She Survived a Brain Tumor, Then She Rebuilt Her Life: Emily Dawson’s Realaunch Story

[00:00:00] I was accustomed to being on the other side of an emergency. Suddenly, I'm the one on the floor needing medical attention. I had an MRI done and the ER director said, we found a mass in your brain. It was terrifying as it was to hear those words. It was relief. Emily Dawson, she's a healthcare executive and co-founder of Avenity Health. In 2014, Emily was diagnosed with a brain tumor, an experience that changed how she saw life, health and what it means to keep moving forward through

[00:00:29] uncertainty. My relaunch wasn't about becoming a completely different person. It was about trusting who I had become through all of those experiences. 12 weeks after my surgery, I applied for my MBA and my MSN. What was driving you at that time? Episodes that I was experiencing became part of how my work in my performance was described and that experience really stayed with me. You have the courage to step away from the path that you'd spent years

[00:00:59] building into entrepreneurship. Waiting started to feel like a bigger risk than actually taking the chance. Instead of waiting, I decided to ask, what would I do if that decision were completely mine? Emily, welcome to ReLaunch to a Rich Life. Thank you, Hilary. I'm so happy to be here and what a great intro. I'm tearing up a little bit listening to that.

[00:01:28] Well, I have to say, I have been so excited to have you on the show because when I first heard about your most significant relaunch that you have had happen, your life changed in a way that you never expected when you started experiencing these seizures. Can you take us back to that time and what ultimately led you to the brain tumor diagnosis in the first place?

[00:01:53] Absolutely. There are certain moments you remember almost frame by frame. And on March 19th, 2014, that was one of the moments for me. Going back to that day, I remember waking up on a cold floor. When I opened my eyes, there were people standing all around me. I remember bright fluorescent light shining down on me.

[00:02:20] And the people that were around me were people that I knew. They were my coworkers that I worked with every day. But I couldn't process their faces. I didn't know what was going on. I couldn't understand what was happening. And I remember one of the nurses asking me what her name was. And apparently, I looked down on her name badge before I answered.

[00:02:44] And she later told me that I was smart enough to look at her badge because she knew I did not know what her name was. And she was right. I didn't. This was somebody I worked with every day. And that's just how confused I was in that moment. I had just had a grand mal seizure that lasted about three minutes. And those are the type of seizures where you experience, you know, violent muscle contractions, loss of consciousness.

[00:03:12] And when you wake up after a seizure, it's so incredibly terrifying. They call it the postictal state. And it's this period where you don't know where you are. You don't know what happens. You don't understand why everyone is looking at you. And you're just trying to... Emily, had you ever had a seizure before? I did, yes.

[00:03:34] I was having what I believe to be were complex partial seizures prior to this event and a few different grand mal seizures prior to this event as well. And just so I know, how long before you had the big one did they start? It had been going on for months. Okay, but not years. But not years. Months. Not years. Not years. Yeah, they kind of started happening suddenly and progressively were getting worse.

[00:04:02] So you're in the hospital and you're looking at all these people that you should know, you don't know. And I mean, how frightening. It's incredibly frightening. And when you wake up, you're just trying to piece together what happened. And I was a nurse. I was accustomed to being on the other side of an emergency. And suddenly I'm the one on the floor needing medical attention. And shortly after that happened, I was taken to the emergency department. I had an MRI done.

[00:04:31] And I remember the ER director coming into the room, sitting beside me. He leaned up against the bed. He put his hand over mine. And I could see there was a look of concern on his face. And then he said, we found a mass in your brain. And I will never forget those words. And I was still in this postictal state. But I just remember repeating those words over and over in my head. A mass in your brain.

[00:04:59] And I think as terrifying as it was to hear those words, there was actually another emotion that I felt. And it might sound strange, but it was relief. Why is that? Because months leading up to that day, I knew something was wrong. And I was having these episodes that were just debilitating. And I didn't know they were seizures at the time. They felt like little panic attacks that were happening.

