Latest / The Cyclical Doula Podcast: Fertility Awareness, Charting Cycles, and Reproductive Health Education / Embracing Integrative Medicine: A Holistic Approach to Chronic Illness and Menopause with Penni
Transcript
- emmamma: Welcome back today I am joined by Dr. Penni who is an integrative nurse practitioner, a trauma informed hypnotherapist, the owner of Lowcountry Wellness Center here in Charleston. ⁓ Penni's work bridges clinical medicine with deep respect for the nervous system, trauma healing and the body's innate Emmamma: Thanks so much for being here today on the cyclical doula podcast. If this episode resonated with you, the most powerful thing that you can do is to share it, send it to a friend, text it to your sister, forward it to that group chat. This is how conversations about our bodies start changing, quietly, organically, woman to woman. you are listening and thinking, ⁓ ⁓ want help applying this to my emmamma: capability to heal ⁓ She people navigating chronic illness, Lyme disease, menopause, and long-term health challenges. And she does so with both professional expertise and experience. I'm so excited to have you here today, Dr. Penni. Emmamma: I offer free cycle clarity calls. It's a relaxed conversation over Zoom we talk through your goals, your charting practices, and kind of support that would actually make sense for you. can book one at emmamma.com / free. And if you already, make sure you're following or subscribe to the Cyclical Doula - podcast so that you don't miss future episodes. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: Thank you. emmamma: before we dive into all of the things that you do, can you tell us just a little bit more about who you are outside of ⁓ roles and credentials? ⁓ Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: Yeah, so inside those four walls you pretty much summed me up but outside of those four walls I've been married for 30 years to my high school sweetheart. We have three daughters and three and three-quarters grandbabies. My next granddaughter is due in about six weeks and so that'll give me two of each. ⁓ I've got a wedding coming up for my youngest and Emmamma: And if you feel called to leave a rating or review, it genuinely helps more women find this work. So thank you. You deserve to understand body. You deserve to feel confident in your reproductive choices. And you ⁓ have to figure it out alone. I'll see you next week. Thanks for being here. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: building my dream home right now and so I've got a hundred thousand things going at the same time. I ⁓ am also a author. My book that I co-authored with a bunch of friends won a several awards last year on our spiritual awakenings. I'm also an energy healer and like you said, a trauma hypnotherapist. emmamma: Yeah, that's amazing. So many cool things and yeah, that's so cool. I love it. ⁓ How's the house building going? I feel like that's always an overwhelming experience for most people. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: You know, I'm very fortunate that my husband is a custom builder. So yeah, we built many houses together, but this is our final home. you know, this one's a little different. emmamma: Okay, so it's very very niche of understanding. That's great. Yeah. Yeah, that's good. That's fun. That's so cool. I love that. So tell us what brought you into the integrative medicine work that you do now. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: Yeah, well, I always grew up knowing that we could have science and woof, I call it. My dad was an engineer by day and an herbalist and numerologist at night. So he always taught me that we could blend science and alternative ⁓ modalities. I grew up with chiropractic and acupuncture. And so I knew going into practice. emmamma: Yep. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: decades ago, that I would blend the two. And in the beginning of my career, I was in the traditional fee for service. I worked for Roper, I worked for MUSC and I was stuck in their ways. And then when I went back and got my doctorate, I said, no more. I've got to do things the way that feels right here, that I can sleep at night knowing that I'm doing right by my patients. And so that was really when things made the shift. I'd always practiced integratively within the confines of what Roper and MUSC would allow. ⁓ but I was very limited. And so when I went off on my own, now I could do things the way that I wanted and the way that I knew as a patient that I wanted to be treated as well. So yeah, I would say ⁓ I opened the practice in 2017. So I guess that's really when things made the drastic change. emmamma: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's awesome. And you, ⁓ I mean, I know you see a whole range of different people in your practice, but you also do a lot with people who have chronic illnesses. Tell us about how you got into like that aspect of it. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: Yeah, well, 2018 I became a chronic illness patient. with my alphabet soup and all of my connections in town, I still couldn't get in with the people I needed to. And I realized that if I couldn't get the care with my level of connections, then regular people weren't getting anywhere near what I wanted. ⁓ And then I realized that holistic integrative care just didn't exist. And so if I was gonna do it, I needed emmamma: Mm-hmm. Emmamma: Welcome to the Cyclical Doula podcast. I'm Emma, a certified fertility awareness educator, miscarriage doula and the founder of Emmamma Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: to do it. And so in 2018, I fired my entire team of specialists because, you know, I always call them the box people, right? They can only treat what they see in a box. And my endocrinologist, you do realize that I'm a human being. I don't fit in your boxes, right? You understand that, right? And he just looked at me dumbfounded and I said, emmamma: Mm-hmm. