July 3, 2019 • 32 mins
Journalist, bestselling author, and co-Founder of the Bob Woodruff Foundation, Lee Woodruff, shares how her transition from wife to caregiver and back, now fuels the mission of helping other families get through life-changing crises.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
I think probably feeling myself again was a little bit
like coloring back in the lines. I think I probably
came online in stages. We have so many roles as
his wife and mother and running a house woman working
as well, and I had stepped out of my job
almost for a year that I think probably I didn't
have time to worry about myself for a while. Hello,
(00:32):
and welcome to our podcast, the place where we love
to talk about ups and downs and twists and turns.
I'm Lisa, and I am Jill Herzig. And Lisa's latest
twist and turn is that she's lost her voice. But
that's okay, it's gone. We will sold her on um
and we're offering ute and all kinds of things. But
(00:55):
one thing that people could know about me and should
know about me, is that I am the worst caregiver
in world. I'm a terrible nurse. Um, I have not
noticed that you're always trying to take care of us.
I'm a caring person. You are who doesn't nurse well
and doesn't accept nursing particularly well either, Like I just
like if I'm down, I go to ground and nobody
(01:17):
sees me until I pop up again. But well, you
know you are an amazing caretake No, No, I'm actually
mediocredit and thankfully have been blessed to not have to
do it too much. Our guest today is like par
excellentis caregiver and not definitely not by choice. Um, someone
(01:37):
who has taught the world about what caregiving is. Yes,
we are joined today by leave Woodroff, who is a
good friend and a brilliant woman and the author of
multiple New York Times bestsellers and a media coach and
all sorts of things. Um, what else are you like?
I think that in the bread of a car over
(01:59):
more than I feel like I just need to crawl
into the covers and and listen to out yourself. Listen,
listen to you, sexy, sultry thing you. I'm gonna flirt
with you, sexier than even normal today. Just take it
right off. Yeah, we're all women, were all and all
care take your yes. So for for the listeners who
(02:21):
don't know, for the few people there that I have
not heard your story, can you just tell us about
how you went from being just a regular wife to
suddenly being the most in the most intense caregiving situation imaginable.
I will, and I think I find it so interesting
because caregivers really kind of come in all different shapes
and sizes. But you just made me think of the
(02:44):
fact that many caregivers are just bathed into this in
fire as I was. And it was two thousands six.
My husband had been covering Wars at ABC for a decade.
He had just taken the anchor chair after Peter Jennings
passed away very sadly from on cancer and he was
in a Rock for the State of the Union address.
It was like his ninth time there. And what happened
(03:06):
to him is what happens to our soldiers every day.
It was a really pivotal part in the war where
homemade devices ideas explosives had really ratcheted up. I'm not
sure we'd caught up with that, or that we were
completely on top of that. In the in our on
our side of the pond, he was hit by roadside bomb.
Should be dead, really had half of his skull removed
(03:27):
to save his life in a rock by incredible neurosurgeons
there that had seen you know, thousands of these so
knew exactly what they were doing. And then he was
in a coma for thirty six days. My kids were
really little, and I just became overnight. You know, my
best friend might be not alive every day when I
woke up, So that puts life in perspective pretty darn quick.
(03:50):
Those dirty dishes in the sink, oh well, too bad, right, yeah?
Yeah yeah. And his overall recovery was long and arduous.
It was a brain injury recovery. And I had never
heard the words tb I traumatic brain injury, which the
war has familiarized us all with, or the wars in
a Rock and Afghanistan. But it was a year. I
(04:11):
remember Lesa asking me, this was on a podcast that
you did a couple of years ago, and I remember
you saying, when did you let your breath out? And
and it was a good year, yeah, yeah, yeah, because
you had four small children that you were taking care
of as well. How did you balance all of that
five people that you were did you someone supporting you was?
(04:34):
Did you have friends or relatives? I had no friends, No, no, boy.
The balance word just doesn't belong in that part of caregiving.
But I know, I understand what you're saying. And every
day there was something that was working well and probably
other things off balance. It was many years later and
I've written about this and I speak about this, but
I realized that the four legs of my stool, my
(04:55):
chair all started with F and those were the things
that held me up in different degree, these in different
ways on different days, and those were family. Of course.
I have two sisters, Bob has three brothers. One of
them was in our house as I was in Washington
in the military hospital with Bob. I decided, and it
was the smartest thing I did. I dumb lucked into
it that the kids should all stay in their orbit,
(05:17):
that to move them too down to Washington would be
so disruptive. And so there was a family member in
our house at all times, and the second half was
friends and people cycled in and out. People cycled in
and out absolutely, And I did have a nanny. She
was a halftime nanny because I had always worked, but
she immediately became a full time nanny when this happened.
(05:38):
She just stepped into that role. Didn't know the kids
schedules because I was sort of on the older kids.
There's a six year age gap, so she sort of
was on the babies as we called them. They were
five my girls when Bob was injured. But she didn't
know when Katherine's tennis was or Max soccer. I was
usually done with work in the afternoon. I could do
all that. Everybody just stepped in, so family friends. The
(05:58):
third one is faith is I think people have different
belief systems. And at the end of the day, when
I was not talking to God. Finally, on day thirty five,
before Bob woke up, I was like, Okay, screw it,
I'm gonna just say a prayer because I got I
got nothing left in the chamber. And the last f
is funny because you have to have a sense of
humor when you're going through So what on earth were
you able to laugh at during these times? Oh my gosh.
(06:20):
The fact that Bob woke up and like look down
at his stressing gown. It was like, so what was
I like this the whole time? Did everybody see? Yeah?
They saw, and no one was very impressed. Okay, so
good over yourself, you know, just like everything was. When
he woke up, he really woke up, He really he did.
He woke up like night and day, like you're not
(06:41):
supposed to wake up from Brandon Drew. They kept trying
to turn the medication down to see if he would
come out of it, and he didn't. And then one
day he just woke up, speaking French and Mandarin and
wondering where his boxers were and wondering like he has
everybody seen the jewels and it was like no one
wanted the jewels. Bay, Okay, so get over it. Yeah,
and that is funny. But you know what I will say,
(07:02):
and I read I've read up on this later. It's
so true. Gallows humor is there for a reason, and
it's because when we can laugh at the thing that
scares us, like whistling across the graveyard, then we put
in a box, we can exercise control over it. And
that's why it feels so good. What did you do?
Did hecompress when you weren't laughing? Yeah, I know, it's
not We were laughing the whole time. I was so
(07:24):
happy he was alive that for the longest time, that
euphoria carried me until it didn't. You didn't even know
if he was going to come out of that come no,
because he may have come come back and woken up
and not being able to talk who he was totally
able to be. We didn't know if he could talk.
We didn't know if he'd remember us, and I had.
