Transcript
WEBVTT
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How did it all come together that you're like, wow, I need to hold these companies, these insurance companies accountable?
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Where did that all start?
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Where did that fire start?
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When I got the $20,000 bill from my biopsy because I was out of network, that's where it started.
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When I got to see the amounts that big of an amount I'm like this is really messed up.
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And that's when I just kind of went to work and when I negotiated that one down to basically hundreds of dollars, I'm like, wow, I applied for charity care, I negotiated it was.
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I don't remember everything I did in that moment.
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I have it written down but I just like this was hard but it wasn't impossible.
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More people need to know about this.
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Hey everyone, welcome to the Sugar Daddy Podcast.
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I'm Jessica and I'm Brandon, and we're the Norwoods, a husband and wife team here to demystify the realm of dollars so it all makes sense while giving you a glimpse into our relationship with money and each other.
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We are so glad you're here.
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Let's get started.
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Our content is intended to be used, and must be used, for informational purposes only.
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It is very important to do your own analysis before making any investment based upon your own personal circumstances.
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You should take independent financial advice from a licensed professional in connection with, or independently research and verify any information you find in our podcast and wish to rely upon, whether for the purpose of making an investment decision or otherwise.
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Hey babe, what are we talking about today?
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Well, it is October, which means it is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and I know this is a month that is special to us, because we have women in our lives that have been affected by breast cancer, and the reality is is that one in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime, so it's pretty much impossible to not know somebody who has been affected by this disease.
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And so today we have a very special guest, a breast cancer survivor, with us, jessica Baladad, who is going to detail her journey.
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We're going to get into some of the finances and the cost of cancer and what that means, and then she is also the creator of the Feel For your Life app, so she has created an app that helps women and men remember to do their monthly breast exams, so that early detection is the best prevention, and so it's going to be a really exciting conversation, and we are so thrilled to have Jessica in the studio today.
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So, jessica, thank you for being with us.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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I am so grateful for our conversation today.
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Thank you so much.
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Yes, of course.
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So we do want to make sure that our listeners know who we're speaking to today, and then we'll get into our conversation, because I'm really excited about it.
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Jessica Baladad is a five-year cancer survivor who became a passionate advocate after a practitioner dismissed a malignant lump in her breast during a clinical exam.
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Thankfully, jessica learned how to do a self-breast exam after having a benign tumor removed while she was in college, and it was a routine that she maintained throughout adulthood.
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Two weeks after her clinical appointment, jessica was doing a self-exam in the shower when she found a lump.
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The same lump her practitioner failed to tell her about and documented as normal.
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Jessica was later diagnosed with stage 2b invasive ductal carcinoma.
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She underwent 16 rounds of chemotherapy, a double mastectomy, 24 rounds of radiation, a hysterectomy and a 10-hour flap reconstruction.
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Ooh girl, you've been through it.
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She started Feel for your Life as a social media outreach project to encourage women to be their breast health advocates, and in 2021, jessica became the first breast cancer survivor to create an app that provides resources for doing self breast exams and getting screened, allows users to track and monitor their changes, and lets users set reminders for doing self exams.
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Since launching the app, she's helped write legislation in the state of Tennessee to promote risk reducing measures against cancer and disease.
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Billed as the Feel for your Life Act, it requires high school students to learn about self-breast exams, testicular exams and skin exams.
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Additionally, jessica has spoken before members of Congress to eliminate PBMs, pharmacy benefit managers, qaly scores, pharmacy benefit managers, quality scores, quality adjusted life year and co-pay accumulators.
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These efforts will help ensure patients get better access to healthcare without the bureaucracy of insurance companies.
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We all know insurance is a scam.
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Right, we'll get into that.
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When Jessica isn't advocating, she enjoys traveling and exploring new places, attending sporting events with her husband and photographing animals.
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Wow, you have been through it.
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You channeled it into something amazing to help other women.
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I mean just a round of applause because this is absolutely fantastic.
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So I'm so thrilled to have you, jessica.
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Thank you.
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You know I never said, hey, when I grow up, I'm going to get cancer and become an advocate and create this app and all of these resources.
