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Neurosurgeon and award-winning author Dr. W. Lee Warren, MD delivers daily prescriptions from neuroscience, faith, and common sense on how to lead a healthier, better, happier life. You can’t change your life until you change your mind, and Dr. Warren will teach you the art of self brain surgery to get it done. His new book, Hope Is the First Dose, is available everywhere books are sold.
Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you. It is Mind Change Monday
on the 19th day of All In August.
I am so grateful and excited to be here with you and that you are going all
in with us. Listen, if you haven't started All In August, it's okay.
Go back. There's an episode every day, and that will help you change your mind
and change your life and find your way forward.
No matter what you're going through, no matter how stuck you feel,
no matter how many times you tried before and haven't been able to get it done.
This month is your month to go all in. And today I have an unbelievable guest
who's going to share her story of how she had to go all in in her life several different times.
Amber Gordon is at Bama Brain Doc on Instagram.
She's got quite the social media following. She is a neurosurgeon from Mobile, Alabama,
and she has an unbelievable story, not only of being one of only a very small
number of female neurosurgeons in the United States and in the world,
but also of facing a major bit of adversity in her life, something serious that
threatened to knock her off track,
threatened her very life, threatened her family.
And she's going to show us today how going all in with your faith and being
willing to fight, even when it's hard, is how you press through no matter what you're dealing with.
Amber's got a great story. She's brilliant. She's accomplished.
She's at the top of her game, at the top of her profession, at the top of my
profession, and a colleague that we've run across each other a couple of times
over the years, but we got to know each other recently because she did a post
about my book, I've Seen the End of You, and I reached out to her.
And that's when I learned the story that she's living through and her family
are showing us what an all-in life looks like.
I've got Amber Gordon, the Bama Brain Doc here on the podcast today.
Let's get after it. Friend, we're back and I'm so excited to introduce you to a new friend today.
I met her through the power of Instagram, and she is a brain surgeon,
one of a very small group of female brain surgeons in the United States.
We'll talk about that in a minute. So she's accomplished, just an incredible achiever.
She's got a great story to tell. We've got Bama Brain Doc Amber Gordon here
with us today. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me.
I'm so honored that you asked me to be here, and I'm excited to share my story with everybody.
It's awesome. I can hear the Alabama in your voice. Did you grow up in Alabama?
I grew up in Southern Alabama, down in Atmore.
And my voice and my accent gets a lot more Southern when I'm talking to my mom.
I love it. You might be, are you the only neurosurgeon that ever came from Atwood, Alabama? Yes.
Yep. I'm like the oxymoron from Atmore.
That's amazing. I'm, as far as I know, the only brain surgeon from Broken Bow,
Oklahoma. So I'm with you. Yes. Yeah.
Local fame. That's great. So what led you to go into medicine, Amber?
What got you to that place in your life? So I started out in biomedical engineering
in undergrad and we had a senior design project.
So there was only four girls in the engineering program and we formed our own
group and we picked deep brain stimulations with Parkinson's disease as our senior design project.
And so I stepped foot into the OR for the very first time as a junior at Vanderbilt.
And I met Pete Kvodrat, who was a neurosurgeon and an engineer.
And I decided that I had to be just like him. It was so inspiring to watch this
awake patient, a hole drilled into their head.
They pass this electrode into the brain and then they turn it on.
And it made so much of a difference in this man's life. He went around that
OR room and he thanked everyone that was in that OR, even me,
even though I had nothing to do with it.
And that is the moment that I decided I had to be a neurosurgeon,
not just a doctor, but a neurosurgeon.
So when I was applying to medical schools, I brought two pictures with me.
I visually started the dichotomy of the pictures.
People don't bring pictures with them anymore because they're all on their phone.
But back in the day, we had real pictures. I brought a picture of me in the OR with Dr.
Conrad doing a DBS case, and I brought a picture of me as an Azalea Trail Maid.
Now, an Azalea Trail Maid is like a big honor in Mobile.
You get to represent the city, but you also get to wear these big enamel dresses.
So those are the two pictures I brought with me to medical school interviews,
and I basically told them, hey, I want to go to medical school to be a nurturer. Wow.
So what led you to think about medicine before that?
Were you already thinking about medicine or did that just all start with neurosurgery?
It all started with neurosurgery.
I think really I was leading more towards going into law school than medicine.
And I was going to be a patent. And that was how I was going to use my engineering in law school.
But yeah, really medicine started all with that senior design project and deep
brazed emulation and have never looked back, never thought about anything else.
Always had that one-tracked mind going into it.
I was very fortunate when I got accepted to medical school.
I also went and talked to one of the neurosurgeons at UAB, Judd Warnkert.