The day before he woke up, I had been touring
acute care nursing facilities because the docks were saying, I've
(07:47):
kind of done all we can do for him. So
he's not waking up. He has to be able to
do two hours of rehab two you know, move on
to the next and he's not, so you need to
probably put him in a nursing home. I had come
from that too, walking in the next day at six am,
my cell phone had been off to having this man
sitting up in bed, eyes open, look at me, going,
(08:07):
where have you been? Wait? This is the day after
you prayed for the first it is. I know it
sounds a little weird. Has Lifetime called you about this?
Yet he did and called you about the story. It's
in the book. We don't want to have the whole
scene start with like a brownie uniform in some pedophile
like lurking. So before she met him, she was in
(08:27):
the Girl Scouts to the Wolf. So, but at that
point begins a whole other journey, a whole other journey
of helping him kind of walk step his white step
by step back to a more normal life. Returned to
a more normal life. And it sounds like that's when
the impact on you started to really be felt. What
(08:49):
was that like? It was overwhelming to realize that all
this in this healthy FORTI six year old man I'd
been married to, who I could just kiss goodbye and
wherever he would go, I would not have to think
about him or his happiness or his work. All of
a sudden, was you know, sleeping half the day. He
was still missing his skull. It would be months before
they would put that back on um. Not following if
(09:13):
there were more than one conversation cognitively, he couldn't often
follow it. It was terrifying, And so I did what
I probably most people in this situation do you start
cooking your plan B you know, sell the house, go
back to I'll go back to work full time to
get benefits, you know all that. You just sort of
have this plan ready to go when you're responsible for
(09:34):
all these little babies. And how did the kids you
said little babies? How did they? How would they because
you had to deal with mom, you have to deal
with their stress around this as well, and not let
them or did you let them see you're I did
your tough moments I didn't, and I don't know. I'm
sure they did. You know. It wasn't like I was
popping in like doors day doing like breaking into Oklahoma
(09:56):
and stuff. But I didn't want them to carry that
extra burden because they could see that Dad was different.
And I was getting a lot of questions his dad
always going to be like this, you know, will he
be the same? And I decided early on to just
keep it to the headlines. I knew that the minute
I started dipping down and talking about you know, blood
pressure or whatever, any of these details, I could see
(10:18):
my my second child, my daughter, just go to tent
in nervousness and fear. When we come back, I want
to talk about nervousness and fear a little more. Before
(10:41):
the break, we were talking about nervousness and fear. It's
such a great way to go out. But I do
want to just delve into a little bit more about you.
We've talked about the events and Bob and what happened,
but what did you do to keep yourself strong in
this time? Because you had to have you talk to
buy the four pillars, But those are external, that's not
(11:02):
really like the nervousness and fear and anger and frustration.
And now I mean your your vision of your life
was suddenly erased and you didn't and no real picture
came into view for a while, right, Yes, And that
was That's a really interesting way to look at it,
(11:23):
because I think we all carry around this vision of
what life's gonna look like. We're smart enough to know
that it doesn't always follow the script. But that had
just literally been blown up. I think a couple of things.
I would love to think about this question more, but
off the top of my head, the first thing that
I did is the hardest thing in the world to do,
and it's every hallmark card, which is just shrink yourself
(11:45):
down to being in that moment. So I remember Robin
Roberts saying one time to me, if you look back,
it's sad because that was before you were ill or whatever.
Your thing is your big, bad thing, and if you
look forward, it's scary. So the best thing to to
just be where you are in the moment. So I
really really tried to do that. I remember getting up
before everybody else. I'd go make my coffee with my
(12:06):
little milk frother and I fixed my gaze out on
the sky and the green grass and a flower and
just try to be like, Okay, I'm alive today. I
made it. I got up, you know, one more day.
Cheesy as that sounds. And I think the other thing
that just kind of fixed me was I just got
super warrior esque. I got off caffeine, even though I
(12:26):
just told you I drank coffee, but during the worst
of it, I got off caffeine. I ate only healthy foods,
I did not drink alcohol. And I'm a swimmer. So
I rose every day and went from the hotel to
the Chevy chase Y m c A where I used
to swim when we lived in Washington. And that was
weird to go back into that locker room and see
the same women I've been swimming with years earlier, when
(12:47):
I'd been there at a happy time. So it was
just bizarre, but sort of the opposite of what most
people do. Yeah, I was going to say a lot
of people out there groaning and saying, oh God, at
a time of crisis, I can't rely on my sort
of crutches, my my coffee to wake me up and
want to slow me down. And you know, but it
(13:07):
sounds like you, well, let's make no mistake that a
Valium and a Jack Daniels would have been a pretty
freaking awesome way to cruise them every day. But I
had these four sets of eyes looking at me, and
I knew that they were watching me. I think in
the book that Bob and I wrote in an instant,
I called myself the general in the sense that, uh,
those kids were queuing off me. So whatever was we
(13:29):
were moving forward in some kind of battle formation, they
better see me looking like I had. It was that
always who you were? Was that something something because of
Bob's um sort of a relationship with the military, Did
you as most that military minds because of his job
anything about the military? No, I knew nothing about them
before I landed in that hospital in Germany. Yeah, I
(13:53):
really didn't. That was Bob's culture and what he knew.
I think probably, like both of you, I was always
the organizer and the family. I'm going to just make
that general assumption just that women seem to be able
to have ten files open at one time and have
thought about the snacks for the ten hour car trip.
So that was always a part of my makeup. I
was always ultra organized, but the greatest sorrow to me
(14:15):
and trying to look at what my life would look like.
Was the piece that I loved about us, that we
were the perfect two halves of a hole. So he
would come home from some story and I would have
been taking care of all the kids, and I could
collapse and he could care for me, and then the
role could reverse. And I didn't see that changing. For
the longest time. I thought, for the rest of my life,
(14:37):
I'm going to be how is that going to feel?
And that's not very sexy and that's not I'm just
thinking was sexy And that's like as sexy as some
crape soul nursing shoes and chill here I am. Let's
forget about any nookie. We've got some things to do.
Hear people put that back in your pants. No one
(14:58):
was impressed that role is a battle axe. Who wants
to be that person? Some people really like that. It's
a turn on. People pay for that. Is it like
aunt Lydia and it still that's a thing. Oh my god,
aunt Lydia is not a turn on. I mean that
could kill anything. Just how much fun would that be
(15:18):
to play? Though her role? No, I don't think she's
ever gonna get another job. She's a fantastic actress, but
she's aunt lydia forever. It's like Joffrey on Game of Thrones.
I don't think that. But he made enough money so
he didn't have to. Um, so let's talk about that
for a second. Making money, you felt like, wait, maybe
(15:41):
on me that not only am I going to be
the caregiver, but I might have to be the breadwinner
for this large family. And what did that feel like?
Trying to trying to whip yourself into that particular fancy.