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It's just something that happened and, because of my experience, I wanted to use it to serve other people.
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Yeah, well, we can't wait to dig into all of that.
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I know we touched, I'm sure, just the surface of what has been your life and now your life as a cancer survivor, but we do want to keep with our normal structure because it is a financial literacy podcast and I know that you are super passionate about the finance behind insurance and how scammy and predatorial it is and all of that.
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So I know we're going to talk about that, but we do want to start with your first money memory.
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What is that?
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My first money memory was well, I grew up.
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My mom was an accountant actually, and I remember when she was in college for that, she would come home with these books with numbers on spreadsheets that you, this was before Excel.
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So I just remember dollar signs on everything on these pages with all these grids, and I recall, you know, after I go to bed, if I happen to get up and, you know, want something to eat or drink, you know, kids just always seem to want to get up in the middle of the night I just remember going into I'd have to walk through the dining room to get to the kitchen and seeing my mom with a calculator, one of those big, bulky calculators that makes all the noise you can hear each type and the receipt and she was, you know, paying the family bills.
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So that's the first memory I have of like money and dollar signs and to understand that things have a value and they cost to survive and that things have a value and they cost to survive.
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Did she talk to you about what she was calculating?
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Or did she say things like oh my gosh, the light bill this month was so expensive?
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Or was it more of a passing like oh, I see mom working on numbers.
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It was a passing.
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I see mom working on numbers.
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Passing, I see mom working on numbers.
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It wasn't until my parents divorced when I was nine, 10 years old where I saw money like really understands how money gets involved in family matters and the cost of living, because I mean my parents were very confrontational and upfront and transparent about all of that and in front of me and my sister and with attorneys and everything.
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So I mean I was in it when they were going through it.
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When your parents were together, was your mom the one that took the lead as far as handling the finances.
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Yes, absolutely.
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I always think it's very interesting, because the reason we asked that question is because I think how you interact with money as an adult and your feelings towards money as an adult is very much based in your earliest memories of money.
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So whether that's a negative experience, positive experience, it very much leads into how you view money now.
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Yeah, oh, I agree, experience it very much leads into how you view money now.
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Yeah, oh, I agree.
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Yeah, they say you build your perception of money by the age of seven, which is like crazy wow, yeah, because I just, I mean, I was five, six years old.
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You know those memories that I just recalled for you all, thinking about my mom paying bills and yeah, that, yeah.
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So around that, that age is when I started to understand that things cost money to live and survive.
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Well, speaking of surviving.
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You are a cancer survivor.
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Congratulations.
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That is amazing.
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I was reading through the stats getting prepped for this call and it is wild how pervasive breast cancer is right.
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I mean, everybody knows someone that's been affected colleagues, friends, acquaintances, family members and it's just I mean cancer in general is just one of those things where I've never in my life met someone that doesn't know, someone close to them in the sense that you know has been affected by it.
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It's just one of those things where you think about like so many things in your life that you can prevent, and cancer is really one of those ones where you can be the health Doesn't matter.
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Who you are Doesn't matter.
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Doesn't discriminate.
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You know every socioeconomic class.
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That's why I always say I feel like there's certain diseases out there that there are cures for just as common people don't have access to, but you still see wealthy billionaires dying of cancer.
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Yes, so, yeah, you were talking about one in eight women.
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I was 33 when I was diagnosed and every year, 12,000 women under the age of 40 are diagnosed with breast cancer, and it's just crazy.
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I was in the best shape of my life.
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I don't drink, I don't smoke, I'm not a prude, so I'm just the designated driver.
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It's better that way.
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And so I, when I mean I'm the fourth generation on my dad's side of the family to have breast cancer and no known gene mutation has been found as of yet in my family.
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They don't know why it's happened.
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11 women in my family have had breast cancer.
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I found out right as my aunt aunt on my dad's side, my oldest aunt was getting ready to pass when I got the diagnosis.
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So it's just kind of been one after the other, after the other after the other, and it's just insane.
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But a self-exam saved my life and that's why I'm here, to be able to talk about advocacy, and I'm grateful for that.
