If you’ve ever wondered, “Is it too late for me to...” the answer’s NO and The Uplifters are about to show you why. This space is for purpose-driven women who want to do big, brave things in the second half of their lives. I’m your host, Aransas Savas, and I’ve spent the last 20 years at the intersection of behavior change research and coaching.
May is for mothers, money, and menopause
This month’s stories:
🎧 Four very different takes on motherhood from Ruthie Ackerman, Katie Horwitch, Sarah Gormley, and Shayla Martin. Listen HERE
🎧 Dr. Kimberly Derezil, MD, a doctor and certified wealth manager, discusses how to avoid massive financial losses during menopause. Listen HERE.
🎧 Women’s health advocate Rebecca Bloom on what happens when women get sick.
🎧 And Jacquelyn Fletcher Johnson and Christy Kercheville on finding renewed purpose in the wake of cancer.
I was only a few pages into Rebecca Bloom’s book When Women Get Sick: An Empowering Approach for Getting the Support You Need when I decided that I needed to buy ten copies and hand them to everyone I love.
Women in their 40s and 50s are disproportionately carrying the coordination load of healthcare, for aging parents, for children, and for themselves, often while navigating perimenopause symptoms that are unrecognized and untreated. Studies on patient advocacy in healthcare settings consistently show that women who have support navigating the system have better treatment adherence and measurably better outcomes, largely because they are less overwhelmed and more likely to ask the questions that change the course of care.
Rebecca has spent 27 years at the Bay Area Cancer Connection Center, guiding women fighting breast and ovarian cancer through the maze of insurance systems, workplace rights, and the loneliness and frustration of being sick in a system that was designed to make it harder on them. She is the woman you call when things fall apart. And she’s spent the last few years translating everything she knows into this book so she can be there even when you can’t reach her.
Rebecca’s career began as a very successful benefits attorney at one of New York’s most prestigious law firms. There, she learned how to work an impossibly complicated system, how to think through layers of regulation and stakeholders and incentives.
When her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, she found herself looking at that same system from the other side. Even with health insurance, all of this background knowledge, relative financial security, an excellent medical team, and lots of support, the system felt impossible to navigate. So she left her big, fancy job, moved across the country, and began figuring out how to make it easier.
The healthcare system was not designed to make things easy for patients. It was designed to make it hard for patients to get through and easy for third-party payers not to pay. Women are more likely to be in medical debt, more likely to delay care, and more likely to quietly absorb the cost of being sick in every sense of that word.
But Rebecca says that we have more power than we think. Think an appeal to your health insurer is a waste of time? She says people win more than 50% of them. Feel like taking a leave of absence feels like begging? It’s yours. You’ve earned it. It is part of your compensation. Her book is a playbook for what to do, who to call, what to ask, and how to build the team around us before we need it so that when we do, we aren’t starting from scratch.
“If my book does nothing but make a woman think, ‘I’m worthy of help, and this helped me figure out how to ask for it,’ that would be enough for me.”
Lift Her Up
Pick up When Women Get Sick: An Empowering Approach for Getting the Support You Need wherever books are sold, or better yet, get two and give one to a woman you love (because she probably won’t buy it for herself). And leave a review on Amazon. It helps authors reach more of the people who need their work.
If you loved this story...
Listen to last week’s episode with Dr. Kimberly Derezil, MD to understand the true cost of menopause. It’s probably a lot higher than you expect. Listen HERE.