That was scary. I'd always worked, so I knew that
I'd be able to be employed, but you know, Bob's
We had vested everything in Bob's career in the sense
(16:02):
that we moved every two years in local TV. I
had always been a freelancer so I could sort of
stay home and figure my work stuff out with the kids.
And he had just gotten to this role, so he
had just started making real money. I mean, you don't
make much in journalism until you get to the very top.
So we didn't have, you know, college tuitions sucked away
(16:22):
or any of that stuff. It had all been about
this big sacrifice I had quick aside I had married
a lawyer, and so he was at a law firm
um and at law school when I met him and
we moved to Beijing. We were there for Tenement Square.
I was working with all the journalists as a person
in marketing and PR and he spoke Mandarin, and so
he went out with the crew UH and became a
(16:44):
fixer for CBS for Susan Zarinski, who has just become president,
and the troops shot at the students, some of our students.
We were living at university, and that was where he said,
this is what I wanted to I want to become
a journalist. So he took a six figure pay cut
a um as a lawyer to a journalist twelve tho
dollars a year. We had a two month old baby,
(17:06):
and you know, the next few years were about getting
him where he wanted to go. And I had this
conversation with younger women. Yeah, I was just going to
ask you, what advice do you give to women going
into the sort of part of your life where you
determine how you're going to handle breadwinning division of labor.
Do you say, like, don't put all your eggs in
(17:28):
one basket? Obviously? What happened to you is extraordinary, not
not normal. But I would have said even before I
was injured. My advice to when we would be keep
your oar in the water. You don't have to be
marching into a hedge fund every day with twenty hour days,
but find something that keeps your skills active, whatever that is.
(17:48):
Um it was advice my mom gave me. My sweet
eighties seven year old mother said, you know, just keep
your own You should have your own thing that you
can do. But I have interesting conversations now. I think
the world is at an interesting place in that there's
so many more stay at home dads supporting kick ass
women doing careers, and I on a plot that. But
my personal belief is that if one of you wants
(18:12):
to actively raise the children and be there, then one
of you needs to take a half step back, meaning
that you can't both have fabulous jobs where you're traveling
around the world for a month at a time, or
nanny will raise your children. And that's okay too, if
that's what you want. But for us, we had these
kids so that we could, you know, put our imprint
on them and be there. And so that was me.
(18:35):
I was happy to do that. I had a career
the count them. It's something that, um, you know, I've
I've mentored a lot of younger women and managed a
lot of younger women. And these are all incredibly personal choices.
But as a child of divorce myself, I grew up
with sort of a backbone made of what do we
(18:57):
what were we started with fear and nervousness. Fear and nervousness,
So tattooed on one bicep is fear and on the
other by set this nervousness. If you're me, I mean
you tribe. Though I may not sound like I am.
And I think because my parents who my dad died
from dementia about five years ago, but my parents were
married their whole life. I think because they were children
(19:19):
of the depression that they instilled in the their three
girls Like this, there's never going to be enough mentality
like you've got to keep you know, save it for
a rainy day and all that stuff. So I have
a different fear and nervousness. Yeah, I've just I've mostly
I've just watched and admired what younger women coming up
behind me are doing and sort of how they're arranging
their lives. I do think that or on the water
(19:40):
piece of advice is a good one to pull out
of the world of paid work entirely. Um it is,
it feels um, it's scary. It's just scary, and everybody
you've got to have the like, the fortitude for it. Yeah,
And it's easier today, I think because you can tell,
(20:00):
commute and do things that twenty years ago you couldn't do.
It is either you're in this office or you're not.
And I think there are more options today to stay engaged.
If you've had a different job, you wouldn't have been
able to take care of Bob, right, you know, you couldn't.
I couldn't have no and and quick plug here for
our military families because that's a really big issue, and
(20:22):
that's a whole other show that we could talk about.
But I am I have so much privilege, So let's
just recognize my privilege that Bob worked for ABC, for Disney,
that everything was paid for, covered, We had um security
around us, so no one could take pictures like we had.
You know, these families spend hours or in private civilian
(20:43):
life when a brain injury happens fighting with insurance companies
to like I had it so easy and yet it
was still incredibly hard. So I think about the other
families who whose journey has all of the other stuff,
the hardship, the work. What am I gonna do? How
am I going to pay for therapy? Not fair? You
mentioned military that families. When we come back. I want
(21:04):
to get a little more into your work with the military.
Now we're talking with Luwoodruff and we we've been talking
about the dramatic event that changed your life, but I
want to talk about fast forward to the present, um
(21:26):
get out of that period into what you're doing now
and how you've transformed that experience into a real service
for our military service and your foundation and the work
you're doing to help military families. Can you talk about
that a little bit. I would love to talk about
the Bob Wooder Foundation. We in the hospital didn't know
what how this was going to end in the acute
(21:47):
care of military hospital with as to naval and we
sort of made a pledge to ourselves as we began
meeting the other families, Amazing families, humble people from all
around the country whose first point of entry after Germany
is DC. Walter Reader be sess A Naval and what
we soon realized was everybody got excellent care there, but
(22:07):
once they left and went to their hometown in their
v a, that was not necessarily They were not all
created equally, and we recognized how fortunate we were. We
were talking about that earlier um and we said to ourselves,
if Bob does recover, we need to do something with
our story. We I didn't really realize the extent of
the publicity on the whole thing. I never watched t
(22:30):
I didn't see anything on the news for a year.
I wouldn't turn the TV on for a year, or
the news. I should say, we watched a lot of
lost in Gray's Anatomy because it was just traumatizing picture
a world going on without Bob there to cover it.
There was an election coming up, and he'd always covered
a candidate. Just made me so sad that this great
(22:52):
guy who just gotten to the top of his profession
through no fault of his own, was now removed from it.
And so it was a year before I recognized the
enormity of this story. This is just Bob. He's this
law student I married. But what you realize is when
you're in somebody's living room every day. I'm sure for
your husband as well. People feel like they know you.
(23:14):
So boxes of mail were coming in quilts and flags
and carving zen We're thinking about your family and that
was overwhelming to me. But I thought, oh my gosh,
if this story, this isn't the guy that should be
getting the attention, but he is because he's on TV.
So we need to do something with that. And we
started this foundation a year later um and to date
(23:35):
we've given away almost seventy million dollars. We make grants
two organizations that are around the country, and we get
to see a lot of them because of the travel
and the work that we do, we get to see
who's doing it well. We bring a lot of groups together.
It's different sectors, so whether it's service dogs or recreational therapy,
or post traumatic stress or my big one in fertility
and um intimacy, so helping families through in vitro have
(23:59):
babies after injured. And we're just so proud of the
work that we do to do that. Oh you should be.
That is just extraordinary. So did did that help you
in getting through this incredibly difficult time? Did starting the
foundation and figuring out what your story could do beyond
(24:21):
your sphere, it did? You know. I look back at
that period of my life and I think, how did
I do all of those things? I was running on
some unnatural kind of fuel. I'm sure it was the adrenaline.