[00:05:29] And they would just come over me. And I couldn't explain what was happening. And they just progressively got worse. And there were times I was losing bladder control with them. And I remember thinking, this isn't a panic attack. This is something else happening to me. How old were you? I was 30 at the time. Oh, my gosh. When the seizures started.

[00:05:53] Before the seizures started months earlier, had you been fairly healthy and things were going just great? Or what was really happening? Yeah, I was probably in the best shape of my life. I was doing CrossFit. Super healthy. And then all of a sudden, just debilitating seizures came over me. And we were... I think this is the biggest fear, right? People are like, but you are fine. Everything's great.

[00:06:23] You're in the best shape of your life. And then all of a sudden, you find out that you have a brain tumor. So at the time, we were trying to figure out what was happening. I had an EEG done where they flash a strobing light at you. I had an EEG done where they sent me home and they monitored my brain activity. I even had a CT scan done at one point in time. And we just... We didn't have an answer.

[00:06:50] So when I had this seizure at work and I received the diagnosis, there was this relief that finally there was an explanation. I knew what had been happening to me for months. I wasn't imagining something was wrong with me. There was a reason. And I think being a nurse actually made it more frightening also because I knew enough to understand what a mass in my brain could mean.

[00:07:18] And during nursing school, I actually... What did they actually tell you? I mean, did they give you a diagnosis that this is debilitating? This is something that you're able to... This is survivable? Like what did they say around it? Or did they know anything? Yeah.

[00:07:42] Well, I was transferred to Barrow's Neurological Institute and I spent seven days in the hospital. And I was diagnosed with an extraventricular appendinoma in my right frontal lobe. And this is just an incredibly rare type of brain tumor. There had only been 50 reported cases in literature of this type of tumor in the location that it was in.

[00:08:10] So not only was I being told I had a brain tumor, I was being diagnosed with something so rare that there wasn't a large body of cases to look and say, you know, this is what you can expect. And before going into surgery, I was told there was a possibility I might wake up and not be able to move the left side of my body because of where it was located.

[00:08:33] And I remember being just so scared, but also having this strange sense of gratitude and being thankful that it was happening to me and not somebody that I loved. Because I think it would have been harder to stand beside someone I loved and feel completely helpless while they went through this. So after your surgery, you made this huge, significant decision to invest in yourself and continue your education.

[00:09:03] What was driving you at that time? I mean, what were you trying to accomplish? What was it? Yeah. So only 12 weeks after my surgery, I applied for my dual master's program, my MBA and my MSN. And my mom thought I was just absolutely crazy. Well, well. Oh, my goodness. And looking back, I understand why.

[00:09:33] I had just had a craniotomy and I was applying to complete two master's degrees at the same time. But to me, that made sense. I think this was a way for me to prove to myself that my life was going to keep moving forward. That I wasn't going to sit back and wonder what I might still be capable of. I wanted to find out. And there's another part of my experience that made nursing leadership very intentional for me.

[00:10:04] While I was going through these seizures and these issues that I was having, I was still pretty early in my nursing career. And I was dealing with some difficult things at work as well. I had been working as an assistant director of nursing. And during that period, I was demoted to a unit manager.

[00:10:25] I remember receiving a performance review where the episodes that I was experiencing became part of how my work and my performance was described. And we didn't know what they were. We didn't have a diagnosis. And I think what made that especially difficult was, you know, I was trying to work and I was trying to function normally.

[00:10:53] And I was also trying to understand what was happening at the same time. And that experience really stayed with me. You know, not because I didn't want to remain angry about it. But I remember thinking if I ever had the opportunity to really lead people, I don't want someone who works for me to feel the way that I did. And that, for me, changed the way I thought about leadership.

[00:11:19] And so you continued to grow professionally and academically. But there were still times that you were overlooked, like you just said. Because of that, you're talking about this, I want to create. I want to create. What was your vision around what you ultimately wanted to create for others in your situation?

[00:11:45] And I think you just wanted to help the culture and the environments in the healthcare. I think, you know, some of the greatest leadership lessons I learned came from people that I wanted to emulate. And others came from experiencing firsthand the type of leader that I never wanted to become. And that was one of those experiences.