He, at the time, was not the chair
of the department, but he was a young neurosurgeon, and he had a lab.
And so I was able to work in his lab during medical school and do some really
fantastic research with an HSV virus for glioblastomas. traumas.
I really think that helped propel me into neurosurgery. Wow.
So you went all in. You went full scale. I'm going to medical school.
I'm going to become a neurosurgeon.
Was it ever daunting to you, the difficulty at the time?
It's not very common for women to match in neurosurgery programs and become neurosurgeons.
Give us a little insight into what that was like.
I can't tell you how many of my mentors told me that you don't want to be a
servant. You're not going to have a life.
Definitely not neurosurgery. It's the most malignant program you can go into.
Like this is not what you want to be if you want to be a mom and a wife and
have a great work-life balance.
And I guess I'm just one of those kind of people that I don't really like when people tell me no.
So I try to use that to my advantage. And the more people told me no,
the more I'm just kept pushing it and kept being all in for it.
And so that's why on my social media platform, they all started with me wanting
to inspire the next generation of women in medicine, women in neurosurgery specifically.
And that's what I would tell them is, don't listen to people who tell you that
it can't be done because it certainly can be.
It's not an easy road. It's not a path that everyone can take and everyone can
handle, but it can be done.
And there is light at the end of the tunnel. It does get better after residency at you there.
That's right. All right. Where did you go to medical school?
I went to UAB for medical school and for residency. So I spent 10 years at UAB.
Nice. And so you got to know our mutual friend Jay Wellens there at UAB.
I know Dr. Wellens very well.
He was the assistant residency director when I was applying.
So I got to know him very well. He is a great human being and great surgeon.
He is. Jay has been on the podcast. He's also an author. He has a really wonderful
book that he released last year.
And I got to know Jay because I gave a talk at the Alabama Neurosurgery Society
meeting down in, it was at Watercolor down on the beach, probably 2007 or eight or nine, maybe.
And I gave a talk about my time in the Iraq war as a neurosurgeon there.
And Jay invited me up to UAB to speak at the Galbraith. I don't know if you
were. I was there when you spoke at the Galbraith.
You were? So I remember. And I also remember you at Alabama.
I was there for that talk, too.
Yeah. Kristen Riley spoke right after I did. And we talked about how she was
one of the I think maybe the first female faculty member at UAB is amazing.
Yes, she was. She has been a huge mentor for me and just someone that I can emulate my life after.
She's a very accomplished neurosurgeon, very great technical skills,
but also very compassionate, very human, has two boys.
I remember when they were little, they're now in college and beyond.
So she has been a great person for me to really look up to and to emulate my
practice in my life. That's amazing.
Give us a scale. So people probably don't know.
They probably don't have the scale of this, the size of what you've done.
But there's only about maybe 4,000 board certified neurosurgeons in all of America, 300 million people.
How many of those are women? Less than 300. Incredible.
So in the whole of the United States, 300 million people, there's 300 people
that do what you do, that have accomplished what you've accomplished.
So listener, I'm just telling you, when we talk about going all in and going
after this idea, the statistics of what Amber has accomplished here, just incredible.
So I applaud you for not being intimidated, not taking no for an answer,
doing all the things that you've done.
It's just incredible that you've gotten through it. So as you got to the end
of medical school and you started applying to residency programs and all that,
what was that like for you? Was there a backup plan? What if I don't match?
What was your thought process? I've never had a backup plan.
Like I said, I was all in from day one. I knew a lot of the faculty at UAB.
I had spent a lot of time rotating through UAB.
So I was very familiar with that program.
And I can remember sitting down with Mark Cavley, who was the director of the
residency program at the time.
And I said, look, I want to be a neurosurgeon. And he said, great,
you need to come train here.
And I said, it doesn't really work like that. I have to go through this residency match program.
Programmed and so he said okay you bring me your list
of programs that you are matched to so i
said okay so what told me i made a list and i
had probably about 50 places on my list places
that i would if i got an opportunity i would consider going there not just like
any place in the country so i took these this list mark hadley and he sat back
at his desk and he was just like working all over my paintwork finally i said
dr hadley what are you doing and And he said,
oh, I'm working out all these programs. You're not going to get any of these.
I said, what do you mean? And he said, no, you're coming here.
And I said, but I have to apply to programs.
Well, I applied to 10 programs.
I got offered interviews at all 10 programs. I ranked three programs.
And I got my first BAHRST tech, which was UAB.
And again, I just never looked back at it. I don't think that is normal.
I don't think now going through the residency match, I don't think I would recommend
for someone to only apply to 10 programs.
I think that would be short-sighted, but it worked for me.