The foundation came a little bit later, um, and we
sort of took it by stages. We went out on
a book tour a year after Bob was injured, and
(24:41):
literally people were giving us twenty dollar bills and saying,
make sure this gets to a soldier, which is when
we sort of formalized it and said, okay, we've got
to open a five and one C three. But you
just made me think of something you asked me earlier.
How internally how did I get through? And a lot
of that for me as a writer was writing, and
I would just come back every day. I would write
(25:02):
down what happened because it was the one place that
I had control in what was happening. I could tell
my story, and I wanted to tell my story for
Bob if he if he woke up, he I knew
as a journalist you'd want to know everything in life,
and I see you is ninety nine miles an hour.
And if he didn't live. I knew my children would
want to know what happened and I wouldn't remember, so
(25:23):
that there was power in writing my story and journaling that,
and I'm sure others have gotten you know, solace from
that as well and a hard time. That's what ultimately
became the book. And not because we wanted to write
a book, but because Bob's neurosurgeon said, I hear, you're
a writer, and somebody has to write about what's happening
here in these hospitals because no one in America knows
(25:43):
anything about these injuries. Thousands of these young kids are
coming through with these head traumas and we're saying it
was a fairly new thing. Yeah, then, but I was
saving them. But then but then life goes on and
it is not the same, right. I got a correct
a myth here too, because I did. I was not
like Joan of arc I crashed and I went on
(26:04):
antidepressants and I like went to talk to somebody. I
can't say enough about how we need to give situational
depression and all we need to remove the shame in
the stigma. People are made to feel like, oh, you're
not strong enough to handle this, and it was my
sweet little mother again, who said, you know you, maybe
you need to go talk to somebody, and maybe you
need meth. I think I told her how sad I was,
(26:28):
how I couldn't see the future, and I worried that
this was gonna affect my children, and I needed to
get out of bed every day and pack four lunches
and at least try to show them that the world
is a mostly good place. Did you have a therapist?
I did, and and not to take anything away from
mental health, because I found a better one later. I
(26:49):
felt like all I did was go cry on cue.
It's Thursday at ten. You need that because you can't cry.
And I good with girlfriends, though I felt like for
the grief piece of it, I was meeting somebody who
was dealing with understood total loss. What I had was
ambiguous loss. You're he's still alive, so people don't like
(27:10):
that You're supposed to be so damn grateful because he's
still sitting across from you, And when you start to
say but he's different, they're just like, oh, but aren't
you so lucky. It's sort of like what it feels
like to have a miscarriage but still too living children
is people try to so you can be grateful and
grieve at the same time. And when I finally found
that therapist, I wanted prescriptive stuff. He I just read
(27:32):
a quote from Oliver Sacks, which I love and I'll
share with both of you because it's so true. Outside
of medication. He said, as a neuro neurologist, the only
two things I've found that really work our music and
the garden. And I take the garden to me, like,
just go outdoors. And that's what this therapist said to me.
When you feel walk outside and look at the sky,
even if it's raining, there's this whole big world out
(27:53):
there and you're in it. You're part of that. Those
little things could help. I think that's what living in
the city a lot of people miss, is that connection
with nature that is so healing and in so many ways. Oh,
I couldn't agree more. As a cement and break bound,
poor sche lub. But you know, I think I think
(28:16):
it's worth recognizing how long did it take you to
come out of that spiral? I the medication kicked in
in a couple of weeks, and I called it trampline,
so it prevented me from going any lower. I didn't
like how it made me sleep. It just loved getting
up early, and I'd rack into like eight. I had
to get used to that. I stayed on the medication
(28:38):
for a year and then I, um, I went off it.
I sort of kicked it out from under me. I
could see Bob was getting better. I could see the
children had come through this, and UM, the foundation, I'm
sure somewhere and there was sort of a reason to live,
kind of, or not to live, but to take something
bad and do something good with And the writing probably
(28:59):
helped to because as you're taking everything that you're feeling
and processing it through the page, and you do write
so beautifully jealous before you got here, I was saying,
what a fantastic writer you are. I do think though,
it's it's important to recognize that you don't have to
be a fantastic writer to get a tremendous amount out
of journaling and writing and putting your story out there
(29:20):
and there, and there are so many ways now to
get your story told. And you know, on a larger forum,
there's no there's no barrier to publishing yourself and there's
no wrong there's always an audience Yeah, there is always
an audience, and it's it's wonderful how the Internet can
organize people around issues and chatting. And I have this
(29:41):
or of caregiving, especially just what we're talking about today.
I think there's so many amazing aggregations because it's such
an isolating job. Yeah, well, now you're helping people get
their stories out, maybe not on paper but verbally. Um,
because you're coaching, right, your media coach for people. I
this is something I've always done and I just sort
(30:02):
of formalized it about two years ago. I've been doing
a lot more work from different people, so helping people
present whether there's a talk or an internal meeting and message.
And one of the things we've talked about on this
podcast is that you really have to confront your fears
in times of change. I think possibly the number one
fear that maybe it's maybe it's not the number one,
(30:25):
but it's really high up there. As public speaking. So
many people say that they would honestly rather jump up
off a twenty story building than give a speech in
front of the worst ever given my entire life, it
was relate. Oh oh, it was so bad. It was
I wish I had to go to me before, what
are you? And it was so terrible. I was so
you are a good public speaker, also lying. No, she's lying.
(30:49):
I wasn't. I was so bad. I couldn't you know
what it was. I was having a menopuzzle moment. So
I couldn't get up there without my notes because I
literally could not remember my middle name. I don't know
if you've ever had you. Yeah, girlfriend, I'm almost sixty,
you're not. I'm just may I'll be sixty. Yeah, and
there's an incredibly beautiful thirty two year old sitting left
(31:09):
for anyone who can't see what I can see. It's
so weird. You just literally can remember nothing. So I
was terrified. She's she was great by the way, So
I'm not gonna let her demean or something. But I
know those feelings where you in your own head you
feel like you've failed. I was so embarrassed. I never
wanted to talk to you again. Is that why you
haven't called? Okay? Now? If I lost my voice because
(31:32):
I was you were in brief? Yes? How would you
coach me out of yes? How can you coach people?
Give us something? Do you have? Everybody? So you practice
is number one? And then Number two is whatever your
thing is, breathing, meditating, thinking about that happy raft in
the middle of the lake. And then the final thing
(31:54):
is when you're done, did you die? No, so you
know what you survived. It's a casa is here to
tell Yeah, you didn't die, you were beloved. Well, thank
you so much for being here today. We have loved
chatting with you. I've loved being here. If you want
to connect with late or find out more about the foundation,
you can go to Bob Woodruff Foundation dot org or
(32:17):
Twitter at stand for heroes. Yes, let's stand for with
the number four heroes. UM. Thank you so much for
joining us, and thanks to Julicia Heywood, our producer. Everybody
Until next time, ye
I think probably feeling myself again was a little bit
like coloring back in the lines. I think I probably
came online in stages. We have so many roles as
his wife and mother and running a house woman working
as well, and I had stepped out of my job
almost for a year that I think probably I didn't
have time to worry about myself for a while. Hello,
(00:32):
and welcome to our podcast, the place where we love
to talk about ups and downs and twists and turns.