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Amazing, oh my gosh, 11 women.
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So growing up in your family, since obviously it's so pervasive in your family, were there conversations had as far as like hey, this kind of exists in our family?
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We need to start doing monthly breast exams and you know, getting checked, things like that and my dad was just very blunt about it, very transparent, like your aunt has cancer, this isn't good and she might die.
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That's how I got the cancer talk very young and it was just something that I grew up with.
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It started with you know both.
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I mean technically, he grew up with it, seeing his grandmother, my great grandmother with it, and then many of his aunts, and then his sisters and then his daughter, and it was just something that I grew up around.
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It was.
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When I say it was normalized, I'm not undermining anyone's experience, but it's something we talked about all the time, that came up all the time, so I was very cognizant of it.
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So then at 18, I accidentally stumbled upon a lump in my breast.
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I assumed it was cancer because hey, a woman in my family, if she has a lump, it's cancer.
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And I thought am I too young to get cancer at 18?
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It turned out to be a benign tumor called a fibroadenoma, which occurs in women of menstruating ages, and it was that experience that put me in the habit of doing self-exams.
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15 years later, I remember when I turned 30, I told myself make sure you stay on your self exams because cancer is prevalent in your family, and so, sure enough, right after I turned 33, is when I found the lump in my breast, and it was cancer.
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But that's when you you were gaslit right Because didn't your doctor at the time say you're only 33, it's not cancer, we don't need to worry about it, or what was that experience?
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So I had gone to my well woman's exam in March of 2018.
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I remember January I did a self exam.
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February I did a self exam.
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March.
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I skipped my self exam for that month because I thought, hey, I'm going to see my practitioner who better than her than to do a clinical exam and be more thorough?
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And she'll tell me if she finds anything.
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I've been seeing her for 10 years at this point.
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Why would she not be open with me about that?
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Apparently, she did the exam, didn't say anything, marked it in my documentation as normal.
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I even have copies of it where she marked it as normal.
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And then it was two days later of is.
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I was scheduled to do my routine exam.
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I was in the shower, I went over the right side, everything was fine.
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I went over the left side, started at the very top of my breast and came around to about one, two, three.
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I remember three.
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Four o'clock is when I felt something and I my heart just sank.
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I'm like, wait, this can't be.
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No, I just went to the doctor.
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Surely she would have told me about this.
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And I'm like I'm fine, I'm in the best shape of my life, everything's going to be okay.
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And I'm like wait, I'm too young at 30.
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Yeah, you don't hear about 30 year olds getting cancer, or at least I didn't.
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Women had been in their forties and older, to my knowledge in my family.
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I'm fine.
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I'm good she would have told me about this, and the lump sat in my breast for about four months when I realized this thing is not going away and I need to go back to the doctor, and that's when I started confronting people and getting documentation, the short of it is.
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I was informed that she thought I was too young for breast cancer and that's why she didn't tell me about it at my initial appointment in March of 2018.
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Okay, I feel like I'm going to skip way ahead, but I'm pissed now.
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But also the fact that she documented it without doing a biopsy, without doing anything to verify that it is benign versus malignant.
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Can you sue for that?
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See, I have had people reach out to me about this and here's what I am able to say.
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I did go to the state of Tennessee and I filed the right complaints with the right departments and the right licensures, and I'm going to say that a good portion of my medical bills were paid for up front because of that.
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That's all I'm going to say.
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Okay, I'm glad that you did that, because that is infuriating and you know, I think I've had a lot of health things nothing as major as cancer.
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But I have a lot of specialists and you know, yeah, you have to go back and look at the notes that they write and you can't.
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I think too many people I'm sure you'll agree with this too many people put too much faith and confidence into our practitioners and, at the end of the day, they are just people and even the best of the best, you might catch them on an off day where their kids were awake in the middle of the night and they come in sleep deprived and they skip the step where they say, hey, you have a lump in your breast.
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I don't think it's anything, but what would you like to do?
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Right, like, and I think at this stage in life and I've said it before, I've said it on this podcast If I feel dismissed, if I feel like my questions aren't being answered, if I feel like you're rushing me out of the room, I feel like you're not giving me the time of day, you will not be my, my right, because it's so important Four months.