[00:12:12] As, you know, they made me realize that I wanted to lead differently. I wanted to prepare myself differently. I wanted to gain more knowledge than the leaders I was working under. And really put myself in a position where I could have that greater voice. And choosing nursing leadership after my surgery was not random. I wanted to understand how we could better lead healthcare organizations.

[00:12:38] And I chose my MBA because I wanted to learn more than just the clinical side of healthcare. I wanted to understand operations and finance and culture. And, you know, how decisions that are made at that leadership level ultimately affect people providing care and the patients that are receiving it. This is so powerful that you had this background.

[00:13:07] You get this tumor. It starts you down this pathway of redefining what the healthcare space could look like. All right. So there were some pretty big struggles that happened as you were going through this. Can you share with us, like, what started to happen around you as you were taking on more and more of this academia?

[00:13:34] So after graduate school, my career continued to progress. And I moved into bigger leadership roles and executive positions. I led teams and worked in quality management and really had the opportunity to see healthcare from a broader perspective. And for a long time, I had this formula in my head. Work hard. Produce results. Take on more responsibility. Learn more.

[00:14:02] And eventually that next opportunity would come. And whenever an opportunity didn't happen, my instinct was always, what else do I need to do? So I kept doing more. I kept working harder. I kept taking on another responsibility. I got another credential. I just kept trying to prove myself again. And for a long time, I think that drive served me well.

[00:14:29] But eventually I had to recognize the other side of it. Because early in my story, proving this was important to me. I needed to prove to myself I was going to be okay. That I could still do difficult things and continue to learn that my future was still mine.

[00:14:48] But somewhere along the way, proving myself that I could do difficult things quietly turned into trying to prove to other people that I was worthy for that next opportunity. And those are two very different things. And it's exhausting. It is. And I had to ask myself, what am I trying to prove here? You know, I had the education. I had the experience. I produced great results.

[00:15:18] So what were you trying to prove? That, exactly. And the question for me changed. Instead of waiting for that next position, waiting for that opportunity, I decided to ask, what would I do if that decision were completely mine? And I asked myself, what would healthcare look like if I took everything I learned over the years and built something around what I believed really mattered?

[00:15:45] And once I started asking that question, it became very difficult to ignore the answer. And that's when I decided to become an entrepreneur. Wow. That's a great way to phrase that, that you had to go deep within yourself to really understand why. Why were you, you know, grinding?

[00:16:08] Why did you feel like you needed, you know, and there are people out there that I'm sure can relate right now with lots of certifications. And I got to do this. And it's that, you know, never, my grandma used to call it the divine discontent. Like it's never enough, never enough, never enough. So now you're, now you have the courage to step away from the path that you'd spent years building. And now you're taking that leap into entrepreneurship.

[00:16:38] How, how did that start? And like, how did you narrow it down to what exactly were you going to focus on? Because it's a big topic, right? There's a lot that you could have done. Yes. You know, I don't know if there was one moment where I suddenly just felt courageous enough. And I definitely didn't wake up one morning without fear.

[00:17:01] And eventually that waiting started to feel like a bigger risk than actually taking the chance. And I had spent years in healthcare organizations and gained all this experience, both good and bad. And eventually I realized that I spent my career collecting all these pieces without necessarily knowing that someday I would really use them to build something meaningful.

[00:17:30] My experience as a clinician mattered. My experience as an executive mattered. My education mattered. My experience as a patient mattered. And those difficult experiences and opportunities I didn't get mattered because they forced me to think differently about what I wanted. So entrepreneurship didn't feel like throwing away the career I spent years building.

[00:17:58] It was using everything that I had experienced and learned. And I think that's an important distinction. You know, sometimes we think or... Well, hold on. How did you narrow it down though? Affinity Health. What is it? And specifically how... Because you do. You've laid this out so beautifully.