I'm Lisa, and I am Jill Herzig. And Lisa's latest
twist and turn is that she's lost her voice. But
that's okay, it's gone. We will sold her on um
and we're offering ute and all kinds of things. But
(00:55):
one thing that people could know about me and should
know about me, is that I am the worst caregiver
in world. I'm a terrible nurse. Um, I have not
noticed that you're always trying to take care of us.
I'm a caring person. You are who doesn't nurse well
and doesn't accept nursing particularly well either, Like I just
like if I'm down, I go to ground and nobody
(01:17):
sees me until I pop up again. But well, you
know you are an amazing caretake No, No, I'm actually
mediocredit and thankfully have been blessed to not have to
do it too much. Our guest today is like par
excellentis caregiver and not definitely not by choice. Um, someone
(01:37):
who has taught the world about what caregiving is. Yes,
we are joined today by leave Woodroff, who is a
good friend and a brilliant woman and the author of
multiple New York Times bestsellers and a media coach and
all sorts of things. Um, what else are you like?
I think that in the bread of a car over
(01:59):
more than I feel like I just need to crawl
into the covers and and listen to out yourself. Listen,
listen to you, sexy, sultry thing you. I'm gonna flirt
with you, sexier than even normal today. Just take it
right off. Yeah, we're all women, were all and all
care take your yes. So for for the listeners who
(02:21):
don't know, for the few people there that I have
not heard your story, can you just tell us about
how you went from being just a regular wife to
suddenly being the most in the most intense caregiving situation imaginable.
I will, and I think I find it so interesting
because caregivers really kind of come in all different shapes
and sizes. But you just made me think of the
(02:44):
fact that many caregivers are just bathed into this in
fire as I was. And it was two thousands six.
My husband had been covering Wars at ABC for a decade.
He had just taken the anchor chair after Peter Jennings
passed away very sadly from on cancer and he was
in a Rock for the State of the Union address.
It was like his ninth time there. And what happened
(03:06):
to him is what happens to our soldiers every day.
It was a really pivotal part in the war where
homemade devices ideas explosives had really ratcheted up. I'm not
sure we'd caught up with that, or that we were
completely on top of that. In the in our on
our side of the pond, he was hit by roadside bomb.
Should be dead, really had half of his skull removed
(03:27):
to save his life in a rock by incredible neurosurgeons
there that had seen you know, thousands of these so
knew exactly what they were doing. And then he was
in a coma for thirty six days. My kids were
really little, and I just became overnight. You know, my
best friend might be not alive every day when I
woke up, So that puts life in perspective pretty darn quick.
(03:50):
Those dirty dishes in the sink, oh well, too bad, right, yeah?
Yeah yeah. And his overall recovery was long and arduous.
It was a brain injury recovery. And I had never
heard the words tb I traumatic brain injury, which the
war has familiarized us all with, or the wars in
a Rock and Afghanistan. But it was a year. I
(04:11):
remember Lesa asking me, this was on a podcast that
you did a couple of years ago, and I remember
you saying, when did you let your breath out? And
and it was a good year, yeah, yeah, yeah, because
you had four small children that you were taking care
of as well. How did you balance all of that
five people that you were did you someone supporting you was?
(04:34):
Did you have friends or relatives? I had no friends, No, no, boy.
The balance word just doesn't belong in that part of caregiving.
But I know, I understand what you're saying. And every
day there was something that was working well and probably
other things off balance. It was many years later and
I've written about this and I speak about this, but
I realized that the four legs of my stool, my
(04:55):
chair all started with F and those were the things
that held me up in different degree, these in different
ways on different days, and those were family. Of course.
I have two sisters, Bob has three brothers. One of
them was in our house as I was in Washington
in the military hospital with Bob. I decided, and it
was the smartest thing I did. I dumb lucked into
it that the kids should all stay in their orbit,
(05:17):
that to move them too down to Washington would be
so disruptive. And so there was a family member in
our house at all times, and the second half was
friends and people cycled in and out. People cycled in
and out absolutely, And I did have a nanny. She
was a halftime nanny because I had always worked, but
she immediately became a full time nanny when this happened.
(05:38):
She just stepped into that role. Didn't know the kids
schedules because I was sort of on the older kids.
There's a six year age gap, so she sort of
was on the babies as we called them. They were
five my girls when Bob was injured. But she didn't
know when Katherine's tennis was or Max soccer. I was
usually done with work in the afternoon. I could do
all that. Everybody just stepped in, so family friends. The
(05:58):
third one is faith is I think people have different
belief systems. And at the end of the day, when
I was not talking to God. Finally, on day thirty five,
before Bob woke up, I was like, Okay, screw it,
I'm gonna just say a prayer because I got I
got nothing left in the chamber. And the last f
is funny because you have to have a sense of
humor when you're going through So what on earth were
you able to laugh at during these times? Oh my gosh.
(06:20):
The fact that Bob woke up and like look down
at his stressing gown. It was like, so what was
I like this the whole time? Did everybody see? Yeah?
They saw, and no one was very impressed. Okay, so
good over yourself, you know, just like everything was. When
he woke up, he really woke up, He really he did.
He woke up like night and day, like you're not
(06:41):
supposed to wake up from Brandon Drew. They kept trying
to turn the medication down to see if he would
come out of it, and he didn't. And then one
day he just woke up, speaking French and Mandarin and
wondering where his boxers were and wondering like he has
everybody seen the jewels and it was like no one
wanted the jewels. Bay, Okay, so get over it. Yeah,
and that is funny. But you know what I will say,
(07:02):
and I read I've read up on this later. It's
so true. Gallows humor is there for a reason, and
it's because when we can laugh at the thing that
scares us, like whistling across the graveyard, then we put
in a box, we can exercise control over it. And
that's why it feels so good. What did you do?
Did hecompress when you weren't laughing? Yeah, I know, it's
not We were laughing the whole time. I was so
(07:24):
happy he was alive that for the longest time, that
euphoria carried me until it didn't. You didn't even know
if he was going to come out of that come no,
because he may have come come back and woken up
and not being able to talk who he was totally
able to be. We didn't know if he could talk.
We didn't know if he'd remember us, and I had.
The day before he woke up, I had been touring
acute care nursing facilities because the docks were saying, I've
(07:47):
kind of done all we can do for him. So
he's not waking up. He has to be able to
do two hours of rehab two you know, move on
to the next and he's not, so you need to
probably put him in a nursing home. I had come
from that too, walking in the next day at six am,
my cell phone had been off to having this man
sitting up in bed, eyes open, look at me, going,
(08:07):
where have you been? Wait? This is the day after
you prayed for the first it is. I know it
sounds a little weird. Has Lifetime called you about this?