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I don't know what it did for your treatment or what it did for your diagnosis.
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We can definitely talk about that, but four months of cancer in your body can't be good.
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So had she done the right thing right?
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What could that have changed?
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I?
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think about that all the time.
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You know what would have been different about my treatment plan.
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I think my treatment may have been very similar because when I found out and knowing that my aunt was passing at the time, I was familiar with the pathology within my family before my diagnosis and I knew about the treatments they went through.
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And the oncologist who treated me had treated two generations before me one of my aunts and my grandmother and so he was very familiar with our family history and I said, bring it on, I'm going to go hard on this.
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Just whatever needs to be done, let's do it.
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I'm going to go hard on this.
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Just whatever needs to be done, let's do it.
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Because of the growth rate of my cancer.
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You have three stages of it.
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There's a one, a two and a three, and mine was at a level two.
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I was right in the middle, so it wasn't super aggressive and it wasn't slow growing either.
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It was right in the middle, and right in the middle it may have been aggressive because I wanted to go aggressive as well.
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Thinking back four months previously, maybe I wouldn't have had as much radiation, maybe I could have just had a double mastectomy, maybe I would have only done chemotherapy.
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But thinking back I I realized I would have had the book thrown at me.
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I would have wanted, wanted to have done everything.
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But perhaps some of the physical limitations that I have because the radiation and the double mastectomy and just the surgery I've had to my chest has been so aggressive I'm a very athletic person and I work out in the gym I do have physical limitations that frustrate me.
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Even though mentally I've gotten past a lot of the um, the mental health issues related to cancer, I still grieve my body every day because I can feel it where.
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You know from the surgery and the cancer, where it was and what had to be done to fix it.
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So it's an ongoing process.
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You know the relationship with my body there.
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What's what's like?
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What's crazy to me is the fact that the practitioner was familiar with your family history.
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In that scenario, I would just prefer to be overly cautious than to be dismissive.
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That's just, I don't know.
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That's just baffling to me that.
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Yeah, you tell me you have 11 people in your family that have had cancer.
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My, my inclination is we're gonna check every mole and dot and speck on your body when something comes up right, not no, it's not nothing especially when it comes to cancer.
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So, like you know, I'm thankful that, like for the most part of my family, we don't have cancer.
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It's not prevalent.
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You know individuals as they got older, like 80s and stuff like which, I feel like almost if you make it to a certain age, you're going to have some form of cancer probably.
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But um, for me, like you know, um, as a black male, I know that you know we are more susceptible to different types of cancer.
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I think it's based upon the lack of us actually being proactive and go to the doctor to begin with.
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But I remember when um chadwick boseman passed away from prostate cancer and I was like I'm not going to wait till like 45.
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I'm going to get a prostate check at 40.
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And I don't even have that in my family, let alone for a practitioner.
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To know what your family history is and skip over something.
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It's just kind of just crazy to me.
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Yeah, I mean I can ask why all day.
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Why all day?
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That's where people start to get quiet when it comes to the why, because I think they don't want to make the situation any worse for themselves than it already is.
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And you know there was a financial resolve to it and something that I've learned why is a gut question when we start asking why.
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It doesn't really come from our brains, it comes from our hearts and our gut, and so I'm like I don't want to fixate too much on that because I'm trying to move forward in so many ways.
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But yeah, I mean, it's, it's infuriating, and I do honor my feelings in that whenever I experienced them.
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What was the?
00:21:16.481 --> 00:21:21.652
So you went back and you said hey, I have this lump, I found it.
00:21:21.652 --> 00:21:25.568
Then you find out oh yeah, I documented it, I wrote it down as normal.
00:21:25.568 --> 00:21:27.803
What happened next?
00:21:27.803 --> 00:21:29.386
What was the process after that?
00:21:29.386 --> 00:21:31.432
Besides rage, obviously.
00:21:32.740 --> 00:21:34.242
Oh, the rage continued.
00:21:34.242 --> 00:21:37.988
I'll tell you why too.
