Dr. Linda Plunkett — Ballroom Dancing Through Brain Surgery

Dr. Linda Plunkett was a practicing clinical psychologist with a counseling practice, a ballroom dancing habit, and no idea anything was wrong — until the people around her noticed she wasn't acting like herself and an MRI found a tennis-ball-sized tumor in her frontal lobe. She talks with Jo about interviewing brain surgeons, the eight-hour surgery, the years of fibromyalgia that followed, and the moment ten days into recovery when she says a hand pulled her back — witnessed, she says, by her husband from the top of the stairs. Two books came out of it, both because people kept asking her to write it down. The third is about the storms you don't see coming.Key Moments• 00:58 — End of 2012: a tennis-ball-sized meningioma in the frontal lobe• 01:08 — She didn't notice anything was wrong. Everyone around her did• 02:39 — Interviewing brain surgeons, including the one who offered to go through her nose• 03:02 — Choosing the surgeon on the grounds that he hadn't lost anybody yet• 04:37 — Coming out of an eight-hour surgery feeling like an empty vessel• 04:47 — Told three separate times in thirteen years that nothing more could be done• 06:02 — Why she says you don't stop at one or two opinions• 08:12 — Fibromyalgia, sleep loss, and a brain rewiring itself• 08:20 — The journal that became Supernatural Rescue• 13:28 — Ten days in, at the front door, at her lowest — and the hand she says pulled her back• 17:42 — Asking "why me," and the answer that showed up six months later• 21:21 — Still competing in ballroom dancing in her 60s, through all of it• 24:00 — A hurricane, no word from her husband, and the seed of book threeTakeawayThree times she was told there was nothing left to try, and three times she went looking anyway. Her point isn't that the doctors were villains — it's that a specialist who runs out of tools tends to stop at the edge of their own toolbox, and nobody is going to walk past that edge on your behalf.Find Dr. Linda Plunkett• Website: http://lindasplunkett.com• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@authorlindaplunkett• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindaplunkett/Linda's Books• Supernatural Rescue: From Broken to Beautiful — [AMZN.TO LINK 1]• Living a Positive Life in a Negative World: My Uphill Journey (Gatekeeper Press) — [AMZN.TO LINK 2]• Book three, on weathering the unexpected, is in progressAs an Amazon Associate, Empty Hell earns from qualifying purchases. Buying through these links costs you nothing extra and helps keep the show running.Everything Empty Hell: https://linktr.ee/EmptyhellThis episode covers serious illness, chronic pain, and a period of despair during recovery. Nothing here is medical advice.