Hello everybody. Hi guys, it's Nicole. How are you as you are listening to this today?

Maybe you're walking with me in your ears or you're driving with me in your car or

you're laying in your bed with your phone next to your head. Or is that me? Those are the

ways I listen to podcasts. But however you're listening to this, hello and I hope today is

a good day. Today we're just going to talk on a bunch of different topics. I have so much

on my mind and when I was thinking about this podcast, I was like, let's just dump it all

out. I've been getting a tremendous amount of feedback about this podcast that people are

appreciating it and that they just can't wait till Friday just to hang out and listen to me

talk about whatever. So I'm like, I'll just dump my brain of all the things that I have been

hearing and thinking and processing this week about this chronic pain journey. And of course,

chronic pain is more than just what we classically define as pain. You know, it's pain in your

body. It's a syndrome of the stomach and the skin. It's syndromes of the pelvic area,

which we're going to talk about a lot today. And at some anxiety and depression and OCD and

anything that is chronic because as you guys well know, if you listen to me a lot, this is just

brain science and this is just your nervous system in sustained fight or flight, not knowing how

to calm down and different pain signals and symptoms being filtered throughout the system

throughout your body and causing so much trauma and grief and depression because it's so hard to

live a life when you're sick. It should just basically be chronic sickness. But I guess chronic

illness is also a tag word that a lot of people use these days and it is chronic illness and it

is the symptoms associated with autoimmune conditions. And it's it's so much. It's so much more.

So anyway, let's we're going to talk about all that stuff today.

Personally, I had like a really kind of exciting morning because I got a call from my

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