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: Okay, this is where we'll part ways. You can't help me. And so I really took a shift in my practice and for myself, because now I had to heal me. And so in order to heal me, I had to really drastically do an about face and everything that I had learned and dive deep into literature and relearn how to practice. ⁓ so all of my patients get the benefit of that, right? Because... emmamma: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: had to get sick in order to make those changes. ⁓ so that's just now the way that the practice runs. It's just what it is. emmamma: Yeah, that's awesome. And I think like, like you said, like, it's so hard to see, ⁓ like to be like, go from specialist to specialist to get thrown around and people not know what what exactly you need. And when somebody like you who's able to look at a person at a whole, you can probably quite easily poke something out really quickly and be like, ⁓ like this is causing all of those other symptoms that you're experiencing. Yeah. That's so good. Emmamma: This space is for women who want to understand their bodies deeply, not just memorize information, but actually feel confident in interpreting their cycles. Here we talk about ovulation, hormones, cervical mucus, basal body temperature, and all that's messy in between emotional layers that come with being woman. We talk about trying to conceive, avoiding pregnancy ⁓ hormones. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: Absolutely. Yeah. emmamma: So you said that you've ⁓ dealt with your own chronic illness. How does that like see how you change how you see people's bodies other than just outside, like looking at them as a whole? Emmamma: postpartum transitions, pregnancy loss, perimenopause, and everything in between. Because body literacy isn't just about charting. It's about the autonomy. It's about informed consent. It's about not outsourcing your reproductive decisions to guesswork or fear. Each week, you'll hear conversations with women's health professionals, ⁓ workers, ⁓ Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: Yeah. Well, I think, you know, as a medical society, we do a really big disservice to patients by not acknowledging that body, spirit and mind are one. And, you know, I tell patients all the time, I can get you physically well, but I can't get you healed until you deal with the mental piece of it. Right. And and so, you know, chronic illness has a huge mental component to it. You know, had a conversation yesterday with a patient who keeps telling herself how sick she is. And I said, what you're doing is reinforcing sickness instead emmamma: Mm. Emmamma: and researchers along with solo episodes where I teach practical skills you can apply to your own cycle right away. if you have ever felt like you should have learned this information sooner, if you have ever felt disconnected from your cycle, Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: Waking up every day being thankful that you woke up You know grateful for being able to take a breath and open your eyes and see things and hear things with your ears You wake up and go ⁓ my gosh. I'm still sick We've got to change the script in your brain Which will then change the script that you're telling your body because the body listens to everything you tell it ⁓ And so I think you know it's it's really that lens It's looking at it as a whole and understanding that we can't just compartmentalize, right? emmamma: Mm-hmm. Emmamma: If you want to raise the next generation without shame around their bodies, you are in the right place. So grab your tea, open up your notes app, and let's build a cycle confidence together. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: I can't just treat the knee. I can't just treat the the gut I have to treat it all and that's where The box people just don't see it emmamma: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I don't think I've ever been told by like specific specialists like, ⁓ like you should make sure that you're working on your mental health as well and changing that mindset. And that's such a huge part of all of this. Like you said, we're not in that box. So to switch gears a little bit, I'd love to pick your brain about menopause a little bit more and like midlife transitions. What is your like, let's start off with like, what's your biggest myth around menopause that you'd love to debunk? Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: Yeah, I think women have been told for decades that the symptoms are expected and that they just need to live with it. And I'm over here going, BS, no, no, that's wrong. we can get through it with minimal symptoms and thrive in menopause. I can happily tell you as a post-menopausal gal, I just said to a colleague this morning, I turned 50 this year and I feel better today than I can ever recall in my entire adult life. emmamma: Yeah. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: And I'm not menopausal, you know, like it's doable. It takes a little effort, takes some work. ⁓ But, you know, I think the misconception in both perimenopause and menopause is we just got to roll with the symptoms and that is so untrue. It's just not accurate. emmamma: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And so I'm sure it's specific to the individual, but what's some general recommendations or maybe what would people look out for, ask for when they're having these symptoms that are kind of screaming at them? Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: What? And I think first is identifying what the symptoms are, right? As we talk about my population with so much chronic illness, it's always, you know, is this hormone related? Is this inflammation related? Is this illness related? And sometimes we just have to kind of lean out a little bit and look from a bigger lens and go, all right, there's a lot of overlap. Let's just treat inflammation while we balance hormones, while we work on illness. And so there's a lot of overlap. So from a symptomology perspective, We can kind of say there's some general rules that follow peri and post menopause. So brain fog is a big one. Energy or lack thereof, right? Gals are going to start to see those changes. Libido, we're going to start to see the changes. We're going to see with dyspheronia or gals having uncomfortable sex. You know, I met with a 70 something year old yesterday and I said, how's your sex life? And she nearly died. She's like, oh, I don't do that. And her husband was like, yeah, we haven't done that for years. And I said, why? emmamma: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: And she said well it's too painful. I said, Let's fix that because I need you being intimate right? I need your health to be healthy and then put intimacy So there's just a lot of misconceptions that you know, ⁓ it's just you know, my vagina is aging Well, yeah, but I can fix that right like you should be able to continue to have a healthy intimate life until you don't want one anymore Not because your body failed you emmamma: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Right, right. Mm hmm. Absolutely. ⁓ yeah. I think that's one of those things that it's we don't talk about it enough about how much like, any type of intimacy is not supposed to be painful. And if it is in any season of life, then that it's there's ways to fix it. And there's multiple two different ways of, of approaching that about like what what somebody needs. But yeah, absolutely. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: Yeah, and I think the other piece is we chuck it up to empty nester syndrome. ⁓ you're sad because you're empty nesting or you're sad because you're aging. OK, how about we maybe take a step back and go, are you sad because your hormones are shifting? Like, are you just estrogen deficient? Right. Are you testosterone deficient? Is that why your whole body hurts? Are you not sleeping because you don't have enough progesterone on board? Like. emmamma: Hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: Those are all the real things, you know? emmamma: Yeah. And so what does that look like practically when you are helping evaluate people's hormones ⁓ to kind of figure out how they're they're reacting to all those things? Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: Well, first we look at the big picture first, right? Let's roll out any big issues with anything. Then we're going to dive it down and we're going to look at... some serum testing, some blood testing. I generally don't follow hormones with blood testing, it's just not what I do. ⁓ So I use a ⁓ patented program that's called the menopause method. And the menopause method, what I love about it, it is a symptom driven method. And so my gals start on bioidentical, which we're calling body identical. So body identical hormone therapy. And that's for our perimenopausal gal. When we get into menopause, now it becomes ⁓ ⁓ We've got to get into the mindset of shifting the name to match appropriately what the symptom is, ⁓ what the cycle is, I should say, right? ⁓ And so we're looking at, you know, what is your symptomology and where are you deficient? You'd be surprised, you know, I check a pregnenolone level on nearly everybody and ⁓ I can tell you, I could probably count on one hand over the years how many are actually normal. Pregnenolone is the emmamma: Mm. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: hormone. It makes every single hormone in the body. All of them and everybody's walking around efficient in it. emmamma: Yeah, so how do how do people go about fixing that? Is that just a replacement of sorts to help make that happen? Yeah. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: It's simple replacement, but you gotta know where you're starting. So just don't go start willy-nilly on pregnant women's for all your hormones. But yeah, it's a simple and affordable over the counter fix. emmamma: ⁓ yeah, absolutely. Mm I think that's, that's one of those things where I think we're, we're in this mindset of like, like, I'm living with all these symptoms of that you're explaining and experiencing people, especially in that those perimenopause years. And when people are willing to go through and get some of those testing done and look at their symptoms and see what's going on, it can sometimes be a super easy fix to make sure that they're living without all of Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: Absolutely. Well, and you know, like I tell my gals, one hot flash is too many hot flashes. emmamma: That was actually going to be my next question. everybody is like perimenopause hot flashes are horrible. So how do we is it just so is it just regulating to make sure that our hormone levels are at the right level? Yeah. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: never happen in life. It's maintaining our body and you know into that physiologic state that God intended us to be in right now. Thankfully we've got science on our side now that you know we didn't have a creation. emmamma: Yeah. