unhinged suggestion and thinks, yes, that seems reasonable.

In Part 1, we trace the origin story: from pool swimmer to open water wanderer, to casually knocking out the Triple Crown (Catalina, the English Channel, Manhattan… as one does). Along the way: crocodile-adjacent panic, questionable water conditions, dolphins, bioluminescence, and just enough vomiting to keep things grounded.

It’s a story about curiosity, momentum, and the dangerous power of someone asking, “Have you ever thought about…?”

Unfortunately, someone did.

And next week, it gets cold.

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