[MUSIC]
Welcome, it is a beautiful day to bust some cognitive distortions. Hey, all my name is Suzanne M. Swain, EDS, LMSW, and I am a child therapist, educational specialist, and all things schools in middle school. Well, today's a special edition, I need to talk to you from heart today, and I have an
update that I need to talk to you all about, and to be honest, I just, for the first time,
it's the 30th episode, so we made it to the 30th, and we're almost at 200,000 downloads. So I want to thank everybody out there in the community, I cannot thank you enough. This has been, I started this toward the end of August. This has been my passion project, and I haven't made a single dollar off this podcast. I was determined to go all PBS style, where it's not for profit, it's just for learning.
“And then if something works out, donations only kind of thing, but here's the thing.”
Folks, I need your help. I need to tell you about someone that's part of the MSMP community that y'all don't even know about, and this is Steve's best friend, Tanya. Her name's Tanya B. Eckes, and she is my person, and life, you only have a couple of people.
And if you're lucky, you have one, and if you're super lucky, you have two.
Well, in my life, I've had two best people that are my person, my rock, my everything, my chosen family. You have your birth family, and your chosen family. Well, my chosen family are two people, specifically. My best friend, Dee, who's down in Florida, and she's got two kids who are teenagers. Hey guys, who I lovingly call my niece and nephew, and I've moved moon in the stars for
them any moment. So there's Dee, and I've known her since I was about six years old, and I came to visit her kindergarten class and punched out some boy trying to kiss her.
“Yeah, that's the making of our meat cube right there.”
Now, the other one, I met much later in life, and actually I met her about four years ago, and her name is Tanya, and it's sort of weird how we ended up meeting. She was actually in the cookful area visiting a friend who had just moved there from Texas, and she's from South Africa, which is pretty interesting. She's from Johannesburg, South Africa, and lived there her whole life, and then ended up
traveling the world. I mean, she's been to, oh, like 23 different countries, something like that. But imagine just taking off and just going around the world and living somewhere for a while, and I mean, it's the dream, right? For so many people to just be able to have that experience, you and their younger days. But she ended up living in the UK, she lived here in the US, she stayed with that friend down in Texas for a while, and really loved it.
Hey, Texas. And then here in Tennessee, well, she was actually online and just
“posting locally that she was new to the area and looking for friends, and I'm an introvert,”
I'm an INFJ, so I was like, well, and so I went on there, and I was like, I need to just just, I want to throw some dinner parties and get to know some new people, the type of thing, expand my social circle, get off the computer, and we're not meeting. Well, we hit it off. Right away, went out for Indian food, and we just couldn't stop talking, and it's been that way ever since. That was four years ago. Well, Steve's bestie is Tanya. Let me tell you,
she is the biggest rough house, and but he says this thing, where she throws him on his back, and then takes his two front legs and his back two legs, and then holds him like he's on a spit, and he's hanging, so she'll pick him up by his little two feet, two feet, and swing him, and he just thinks that is the funniest, and I'm the hard, I'm the mom, and she just, like, every time she's around, he's just like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, so Tanya's a person,
well, here's what happened. I'm still recovering from my double knee surgery thing,
where my leg collapsed, well, I'm still hobbling around and she'd use my cane a lot more, but well, she was coming over and helping me out, and making food, making sure I was clean, making sure the house was clean, and she took care of me, and that was since December to now, and I'm still not healed yet. So I was talking to her a couple of weeks ago about some changes she'd had in her herself, and she's 48 years old, and she lost her parents, her dad,
to stomach cancer, and her mom, to a stroke several years ago, and so she's kind of faced the whole world on her own, so she has no family or anything really per se. She does, but there are different countries and things, and so she doesn't get to see them. So we kind of built a little world, family kind of family by choice type of thing, where we just became part of each other of the world, and I found some ideas off her. She was here many times when I was recording podcasts,
and things, well, a couple of weeks ago, she was having a lot of pain in her lower back, and she just couldn't get rid of it, and so I was like, let's go to the OBGYN, and this is the lady doctor, and go get checked out and things, and see what happens, well, we bounce to a couple of different
Appointments.
well, they found a massive. I stayed in the ER with her for 11 hours, a couple of weeks ago,
“and they took her away in an ambulance to Nashville, to Centennial Hospital, thank you folks.”
And to Dr. Sullivan in the oncology OB unit, you are a rock star, thank you for who you are, because you may have saved her life. They found stage four metastatic cervical cancer. It's in her bones, it's in her lungs, it's in her liver, and it's in her lymph nodes. So imagine two weeks ago, you thought you were just going for a routine doctor visit, and then two weeks later, you haven't been able to sit up in a chair this entire time.