[00:18:21] How does that serve the areas that you realized there was some missing components? So the idea of Avenity Health really grew out of years of conversations and experiences about what we thought healthcare could do differently. Traditional medicine is so important. Traditional medicine is what saved my life.

[00:18:47] So for me, this has never really been about replacing traditional healthcare. It's about asking what else can we do? And I think there's a big shift in healthcare now. You know, we're very reactive. Healthcare is designed to respond to something once it has already happened. You develop symptoms. You get sick. You receive a diagnosis. And then we intervene.

[00:19:16] And I think the shift is now, what can I do to prevent things from happening? We're moving into a more preventative space. And there's obviously situations like what happened to me where acute medical care is exactly what you need. But after spending so many years in healthcare, I became interested in how we can help people become active participants in their health.

[00:19:46] How can we help someone understand what's happening in their body? How can we personalize care instead of assuming everyone needs the exact same thing? So how do you do that? How do you take care of that now? So with Avenity, we wanted to create an environment where people felt heard, where care is highly personalized, where they feel they are actually participating in decisions about their health.

[00:20:17] And Avenity Health is about proactive care. It's about longevity. We specialize in therapeutic plasma exchange, which if you've read any of the studies, there's studies that show it can add years to your life. It removes the... Tell us more for those that don't know about that, plasma. What are you offering to people? Because there's people...

[00:20:46] Is this only in Arizona or is this also... Are you providing it elsewhere? So we only have the one clinic in Arizona right now. And therapeutic plasma exchange is a process in which we remove a portion of your plasma and we replace it with a sterile albumin.

[00:21:06] And basically, your plasma contains inflammatory proteins and metabolic waste and just all these things that you accumulate over time. There's research out now that it can help prevent the progression of Alzheimer's disease. It's anti-inflammatory.

[00:21:33] And when you think about it, all disease is caused by inflammation. If we reduce that inflammation in the body, you're ultimately preventing disease. Let me ask you, how are you doing health-wise? I am doing great. I am... My brain tumor was completely resected. I no longer take medication. Yes. Yes.

[00:21:58] I do have to go in and have regular scans and follow-ups. They told me there's a small chance it could return. But if it did, it would be in the same location, which was operable. You know, I am so fortunate for the type of tumor that I had, the location that it was at. It was encapsulated. They were able to remove it entirely. I am so, so fortunate. But going through something like that is completely life-changing.

[00:22:28] It puts everything in perspective and really makes you think about what you want out of life. And, you know, all the experiences that I went through, I think the biggest thing that I learned that a relaunch doesn't necessarily mean starting over. There were chapters in my life where I, when I was living them, I would have happily erased. I certainly wouldn't have chosen to have a brain tumor.

[00:22:57] I wouldn't have chosen to have those difficult experiences early in my career and being overlooked for opportunities. You know, none of that, none of that made any sense while it was happening. But reflecting back on them, those experiences changed the direction of my life. And it's who you are now. And it's the business that you created and the people that you're helping. It's incredible.

[00:23:22] Well, we often say either on air or off, I'll ask if you could go back and change this significant relaunch. Would you? And I haven't heard one person, even in the worst of times, say, you know what? Yeah. Of course you don't want it, but it has impacted your life so much. Absolutely. I think, you know, you go through these experiences and at the time they don't make sense. You know, you ask yourself, why is this happening to me?

[00:23:52] What did I do to deserve this? And they don't make sense at the time. But years later, you realize, oh, that happened. So this could happen. So I could end up here. And now I met this person or it created this. It all makes sense at some point in time. It just doesn't make sense in the moment. So I think, you know, you need to kind of trust those experiences that you're living through.

[00:24:23] And I think you need to sometimes ask yourself too, if you're not receiving those opportunities, ask yourself, what am I waiting for? Sometimes you can do everything right. And the opportunity that you're expecting still doesn't come. And that doesn't necessarily mean you weren't ready. It might mean maybe you were looking for permission in the wrong place.