Yet he did and called you about the story. It's
in the book. We don't want to have the whole
scene start with like a brownie uniform in some pedophile
like lurking. So before she met him, she was in
(08:27):
the Girl Scouts to the Wolf. So, but at that
point begins a whole other journey, a whole other journey
of helping him kind of walk step his white step
by step back to a more normal life. Returned to
a more normal life. And it sounds like that's when
the impact on you started to really be felt. What
(08:49):
was that like? It was overwhelming to realize that all
this in this healthy FORTI six year old man I'd
been married to, who I could just kiss goodbye and
wherever he would go, I would not have to think
about him or his happiness or his work. All of
a sudden, was you know, sleeping half the day. He
was still missing his skull. It would be months before
they would put that back on um. Not following if
(09:13):
there were more than one conversation cognitively, he couldn't often
follow it. It was terrifying, And so I did what
I probably most people in this situation do you start
cooking your plan B you know, sell the house, go
back to I'll go back to work full time to
get benefits, you know all that. You just sort of
have this plan ready to go when you're responsible for
(09:34):
all these little babies. And how did the kids you
said little babies? How did they? How would they because
you had to deal with mom, you have to deal
with their stress around this as well, and not let
them or did you let them see you're I did
your tough moments I didn't, and I don't know. I'm
sure they did. You know. It wasn't like I was
popping in like doors day doing like breaking into Oklahoma
(09:56):
and stuff. But I didn't want them to carry that
extra burden because they could see that Dad was different.
And I was getting a lot of questions his dad
always going to be like this, you know, will he
be the same? And I decided early on to just
keep it to the headlines. I knew that the minute
I started dipping down and talking about you know, blood
pressure or whatever, any of these details, I could see
(10:18):
my my second child, my daughter, just go to tent
in nervousness and fear. When we come back, I want
to talk about nervousness and fear a little more. Before
(10:41):
the break, we were talking about nervousness and fear. It's
such a great way to go out. But I do
want to just delve into a little bit more about you.
We've talked about the events and Bob and what happened,
but what did you do to keep yourself strong in
this time? Because you had to have you talk to
buy the four pillars, But those are external, that's not
(11:02):
really like the nervousness and fear and anger and frustration.
And now I mean your your vision of your life
was suddenly erased and you didn't and no real picture
came into view for a while, right, Yes, And that
was That's a really interesting way to look at it,
(11:23):
because I think we all carry around this vision of
what life's gonna look like. We're smart enough to know
that it doesn't always follow the script. But that had
just literally been blown up. I think a couple of things.
I would love to think about this question more, but
off the top of my head, the first thing that
I did is the hardest thing in the world to do,
and it's every hallmark card, which is just shrink yourself
(11:45):
down to being in that moment. So I remember Robin
Roberts saying one time to me, if you look back,
it's sad because that was before you were ill or whatever.
Your thing is your big, bad thing, and if you
look forward, it's scary. So the best thing to to
just be where you are in the moment. So I
really really tried to do that. I remember getting up
before everybody else. I'd go make my coffee with my
(12:06):
little milk frother and I fixed my gaze out on
the sky and the green grass and a flower and
just try to be like, Okay, I'm alive today. I
made it. I got up, you know, one more day.
Cheesy as that sounds. And I think the other thing
that just kind of fixed me was I just got
super warrior esque. I got off caffeine, even though I
(12:26):
just told you I drank coffee, but during the worst
of it, I got off caffeine. I ate only healthy foods,
I did not drink alcohol. And I'm a swimmer. So
I rose every day and went from the hotel to
the Chevy chase Y m c A where I used
to swim when we lived in Washington. And that was
weird to go back into that locker room and see
the same women I've been swimming with years earlier, when
(12:47):
I'd been there at a happy time. So it was
just bizarre, but sort of the opposite of what most
people do. Yeah, I was going to say a lot
of people out there groaning and saying, oh God, at
a time of crisis, I can't rely on my sort
of crutches, my my coffee to wake me up and
want to slow me down. And you know, but it
(13:07):
sounds like you, well, let's make no mistake that a
Valium and a Jack Daniels would have been a pretty
freaking awesome way to cruise them every day. But I
had these four sets of eyes looking at me, and
I knew that they were watching me. I think in
the book that Bob and I wrote in an instant,
I called myself the general in the sense that, uh,
those kids were queuing off me. So whatever was we
(13:29):
were moving forward in some kind of battle formation, they
better see me looking like I had. It was that
always who you were? Was that something something because of
Bob's um sort of a relationship with the military, Did
you as most that military minds because of his job
anything about the military? No, I knew nothing about them
before I landed in that hospital in Germany. Yeah, I
(13:53):
really didn't. That was Bob's culture and what he knew.
I think probably, like both of you, I was always
the organizer and the family. I'm going to just make
that general assumption just that women seem to be able
to have ten files open at one time and have
thought about the snacks for the ten hour car trip.
So that was always a part of my makeup. I
was always ultra organized, but the greatest sorrow to me
(14:15):
and trying to look at what my life would look like.
Was the piece that I loved about us, that we
were the perfect two halves of a hole. So he
would come home from some story and I would have
been taking care of all the kids, and I could
collapse and he could care for me, and then the
role could reverse. And I didn't see that changing. For
the longest time. I thought, for the rest of my life,
(14:37):
I'm going to be how is that going to feel?
And that's not very sexy and that's not I'm just
thinking was sexy And that's like as sexy as some
crape soul nursing shoes and chill here I am. Let's
forget about any nookie. We've got some things to do.
Hear people put that back in your pants. No one
(14:58):
was impressed that role is a battle axe. Who wants
to be that person? Some people really like that. It's
a turn on. People pay for that. Is it like
aunt Lydia and it still that's a thing. Oh my god,
aunt Lydia is not a turn on. I mean that
could kill anything. Just how much fun would that be
(15:18):
to play? Though her role? No, I don't think she's
ever gonna get another job. She's a fantastic actress, but
she's aunt lydia forever. It's like Joffrey on Game of Thrones.
I don't think that. But he made enough money so
he didn't have to. Um, so let's talk about that
for a second. Making money, you felt like, wait, maybe
(15:41):
on me that not only am I going to be
the caregiver, but I might have to be the breadwinner
for this large family. And what did that feel like?
Trying to trying to whip yourself into that particular fancy.
That was scary. I'd always worked, so I knew that
I'd be able to be employed, but you know, Bob's
We had vested everything in Bob's career in the sense
(16:02):
that we moved every two years in local TV. I
had always been a freelancer so I could sort of
stay home and figure my work stuff out with the kids.