Incredible. Yeah, actually, I got into neurosurgery very late in medical school
before I got exposed to it. And I only applied to two programs.
Really? I was super late and only two places that had already not capped off.
That was in the days that we were still matching, but most of the programs made
deals with the residents as they rotated through back in those days.
And so most places knew who they were going to take or not take before the match.
So I was late to the process. So it was really all in for me.
I could have ended up being a cardiologist or something. So interestingly,
my year, UAB took two female residents in neurosurgery.
And at the time, it was the only all-female resident route in the country.
Wow. Which was pretty impressive. Now, my co-resident ended up not making it through residency.
She actually had some health issues and mental health issues and ended up choosing a different path.
But yeah, I thought that was pretty impressive that UAB, which is a very southern
place, Alabama, was the only place in the country at the time to have an all-female residency class.
I think that speaks. very well for our state.
It really does. And Jim Markert and Mark Hadley and those guys put together
a really forward-thinking program, too.
I remember always being really impressed with how they thought about how they
were going to train people.
And they just did a great job. Bart Guthrie and all those guys were just tremendous.
Yeah. I used to send y'all a lot of patients when I was in Auburn.
Yeah. Well, that's so great. Now, so let's talk about family for a minute.
So going through this process, you weren't married when you started medical
school yet, right? I was not married when I started medical school.
I got married right at the end of medical school before residency.
So we went on our honeymoon and came back on Sunday and Monday morning, I started residency.
Oh, my goodness. And now no one in my family has anything to do with medicine.
I have no nurses, no doctors, no anything in my family.
When I was an undergrad and I called my mom and dad and said,
hey, I want to go to medical school and I want to be a neurosurgeon.
And a lot of that just said, great, what till he did?
And I said, there's really nothing you can do, but I just want to tell you what
I'm going to do. And so really this was an uncharted territory.
They had no concept of what it was like to be a resident and to be on call.
And my husband certainly had no concept of that. He owns a land in Timbuktu.
So I like to tell people that she grounds me.
He reminds me all the time. He's not my anesthesiologist. I just, I cannot yell at them.
But yeah, he really keeps me grounded. And I think that was great for our relationships.
For a not in residency, I was never at home.
I'd sit in the yard with people or get the phone line connected when we moved into our house.
And he would always make sure I was very well fed.
He would bring food up to the hospital for us. And I don't think I could have
gotten through without him and without my parents behind me cheering me on.
And there were some times when I really second-guessed myself going to residency.
I think that's very moral. I think all of us have that same...
You get into it and really you start to ask yourself, can I do this?
Am I good enough to do this? Am I smart enough?
Can I really handle all the emotions that go along with it? And I definitely
had those questions under residency.
And I can remember one morning, I just looked at my husband and I said,
I don't think I can do this.
In his comment, he like grabbed me up by the shirt and he said,
yeah, put your bing girl panties on and go to work. That's right. Get after it.
So what role did faith play in your ability to persevere when it got hard?
So I will tell you, I have a very strong faith. I'm a Christian.
I don't really talk about that much on my social media platforms or whatever
reason. I just haven't had the opportunity or wanted to share that.
But I'm a very faith-driven person.
And when I was studying for my impact, so to get into medical school.
I remember being very down i wasn't
scoring well and he had a practice test and i
just remember in the back of my mind thinking maybe i'm
not gonna do this maybe this isn't you know what i'm supposed to do and i just
remember having this internal dialogue with god with jesus and just saying look
if this is not what i meant to do just show me and i'll move on to something
else and show me what I really meant to do.
And so while I was studying for the MCAT, I actually checked myself into a hotel
so that I had no distractions, that I was just all in.
And there was this gentleman that came up to me in the lobby and he asked me what I was doing.
And I said, studying for the MCAT, I want to be a doctor, more specifically,
I want to be a brain surgeon.
And he looked at me and he said, you're going to do that and you're going to be great.
And I never saw him again that whole week in the hotel.
And I called him up here at the my son. And then, I see an angel just came and
spoke to me and told me that it was going to be okay, that I was going to be
a doctor, I was going to be a brain surgeon.
And I just remember feeling this big sense of relief, comfort, knowing it.
And so I just took that with me
through medical school and even into residency, even on those dark days.
We see terrible things in neurosurgery. We see young people have terrible diagnosis
through terrible trauma.
We don't know if they're going to live, many of them don't. And really,
I think it's really hard to be in our position as neurosurgeons and not have some plume of faith.
Because you can't rationalize what we see.
There is no rhyme or reason for it. There's no reason certain people are picked
for these things and other people aren't.
And so for me to be able to handle it, I really have to rely on my faith,
on my church, and on my family.
Amen. Let's try. Now, you mentioned social media.