[00:24:50] And my relaunch wasn't about becoming a completely different person. It was about trusting who I had become through all of those experiences. And at some point, I stopped waiting for someone else to decide what my next chapter might look like. And I decided to write it for myself. That's so great. And I think about like where you are now and what you're creating.

[00:25:20] What would you say when people are hearing this? Knowing now what you know. What are some things that they can do proactively to stay ahead, as you're suggesting, stay ahead of their health? That's a really interesting question. I think there's a lot of things we can look at preventative-wise.

[00:25:48] There are several different tests out there that look at different biomarkers. Things that you might be predisposed for. Looking at your family health history and if those are genetic factors. I think, you know, obviously getting your annual checkups is important. Right. Getting lab work regularly is important.

[00:26:15] There's all these things that we can do in that preventative space. And I think if you are experiencing something, don't overlook it. Get it checked out. Because the sooner you can find out what's going on, the sooner intervention can happen. So let me ask you an interesting question there. Sometimes we have symptoms and we, you know, we don't want to be a hypochondriac. Hypochondriac.

[00:26:45] But we also don't want to just say it's nothing. What do you suggest for people when they have something, you know, is that, should they immediately go to the doctor? Should, you know, is there like a time period as a nurse you say, well, you know, because I have had things happen and I've had melanoma in the past and I sometimes have things. I'm like, oh, I, what I do is I give myself about two weeks. Right.

[00:27:10] You got a sore throat or you have something going on and you're like, okay, let's just see how quickly it goes away. What do you say is that timeframe? Or is there one? Like, how do you recommend people kind of like say, okay, wait a second. Could you have gotten into the doctor sooner than you did?

[00:27:33] Yeah, I think depending on what you're experiencing, taking that in consideration, obviously, things like chest pain. You call 911. Yeah. Things like that. You know, you want immediate medical attention. But if something is bothering you and it's not getting better and it's getting worse, you definitely need to get in and get it checked out. I wouldn't wait.

[00:28:05] I think being a nurse for me and experiencing what I was going through, I probably knew too much. Once I started having more symptoms, I knew there was something neurological going on and we were doing the tests and I still had no answers. And that in itself is very frustrating. Yeah, it really is. Well, Emily, is there anything else that you'd like to make sure that you leave our listeners with?

[00:28:34] So I think the biggest thing, the biggest takeaway for me and for listeners is, you know, there are times in your life where there's uncertainty, there's difficulty, difficulty, and you're going through the grind and you're not getting what you want out of it. And maybe you want to take that next step in your career or you want to start a company or

[00:29:05] you want more for your life. And I don't think there's ever a moment in time where somebody hands you a piece of paper. Okay, now you're officially ready. At some point, you just have to trust yourself enough to begin and gain that courage and take those life experiences that you've had and use them to your benefit, the good and the bad,

[00:29:33] because all of those experiences that you gain make you the person that you are. And that's going to lead you in your right path. And you might not realize it at the time, but you will. You 100% will. And I think just knowing in your heart that those experiences will take you to where you need to be and trusting the process.

[00:30:00] Emily, it has been so incredible having you here. And I'm so glad that you are on the mend. You're creating something incredible with Affinity Health. So excited that you came on and you were able to share the story. And we always love when there's that positive ending, the twist to, hey, this could have been. And you have made something really incredible out of it. So thank you for being here.

[00:30:29] And for those listening, there's some wake-up calls here, right? We need to make sure that we are our own advocate, that when we realize something is going on with our own body, we take it into our hands and make sure that you don't ignore any of the signs. So if you enjoyed this episode, please make sure to hit that subscribe button. Don't miss out on another episode.

[00:30:57] And we will be back again next week. Thanks again, everyone. All right. Your next level is waiting. Thanks for tuning in. This is amazing what we're doing right now. ReLaunch to a Rich Life If today's episode sparks something in you, don't keep it to yourself.

[00:31:26] Please share it. I'll tell you more later about how that actually helps you have more success yourself. Subscribe so you don't miss one episode. Let's create unstoppable momentum together. So until next time, keep relaunching, keep rising. And remember, it's go time.