And he had just gotten to this role, so he
had just started making real money. I mean, you don't
make much in journalism until you get to the very top.
So we didn't have, you know, college tuitions sucked away
(16:22):
or any of that stuff. It had all been about
this big sacrifice I had quick aside I had married
a lawyer, and so he was at a law firm
um and at law school when I met him and
we moved to Beijing. We were there for Tenement Square.
I was working with all the journalists as a person
in marketing and PR and he spoke Mandarin, and so
he went out with the crew UH and became a
(16:44):
fixer for CBS for Susan Zarinski, who has just become president,
and the troops shot at the students, some of our students.
We were living at university, and that was where he said,
this is what I wanted to I want to become
a journalist. So he took a six figure pay cut
a um as a lawyer to a journalist twelve tho
dollars a year. We had a two month old baby,
(17:06):
and you know, the next few years were about getting
him where he wanted to go. And I had this
conversation with younger women. Yeah, I was just going to
ask you, what advice do you give to women going
into the sort of part of your life where you
determine how you're going to handle breadwinning division of labor.
Do you say, like, don't put all your eggs in
(17:28):
one basket? Obviously? What happened to you is extraordinary, not
not normal. But I would have said even before I
was injured. My advice to when we would be keep
your oar in the water. You don't have to be
marching into a hedge fund every day with twenty hour days,
but find something that keeps your skills active, whatever that is.
(17:48):
Um it was advice my mom gave me. My sweet
eighties seven year old mother said, you know, just keep
your own You should have your own thing that you
can do. But I have interesting conversations now. I think
the world is at an interesting place in that there's
so many more stay at home dads supporting kick ass
women doing careers, and I on a plot that. But
my personal belief is that if one of you wants
(18:12):
to actively raise the children and be there, then one
of you needs to take a half step back, meaning
that you can't both have fabulous jobs where you're traveling
around the world for a month at a time, or
nanny will raise your children. And that's okay too, if
that's what you want. But for us, we had these
kids so that we could, you know, put our imprint
on them and be there. And so that was me.
(18:35):
I was happy to do that. I had a career
the count them. It's something that, um, you know, I've
I've mentored a lot of younger women and managed a
lot of younger women. And these are all incredibly personal choices.
But as a child of divorce myself, I grew up
with sort of a backbone made of what do we
(18:57):
what were we started with fear and nervousness. Fear and nervousness,
So tattooed on one bicep is fear and on the
other by set this nervousness. If you're me, I mean
you tribe. Though I may not sound like I am.
And I think because my parents who my dad died
from dementia about five years ago, but my parents were
married their whole life. I think because they were children
(19:19):
of the depression that they instilled in the their three
girls Like this, there's never going to be enough mentality
like you've got to keep you know, save it for
a rainy day and all that stuff. So I have
a different fear and nervousness. Yeah, I've just I've mostly
I've just watched and admired what younger women coming up
behind me are doing and sort of how they're arranging
their lives. I do think that or on the water
(19:40):
piece of advice is a good one to pull out
of the world of paid work entirely. Um it is,
it feels um, it's scary. It's just scary, and everybody
you've got to have the like, the fortitude for it. Yeah,
And it's easier today, I think because you can tell,
(20:00):
commute and do things that twenty years ago you couldn't do.
It is either you're in this office or you're not.
And I think there are more options today to stay engaged.
If you've had a different job, you wouldn't have been
able to take care of Bob, right, you know, you couldn't.
I couldn't have no and and quick plug here for
our military families because that's a really big issue, and
(20:22):
that's a whole other show that we could talk about.
But I am I have so much privilege, So let's
just recognize my privilege that Bob worked for ABC, for Disney,
that everything was paid for, covered, We had um security
around us, so no one could take pictures like we had.
You know, these families spend hours or in private civilian
(20:43):
life when a brain injury happens fighting with insurance companies
to like I had it so easy and yet it
was still incredibly hard. So I think about the other
families who whose journey has all of the other stuff,
the hardship, the work. What am I gonna do? How
am I going to pay for therapy? Not fair? You
mentioned military that families. When we come back. I want
(21:04):
to get a little more into your work with the military.
Now we're talking with Luwoodruff and we we've been talking
about the dramatic event that changed your life, but I
want to talk about fast forward to the present, um
(21:26):
get out of that period into what you're doing now
and how you've transformed that experience into a real service
for our military service and your foundation and the work
you're doing to help military families. Can you talk about
that a little bit. I would love to talk about
the Bob Wooder Foundation. We in the hospital didn't know
what how this was going to end in the acute
(21:47):
care of military hospital with as to naval and we
sort of made a pledge to ourselves as we began
meeting the other families, Amazing families, humble people from all
around the country whose first point of entry after Germany
is DC. Walter Reader be sess A Naval and what
we soon realized was everybody got excellent care there, but
(22:07):
once they left and went to their hometown in their
v a, that was not necessarily They were not all
created equally, and we recognized how fortunate we were. We
were talking about that earlier um and we said to ourselves,
if Bob does recover, we need to do something with
our story. We I didn't really realize the extent of
the publicity on the whole thing. I never watched t
(22:30):
I didn't see anything on the news for a year.
I wouldn't turn the TV on for a year, or
the news. I should say, we watched a lot of
lost in Gray's Anatomy because it was just traumatizing picture
a world going on without Bob there to cover it.
There was an election coming up, and he'd always covered
a candidate. Just made me so sad that this great
(22:52):
guy who just gotten to the top of his profession
through no fault of his own, was now removed from it.
And so it was a year before I recognized the
enormity of this story. This is just Bob. He's this
law student I married. But what you realize is when
you're in somebody's living room every day. I'm sure for
your husband as well. People feel like they know you.
(23:14):
So boxes of mail were coming in quilts and flags
and carving zen We're thinking about your family and that
was overwhelming to me. But I thought, oh my gosh,
if this story, this isn't the guy that should be
getting the attention, but he is because he's on TV.
So we need to do something with that. And we
started this foundation a year later um and to date
(23:35):
we've given away almost seventy million dollars. We make grants
two organizations that are around the country, and we get
to see a lot of them because of the travel
and the work that we do, we get to see
who's doing it well. We bring a lot of groups together.
It's different sectors, so whether it's service dogs or recreational therapy,
or post traumatic stress or my big one in fertility
and um intimacy, so helping families through in vitro have
(23:59):
babies after injured. And we're just so proud of the
work that we do to do that. Oh you should be.
That is just extraordinary. So did did that help you
in getting through this incredibly difficult time? Did starting the
foundation and figuring out what your story could do beyond
(24:21):
your sphere, it did? You know. I look back at
that period of my life and I think, how did
I do all of those things? I was running on
some unnatural kind of fuel. I'm sure it was the adrenaline.