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: Right? We can maintain this physiologic level of estrogen and progesterone and testosterone and prognanolone. Then we balance out the aging component of it, right? Now we can slow that aging progress in the body, right? We can be cancer protective and bone protective and heart protective and brain protective and all the great things without damaging the body by withholding all of those hormones. ⁓ emmamma: Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. Do you think therefore when people are being proactive about going through perimenopause with all of these hormones, do you feel like that therefore like extends the life, the time that they have before they actually hit menopause and go into that post menopausal phase? Or do you think it's the same timeline just with support without the symptoms? Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: They're still gonna, know, whenever they're genetically gonna go through menopause is when they're genetically gonna go through it. goal is to minimize the effects of peri so that you come out menopause on the other side. We do a random blood test one day and we go, ha, congrats, you're post-menopausal. You didn't even know that. emmamma: Yeah. That's awesome. That's so good. I feel like what a different approach than the way that our society is currently handling that and how we can just I think therefore like as women we can be more empowered to not feel like horrible for eight plus 1015 years of going through this process. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: We would never allow a man to suffer like that, but for some reason society has said women should suffer. emmamma: Mm, mm, yeah, absolutely. So where, when people, what is like the first sign of perimenopause that people should start looking into like these supplements of replacement? Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: Well, so the, in the root cause world where I live, ⁓ the recommendation is that we will get gals on hormone balancing therapy by the time she leaves her 20s. emmamma: Okay? Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: Right? So if I can catch you early in life, I can prevent the onslaught of things that come with hormone shifting. And so we maybe don't start on estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and progenitolone. Maybe we just start in your 20s with balancing prognenolone, right? Maybe you need a little cyclical progesterone to support your body, right? So it just depends on the girl and what she's got going on. But as we get closer to Perry and then Perry, the transition into menopause, of course, know, Perry is the cycle emmamma: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: to change and you know we start to maybe get some mood changes and we start to see some libido changes and you know maybe our fuse that used to be this long becomes you know half the length or something. So you know there's some kind of telltale signs that yeah maybe maybe we're heading down that path. It's a little bit more of a challenge in a gal who doesn't cycle right. So for me I had a hysterectomy in my 20s and so I always joked with my husband that we would know I'm postmenopausal when I spot emmamma: right? Yeah. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: I hate him. He's my favorite human being, now outside of my grandbabies and my kids of course. And so a couple years ago we were walking on the beach in Mexico and I was having a boohoo pity party of one dealing with all of my chronic illness at the time. And he turned to me and he said, hey, I think it's time to check your hormones. And I looked around and I thought, right now? Right here? This is where you wanted to have this conversation? Do you want to go back to America in a body bag? Was that your intention? So I got back home, checked into the office and had my nurse draw my labs and I said, please just check my markers. And she called me a couple of days later, I was off and she said, you probably want to go look at your labs. And that meant, I knew, I knew her well enough to know that that meant that I was in fact post-menopausal. And so, yeah, but I didn't know, I never had any symptoms other than him saying, hey, your mood's a little off, this is not how you normally act. Maybe you need to check your hormones. emmamma: Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy. Like, what a cool thing. And also, therefore, like, that's really helpful to know, because I think a lot of people have hysterectomies for a variety of reasons. And being able to, like, still have some markers of what they might be looking for in their own life is really helpful, too. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: And I saved my ovaries, right? So that's always the difference. When a gal goes in and has a hysterectomy with a oophorectomy, right, and she loses the ovaries, she wakes up in menopause, right? I mean, it's that quick when the ovaries leave the body. So that's a completely different beast, right? Those gals need menopause replacement therapy immediately. They are absolutely miserable. I'm talking about the natural progression, right, with ovaries sustaining. emmamma: Yeah. bright. Mm-hmm. Yeah. for sure. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's good to know because I is it typical? Do you think for people who also ⁓ have their ovaries removed that that's like typical medical practice to also bring them on to those hormone replacement therapies? Or is this a little bit more in that like integrative medicine? Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: No, is the downside is that the box people are put her on a synthetic hormone. And so she's going to get a lab created hormone that is not natural to her body that her body then has to figure out how to convert into a natural hormone. So they do an okay job of putting them on menopause replacement. They're just not doing the right meds. emmamma: Yep. Mmm. Right? Mm hmm. Yeah. And I think that's that's so hard of like knowing when you're making all of these choices about your reproductive health and that you don't when you don't even know that there's other options out there. That that makes it so hard to make informed choices and feel like you have these responsible things that you can go through through our reproductive lives easily. Yeah, that's amazing. ⁓ so thank you for all of that. I Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: powerful. Yeah. emmamma: Also, ⁓ just wonder what is your main thing that you want every woman to know as she's going through her reproductive years in just life? Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: Yeah, well, I think misery is optional, right? Get out of the mindset where we got to get past the gaslighting of the standard medical community who think misery equals, or menopause equals misery. That's crap. Let me tell you, let me scream it from the rooftops. That is the biggest crock of crap I've ever heard. No, there should, literally you should be in the second prime of your life when you're in menopause. emmamma: Yeah. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: It's just, we've done a disservice to women over the years. emmamma: Yeah, absolutely. For sure. I think so. ⁓ So I have another question. And I don't know if you work with this specifically, because we didn't talk about it. But endometriosis is one of those illnesses that is kind of on the lines of chronic illnesses. It's not typically diagnosed that way. But it's a huge inflammatory thing. Do you Yeah, do you work with people who have endometriosis? And what support do you have around that? Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: Yeah. It should be. We do, but obviously not in a surgical way, right? We're integrative primary care. So we're doing that background support, right? We're looking at what else is going on that's feeding into inflammation. What do we need to do about cycle balancing and hormone balancing and ⁓ symptom management, right? Like here's another group of women who have just been told, you know, pain is expected, suck it up, buttercup. And I'm over here going, okay. emmamma: Of course, of course. Right? Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: Let's put a freaking period cramp machine on a man and see how long he can tolerate this kind of I mean, what a minute, two minutes and he's going to be whimpering like we need to be treating women like freaking human beings and we need to adequately control their pain. We need to adequately control their inflammation. And the hardest thing with endo is finding what else is triggering inflammation, right? emmamma: Not very long, usually. Yeah. Mmm. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: Endo in and of itself is inflammatory, but it's rarely, rarely alone. And so now we get to go into the deep dive into, why? But why did it happen? Where did things go wrong? Where else is your body storing things that I need to figure out and fix? emmamma: Mm-hmm. Mm Absolutely. And I think that's it that can help so much with people just managing their day to day when they're able to get that support for sure. And yeah, that's so good. ⁓ What else do want to share about what you do maybe around the like spiritual aspect of ⁓ of your work? Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: are cool. Yeah. So that world is a rapidly evolving world. I always joke that I tried to wall that section of me off for too long and then finally spirit beat me over the head and said, now's the time. Like you do our timeline and we're going to pull the rug out from under you. And so like I said, you know, I written a book about my spiritual awakening and ⁓ And so I have a whole nother practice ⁓ that everybody at Lowcountry doesn't probably even know about. But have another business called Peace Center for Healing. ⁓ And that's where I do my energy healing and my spiritual work. I host regular retreats. I am very connected to the lineage of Mary Magdalene and the Sophia lineage. And so I do a lot of work in that realm in ⁓ helping gals. Remember their gift as a healer and their connection to Mary Magdalene and that lineage of divine healers ⁓ So and that's ⁓ I call that my my side job so to speak emmamma: I love that. What's the biggest shift that you see with people who are coming into that space? Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: ⁓ I think we're seeing a, and thankfully we're seeing it, but we're seeing a mass awakening, right? And not just an awakening in spirituality, but awakening in that people are seeing the BS for what it really is. ⁓ And so, you know, I joke with patients all the time about, know, my BS meter used to be, you know, 10 inches deep and now my BS meter is an eighth of a millimeter deep. ⁓ And that happens when you go through a spiritual awakening. You just see things differently. And so, emmamma: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: your threshold for crap lowers quickly. And so I think we're seeing as a society, a global society, more people are waking up, not only to who they really are, to their true selves, but to the bullshit, excuse me, of society. And we need that, right? We need more people waking up to that. emmamma: Yeah, that's amazing. think what a great thing to be able to just name and say like, this is something that we need, because it's huge. when people wake up to understanding how society can be so detrimental when it's not treating humans well and all of those things is really important. Yeah. Let's see. I have Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: Exactly. Yep, absolutely. emmamma: ⁓ Another question for you. So I what I do typically is to teach people how to track their cycles for family planning. ⁓ And so I, because you're in this space of ⁓ treating people both medically and with all of the the woo as you called it as well. ⁓ What do you think women need to know about their cycles as a whole? I know we talked about menopause, but maybe for somebody who's Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: Yeah. emmamma: very new to cycling, even teenagers or coming into those prime fertility years. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: Well, I think there's a lot of things that go into it. So ⁓ I'll give you a quick little side note. I had a hysterectomy at 26 because my PCOS was so severe that my third pregnancy just wreaked havoc on my body and both of us barely survived it. And so we knew that by the time I was getting ready to have kids, we knew that my clock was really short. So I'm a gal who battled infertility. My first two kids are infertility kids. My third was a natural conception and I was shocked. emmamma: Mmm. Mm-hmm. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: ⁓ In fact, I remember going to the OB saying how did I get pregnant and she said a man and a woman I said How did we get here ⁓ and so it's a battle I lived right And so I nobody told me as a teenager that having a cycle every 72 days was not normal emmamma: Yeah, I got that part. Thank you. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: just, you know, that's what my cycle was and it wasn't talked about. So I love that you do this because gals need to know that, you know, a 28 day cycle is the average, but it's not the norm, right? And so your norm is your norm. I tell everybody, right? This is, it's a norm of one. We have averages across the community, but your norm is unique to you. ⁓ And so learning what your patterns are and then really listening into your body. So, emmamma: Right. You're right. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: I love for my patients to do symptom journaling. And I remember as a teenager keeping track of my cycles and I had my color coded circle meant this and a square meant that on the calendar so my brothers would never know what it was. And of course now we have everything on an app and that makes tracking so much better. But I think gals need to A, be empowered to know your body and explore your body. I need you as a woman. emmamma: Yeah. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: to know your body so intimately that if something's wrong, then you reach out to me to say, something doesn't feel right here. Or, you know, this last cycle, I just felt really off, you know, or whatever the symptom may be. But I need to know you so that you can then relay that to me when things go wrong. I don't know your body like that, you know? It's not my job to know your body that intimately. That's your job to know that. And I think we need to teach girls, young girls, right, teenagers and young women. emmamma: Yeah. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: You need to learn your body. Please check your body every month, right? Do your breast exam, you know? And I joke with, or not a joke, I scold my gals that have an IUD that aren't checking strings constantly. Like, what do mean you've not checked your strings? It is inside of your body. How the hell else am I gonna know where it is if you're not checking it? And so, you know, I think if I were talking to a group of adolescent girls today, I'd say, emmamma: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right, right. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: Please get to know you on all levels, right? You're figuring out who you're gonna be as you adult up, that's great. But I need you to go inward. I need you to find out who you are on the inside. need you to know your body. I need you to know your heart. I need you to know your mind. They're all gonna grow together, but I need you to know who they are at a baseline. emmamma: Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that's so helpful and having that knowledge base, like you said, of like when something is wrong or when something's different, being able to know like, okay, like this is something that's different and therefore it could be something that needs support and being able to reach out. That's so good. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time and talking to us and sharing all the things that you do. What else do you want people to know about maybe your practices or anything else about who you are and how can people connect with you? Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: You know, my mission in life is to spread the light and help people achieve their highest goals. And so I do that by supporting them physically. I do that by supporting them emotionally. I do that by supporting them mentally. And that's what all of my businesses are built on is we've got to help each other, right? We're, we're a global society and we didn't get here as a species by ignoring everybody else. So we need to really take care of each other. ⁓ So you can find me on all the things. ⁓ Google search will get you everything but Lowcountry Wellness Center is my primary care practice. That's Lowcountry-Wellness.com. Center for Healing is my energy healing and my spiritual practice and my hypnotherapy and that's PeaceCenterforHealing.com. And so those are the main two big things that I work in ⁓ and through the Peace Center I've created the Temple of the Rose Society that is the Mary Magdalene Lineage Society and that's its own website too and all of that is on those websites. so emmamma: Awesome. Great. Well, I'll make sure all those things get linked into the show notes so that people can find them, especially if they're local. And I thank you so much for your time into sharing all your knowledge. Yeah, thank you for having me. Absolutely. Dr. Penni Vachon, APRN: Yeah, thank you for having me.