00:21:37.988 --> 00:21:41.314
So I was at the appointment.
00:21:41.314 --> 00:21:55.603
I actually saw a different provider that day, same facility, different provider, but the nurse who was there she I could tell she was defensive that I was there and she she knew who I was.
00:21:55.603 --> 00:21:56.964
Like me.
00:21:57.726 --> 00:22:05.895
So when the second provider this was the end of July of 2018.
00:22:05.895 --> 00:22:13.666
She had performed a clinical exam of my breast, she didn't say a whole lot and she's like, all right, get dressed.
00:22:13.666 --> 00:22:29.299
And then I got dressed, I'm like okay, and you know, she just kind of asked me some questions about my family history, the history of the benign lump I had when I was 18, and just general questions about how I was feeling.
00:22:29.299 --> 00:22:41.852
And I know, at that time, over the summer, I was starting to get tired a lot and I thought, well, I'm in my 30s now I guess you're supposed to take two-hour naps in the middle of the day because you're getting old.
00:22:41.852 --> 00:22:45.887
And I thought that was horrible.
00:22:45.887 --> 00:22:47.952
I was sleeping seven, eight hours a night.
00:22:47.952 --> 00:22:53.306
Now I'm sleeping two, two and a half hours in the middle of the day.
00:22:53.306 --> 00:22:54.230
I can't keep my head up because I'm so sleepy.
00:22:54.230 --> 00:22:58.224
And I thought it was just normal because I'd never been in my thirties before and I'd never had cancer before.
00:22:59.267 --> 00:23:13.521
So I'm telling her this and she's just kind of writing it down and she leaves the room and she sends in the nurse the nurse I'm familiar with and the nurse said hey, we're going to schedule you for a mammogram.
00:23:13.521 --> 00:23:14.423
I said why?
00:23:14.423 --> 00:23:19.981
And she's like, because that's what, that's what they want you to do, that's just the next step.
00:23:19.981 --> 00:23:22.988
I said well, what, what, what did she say?
00:23:22.988 --> 00:23:25.773
Did the practitioner say about the lump in my breast?
00:23:25.773 --> 00:23:31.766
And the nurse turns around and looks at me and says I don't know, I'm not a mind reader, yeah.
00:23:37.061 --> 00:23:39.704
I have so many thoughts so many thoughts right now.
00:23:40.122 --> 00:23:44.387
The rage continued and I said, well, can you go?
00:23:44.387 --> 00:23:44.769
Look?
00:23:44.769 --> 00:24:09.527
And she like, rolls her eyes visibly, rolls her eyes at me and turns her head and just stomps out of the room like a toddler I'm exaggerating a little bit, but she did not want me asking questions.
00:24:09.527 --> 00:24:15.885
She was very uncomfortable and she went and I guess she came back a few minutes later and she just repeats three words to me Firm, smooth and dense.
00:24:15.885 --> 00:24:21.730
I said, okay, well, is it indicative of anything malignant?
00:24:21.730 --> 00:24:22.353
Is it benign?
00:24:22.353 --> 00:24:23.766
She's like I don't know.
00:24:23.766 --> 00:24:24.126
I don't know.
00:24:24.126 --> 00:24:26.605
We're just supposed to schedule you for a mammogram.
00:24:26.605 --> 00:24:29.529
I said, well, I have questions.
00:24:29.529 --> 00:24:32.461
Well, the practitioner, she's busy right now.
00:24:32.461 --> 00:24:34.125
And I said, well, I'll wait.
00:24:34.125 --> 00:24:39.114
And so she's like fine, and then she's getting.
00:24:39.440 --> 00:24:42.768
This woman is like in her sixties, I think she's.
00:24:42.768 --> 00:24:49.673
I'm not going to come up with excuses for her, but the way she treated me was poor and regardless, regardless.
00:24:49.673 --> 00:24:50.977
So she leaves.
00:24:50.977 --> 00:25:04.362
And I waited in my little patient room for an hour and a half before the practitioner came in and addressed all the questions that I had and the last thing the nurse told me was just like don't go Googling anything.