The foundation came a little bit later, um, and we
sort of took it by stages. We went out on
a book tour a year after Bob was injured, and
(24:41):
literally people were giving us twenty dollar bills and saying,
make sure this gets to a soldier, which is when
we sort of formalized it and said, okay, we've got
to open a five and one C three. But you
just made me think of something you asked me earlier.
How internally how did I get through? And a lot
of that for me as a writer was writing, and
I would just come back every day. I would write
(25:02):
down what happened because it was the one place that
I had control in what was happening. I could tell
my story, and I wanted to tell my story for
Bob if he if he woke up, he I knew
as a journalist you'd want to know everything in life,
and I see you is ninety nine miles an hour.
And if he didn't live. I knew my children would
want to know what happened and I wouldn't remember, so
(25:23):
that there was power in writing my story and journaling that,
and I'm sure others have gotten you know, solace from
that as well and a hard time. That's what ultimately
became the book. And not because we wanted to write
a book, but because Bob's neurosurgeon said, I hear, you're
a writer, and somebody has to write about what's happening
here in these hospitals because no one in America knows
(25:43):
anything about these injuries. Thousands of these young kids are
coming through with these head traumas and we're saying it
was a fairly new thing. Yeah, then, but I was
saving them. But then but then life goes on and
it is not the same, right. I got a correct
a myth here too, because I did. I was not
like Joan of arc I crashed and I went on
(26:04):
antidepressants and I like went to talk to somebody. I
can't say enough about how we need to give situational
depression and all we need to remove the shame in
the stigma. People are made to feel like, oh, you're
not strong enough to handle this, and it was my
sweet little mother again, who said, you know you, maybe
you need to go talk to somebody, and maybe you
need meth. I think I told her how sad I was,
(26:28):
how I couldn't see the future, and I worried that
this was gonna affect my children, and I needed to
get out of bed every day and pack four lunches
and at least try to show them that the world
is a mostly good place. Did you have a therapist?
I did, and and not to take anything away from
mental health, because I found a better one later. I
(26:49):
felt like all I did was go cry on cue.
It's Thursday at ten. You need that because you can't cry.
And I good with girlfriends, though I felt like for
the grief piece of it, I was meeting somebody who
was dealing with understood total loss. What I had was
ambiguous loss. You're he's still alive, so people don't like
(27:10):
that You're supposed to be so damn grateful because he's
still sitting across from you, And when you start to
say but he's different, they're just like, oh, but aren't
you so lucky. It's sort of like what it feels
like to have a miscarriage but still too living children
is people try to so you can be grateful and
grieve at the same time. And when I finally found
that therapist, I wanted prescriptive stuff. He I just read
(27:32):
a quote from Oliver Sacks, which I love and I'll
share with both of you because it's so true. Outside
of medication. He said, as a neuro neurologist, the only
two things I've found that really work our music and
the garden. And I take the garden to me, like,
just go outdoors. And that's what this therapist said to me.
When you feel walk outside and look at the sky,
even if it's raining, there's this whole big world out
(27:53):
there and you're in it. You're part of that. Those
little things could help. I think that's what living in
the city a lot of people miss, is that connection
with nature that is so healing and in so many ways. Oh,
I couldn't agree more. As a cement and break bound,
poor sche lub. But you know, I think I think
(28:16):
it's worth recognizing how long did it take you to
come out of that spiral? I the medication kicked in
in a couple of weeks, and I called it trampline,
so it prevented me from going any lower. I didn't
like how it made me sleep. It just loved getting
up early, and I'd rack into like eight. I had
to get used to that. I stayed on the medication
(28:38):
for a year and then I, um, I went off it.
I sort of kicked it out from under me. I
could see Bob was getting better. I could see the
children had come through this, and UM, the foundation, I'm
sure somewhere and there was sort of a reason to live,
kind of, or not to live, but to take something
bad and do something good with And the writing probably
(28:59):
helped to because as you're taking everything that you're feeling
and processing it through the page, and you do write
so beautifully jealous before you got here, I was saying,
what a fantastic writer you are. I do think though,
it's it's important to recognize that you don't have to
be a fantastic writer to get a tremendous amount out
of journaling and writing and putting your story out there
(29:20):
and there, and there are so many ways now to
get your story told. And you know, on a larger forum,
there's no there's no barrier to publishing yourself and there's
no wrong there's always an audience Yeah, there is always
an audience, and it's it's wonderful how the Internet can
organize people around issues and chatting. And I have this
(29:41):
or of caregiving, especially just what we're talking about today.
I think there's so many amazing aggregations because it's such
an isolating job. Yeah, well, now you're helping people get
their stories out, maybe not on paper but verbally. Um,
because you're coaching, right, your media coach for people. I
this is something I've always done and I just sort
(30:02):
of formalized it about two years ago. I've been doing
a lot more work from different people, so helping people
present whether there's a talk or an internal meeting and message.
And one of the things we've talked about on this
podcast is that you really have to confront your fears
in times of change. I think possibly the number one
fear that maybe it's maybe it's not the number one,
(30:25):
but it's really high up there. As public speaking. So
many people say that they would honestly rather jump up
off a twenty story building than give a speech in
front of the worst ever given my entire life, it
was relate. Oh oh, it was so bad. It was
I wish I had to go to me before, what
are you? And it was so terrible. I was so
you are a good public speaker, also lying. No, she's lying.
(30:49):
I wasn't. I was so bad. I couldn't you know
what it was. I was having a menopuzzle moment. So
I couldn't get up there without my notes because I
literally could not remember my middle name. I don't know
if you've ever had you. Yeah, girlfriend, I'm almost sixty,
you're not. I'm just may I'll be sixty. Yeah, and
there's an incredibly beautiful thirty two year old sitting left
(31:09):
for anyone who can't see what I can see. It's
so weird. You just literally can remember nothing. So I
was terrified. She's she was great by the way, So
I'm not gonna let her demean or something. But I
know those feelings where you in your own head you
feel like you've failed. I was so embarrassed. I never
wanted to talk to you again. Is that why you
haven't called? Okay? Now? If I lost my voice because
(31:32):
I was you were in brief? Yes? How would you
coach me out of yes? How can you coach people?
Give us something? Do you have? Everybody? So you practice
is number one? And then Number two is whatever your
thing is, breathing, meditating, thinking about that happy raft in
the middle of the lake. And then the final thing
(31:54):
is when you're done, did you die? No, so you
know what you survived. It's a casa is here to
tell Yeah, you didn't die, you were beloved. Well, thank
you so much for being here today. We have loved
chatting with you. I've loved being here. If you want
to connect with late or find out more about the foundation,
you can go to Bob Woodruff Foundation dot org or
(32:17):
Twitter at stand for heroes. Yes, let's stand for with
the number four heroes. UM. Thank you so much for
joining us, and thanks to Julicia Heywood, our producer. Everybody
Until next time, ye
Road to Somewhere News
Hosts And Creators
Lisa Oz
Jill Herzig
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