So I moved her into my home, and she's in my guest room right now, sleeping peacefully, thanks to a lot of medicine and things that she really desperately needs right now. Today, in fact, I'm going to have to go and try to figure out a way to get her the level of pain
“medication and help that she really needs. I'm her primary caregiver right now, and oddly,”
today was the first day I was supposed to go back to work, and go see my kids, and even though I'd
be hobbling with a cane, I still didn't care, I was ready to bust it just to see my my my peeps. But our whole world is pulled out from undress, and Stevie is beside himself, he's acting so strange, and Ralphie, the dog, he's my elderly dog, he just lays by her head, she smells different, she seems different, her energy isn't there, and like I said, she can't sit up in a chair, and can barely make it to the restroom. So I can't imagine which must be feeling right now.
I know the feels that I've gone through recently, and you know, when you rely on someone as part of your world every single day, it changes you, but here's the kicker. This is what my mom had, so it applies to middle school because I was about 14 when my mom passed away, the same thing, she complained of back pains, the whole thing. Except now I'm a little older, a little smarter well, and with a new knee, but now I'm the primary caregiver, and unfortunately I had to
let go my job over with the kiddos, and I figured it was best because like all y'all would know, I mean, I haven't been back there since December, and to come back and see my kiddos again, only believe on them is not good to do when you have kids with adjustment disorders and abandonment issues, and so it's better to exit stage left sometimes. It's my the best job I ever had. But she's my person. That's just your person. She's my Christina Yang to my Meredith Gray.
How can, how could I do anything less? So it's messy. She's got all kinds of things in South Africa. We have to go this week to get her action planned. They're going to do immunotherapy and chemotherapy and all kinds of things and see what her insurance will cover. But I've taken her in, and now she's going to be with me, which I love, and we're going to have a blast, but right now I'll I see is her crying and sad and pain and poor Steve confuses. I'll get out. I learned a lot about food
from her, and we went on all kinds of food journeys. We even went on a trip where when I graduated therapy school, she was there at the whole time and I complained to her about homework and this
“net and over thinking things and remember two hour conversation about some topic we had in the”
class, and I was like, "But kids could release it. I had a super nerd was going on a tirade and a tangent." And she listened to me prattle on for two hours in the middle of the night, and didn't think a thing of it. It takes the bedogs and watches them. No problem. They need a walk.
She'll do it. Anything. She's always ready to pitch in. But folks, we got a helper. We got a helper.
Please help her. She's going to have a lot of expenses. She doesn't even know of. She's from a country where the healthcare doesn't cost anything. She could go right away to the ER and she'd have a room in a hospital and be able to take care of that without any cost whatsoever. I've seen some the bills that she's acquiring after getting her mail and it's pretty terrifying. Well, now I don't really have an income and maybe regretting never having an advertisement or anything
on this podcast because maybe I could have helped out a little better. But what I can do is I have a platform. And I just wanted you to know that I have loved every single minute of these 30 episodes and I have done for you and I hope it is given you some knowledge and insights so you can make your lives a little bit better. And that's all I want. I don't care about money. I don't care about
Much of anything except bettering people.
where I know that I help just somebody out there at some point and they live a little better. Kind of like the Girl Scouts and you leave a place a little cleaner in the way you found it. I feel like I finally leave this world a little bit more joyous than the way that they were before
than I've done my job. And I have never done this before because I literally despise money.
“I think it's part of the try out of evil, power, money, and ego. And I try to avoid it at all costs.”
But I think I have nothing left. So I'm going to beg the siege and plead to y'all for a little bit of help. I may Tonya go fund me page because she can't work anymore and I'm not working but I'm going to try to figure out some options for her. This is all going to go to her. I don't want any of it. But I'd like to see if I can get y'all's help to maybe see if we can work on assisting her with some of her living expenses and things like that. So if you have any, if you have
the means or are willing to help out, we can go to gofundme.com and that what you can do is you can look up Mary Poppins Cancer Fight and it will really go a long way or a couple of seconds of your time, maybe a few bucks here, a few bucks there. Whatever you can do, middle schoolers, folks, you're better at raising money than anybody. She's got stage four cervical cancer and
“if you can raise money for cancer, even if it doesn't go under Tonya's name, just raise money,”
put the fight out there. We're going to stop this stuff. This isn't saying my mom, Tonya, I don't know how much time she's got but I promise you we're going to make it as fun as possible. She really wanted desperately to go down to Orlando. She's a big fan of the show called Wentworth. She's a TV buff. Absolutely love TV, but she writes fiction. She's a fiction writer and she's written two books, but Wentworth is a favorite show. It's kind of like Orange is a new black
but really severe kiddos. This is an adult show. This is not for you, but they're having like a Comic-Con type of thing, but she really wants to go down in Orlando, but you can meet the characters and her favorite characters are going to be there and I was going to try to surprise her because her birthday is this Wednesday and I was going to try to figure out a way to get us down there so
“she could go check it out in surprise her, but I don't know financially I can't afford it now and”
she certainly wouldn't think of such a thing, but she can't sit up, but right now she had some radiation the other day and maybe it'll help, maybe not, I don't know. She may not sit up again at this point, I don't know, but she was really wanting to go to that Wentworth thing, so I'm going to figure out some way to zoom in or something, but it's like her, the dream she talked about maybe just aren't plausible anymore and I don't know what to say to her to make her feel better or to make
things go easier. And so if you can help out in some way, you can go to MSmerypopans.com and I'll put a link for Tanya on there and you can click the link it'll take you straight to our GoFundMe page and you can read the description and see some pictures over and see my bestie and give her a big hug for me. So if you do prayers and thoughts and just spend some time thinking about life for Tanya, I greatly would appreciate it, but I need every kind of good vibe coming toward Livingston, Tennessee.
So if you don't mind, help me out folks, I've never asked for anything this time, it's just for a
friend and so that makes me want to do it. I'd probably wouldn't ask for myself, but if you can spare a couple bucks or you want to raise some money for cancer research and her name, I would be forever grateful. There's no bigger person for the animals and the elderly than Tanya. You know, I have a bunch of stray cats that I feed every day which have become parts of the family, I found this little gray kitten and skinny little guy and started feeding him, she kept coming over,
she's like, I love him and so over the four years of known her, she's taken this little cat that we originally thought was a girl and she would cry and just be like, "Man, so we called her Jolene and this was like, "All right, let's name it Jolene." She's well, she turned around and I was like, "Oh, that's not a girl." So now there's Joe Space Lee and that's kind of like her cat when she's here and it's just
amazing, absolutely amazing and this guy is a big, chubby, purring, adorable inside cat for the
most part now. She did that, she saved that cat and she had a cat named Willow that she absolutely adored, in fact she even tattooed Willow's name on her wrist. So she's a big cat lover at heart, I'm probably a dog at heart and she's definitely a cat at heart and so she would do anything for animals, the guinea pigs that I have, she decided one day that she would make Melrose Place and it's like a little apartment complex so she put out towels and built this whole little fence and
everything for them and so Pedro and new knew had a little area where she took Amazon boxes and
Cut holes in them and to make little apartments and so she put them all over ...
had like all these different little buildings to go into and I was like, "What are you doing?"
She's like, "I'm having so much fun right now, I'm taking care of the guinea pigs and she was just on a tear with that and I just walked in and just I was like, "What are you doing?" And it just, "I've made me laugh so hard because I was like, "Of course, of course you're doing that."
“Just as I'm really quirky so as she and I think that's why we get along so well but”
she was a nurse caregiver. She cared for a dad and went to that CNA training where she could learn to care for other people and so she has worked for caterpillar where she worked in diamond mines where she helped to organize equipment that we work in the diamond mines. I'm cool with that and all that forgot like, "What?" And I was like, "Tell me about that five questions." So she got to get sprayed off every day to make sure she didn't have any diamond dust on her or was like walking away
with anything. I mean, stories out of this person. It's just like, I feel so small-towny and I thought
“I traveled a bunch but I realized I haven't been anywhere or seen anything but she gets it has”
to get up and go to just go to another country. That's brave. She's probably the braveest person I know and these last two weeks seem what she's going through and trying to remain happy through it all is definitely something that is inspiring and I would expect nothing less out of her. So kids and elderly people and especially animals, she would give anything for them. The shirt off her back. So if you can help out with this cancer fight, we are going to start a whole new
process and today I'm going to start making those phone calls and show me it on Thursday to get the results and the action plan and see what we're going to do because we're going to fight. She's going to get chemo and immunotherapy and targeted therapy and whatever the bills will be, money doesn't buy people. Now I realize that time is really short and you don't know how many minutes you have with someone and when I talk to her, think of my middle school kid inside
who lost her mom and lost her words in the same moment. The thought of having this happen again
with someone else that means so much to me deeply that I would give my life in the second for that
person. The thought of this happening again is utterly devastating and for once my mental health might be in jeopardy a little bit because I feel like I can't breathe when I don't have my person. So if you can spare a little time, help us out. The middle school Mary Poppin is podcasts, Tanya's cancer fight, go to the website MSmerypoppins.com and click on the link for Tanya and you can go to the GoFundy page or go to GoFundMe and in the search bar just look up Mary Poppin's
cancer fight. Okay and you'll find you'll see a picture of Tanya there. There's me we went to
“Alta Arizona and we're out in Sedona. I think at the time so we were checking it out but”
if you can help us out, folks call on the army. I need prayers, I need thoughts and Tanya really needs to have the means to be able to support her through this cancelled struggle and I promise you we're going to give her all the love in the world but I just need your help, folks. So I thank you for
your time and as always stay clever little foxes, love y'all bunches and happy 30th episode.
Take care and Tanya. We're going to fight for you girl. I got you.