So let's talk about that for a second. At some point along the way,
you decided to start trying to inspire people.
Was that while you were a resident or was it after you finished?
It was a year ago, just a little over a year ago that I started the presence on social media.
In fact, I was very against it. I didn't feel like social media was the right
platform for physicians to be on.
I just felt we really, we are called to be in our profession.
I have a strong feeling about that. And I just didn't feel like it was something
that needed to be aired to the masses.
My mind was changed about that. My marketing team at my hospital actually came
and asked me to be on social media for a Naffy Award.
Now, a Naffy Award in Mobile is a big deal. It is a local newspaper and it's
the Reader's Choice Awards.
And so last year I was nominated for Best Brain Serve in Mobile.
And they came and they wanted me to do this dance to promote Naffy's and to get more votes.
And I laughed in their face. And I said, absolutely not. That is not me.
It's not something that I'm interested in.
It's tech coming back, telling me we need to do this. We've got to get the vote out.
And so finally, I broke down and I agreed to do it. And it was really fun.
And then it got like, I don't know, 10,000 views or something in the first day. It was a big deal.
And then they came back and they said, OK, you've got to do another one.
And I was like, I don't know. there.
But it was a little bit easier to persuade me for the second one.
So I did a second one. And again, it was so fun.
It was fun to interact in that way with the people that I work with in my office, the nurses in the OR.
I really felt like it helped to strengthen our team.
And so I used that as a jump off part to really show the world that you can
be a brain surgeon and a mom and a
wife and you can have it all and
you don't have to sacrifice one for the other and
really you can be all things and i think it's
really hard now for the next generation if they don't see it they don't think
they can do it and so that's what i was really passionate about to begin with
in my social media career is really showing these young females that they can
do anything they set their minds to,
whether it's neurosurgery or engineering or flight and space,
whatever they want to do, you can do it.
I certainly did not think at the beginning of the year when I was reading your
book that I was eating fruit, cancer myself.
It's just one of those things that kind of hit and I pivoted and changed what
I've started talking about on social media.
And it just reflects reflects my journey and my family and what we've been going
through and honestly I think it has helped me to talk about it in a very open
way it's helped me process it and hopefully I can help other people that are
going through the same thing that I've been through.
Wow. Now the listeners are going to go, wait, what? We haven't told that part of the story yet.
But sometime earlier this year, you started noticing some things in your own
body and in your own life that were going on. So unpack that a little bit.
You're now at the, you've gotten through the residency, you're gaining fame
on social media, you've had the child, you have a beautiful son,
your life is boom, it's on track.
And then what happened? So at the beginning of the year, first of all,
I made these New Year's resolutions for myself that I shared on social media.
And those New Year's resolutions were to read more. Your book was one of those.
And to spend more quality time with my family.
And I really think that as a God-dame that this happened to me.
But be careful what you ask for because God's provided me extra time to spend
with my family and more time to read. Maybe not in the way that I wanted.
But at the beginning of the year I started feeling extremely
tired and not not I
need a coffee to pick me up at the end of the day tired it was I woke up tired
was just tired through the day I was going home in the afternoon after I'd finished
clinic and surgery I'd take a nap before I would go pick my son up from school
just so I could finish homework and dinner and get him to bed.
And really, this all came to culmination probably the end of March.
I was around with a nurse practitioner who called.
And literally, every time we would go into a patient's room,
I was having to sit down in the bed with the patient just to be able to get three rounds.
I just, I had no energy. I was feeling a little bit lightheaded. I just knew it wasn't me.
Brooke looked at me and she said, something's wrong. You need to go get checked
out. So I called my friend and primary care doctor.
And I said, hey, can't you just order a bunch of labs? Maybe my thyroid is off.
I don't know. so she ordered this huge lab
panel that came back when i was very anemic hemoglobin
was 6.8 so she called me immediately she's oh my god amber are you okay do we
need to bring you in and give you a blood transfusion tell me what's going on
and i said no i'm okay i'm just very tired she's okay let's send you to your
ob-gyn maybe you need a hysterectomy so we went through Through all of that,
biopsied everything GYN that could be biopsied. It all came back normal.
And so my OB-GYN told me, Amber, you really need to go get a colonoscopy.
And I'm 40 years old. And I looked at her and laughed. And I was like,
I don't have problems there.
She's known you've got to go get a colonoscopy. So I put it off for a while,
probably about a month. And finally, my OB-GYN, endocrine surgery doctor,
took me on a conference call one day.
And they were like, Amber, we're very worried about you. You have to go get a colonoscopy.
So I said, fine, schedule it. Oh, wait, we've got it.
So my husband asked me, as we were driving up to get the colonoscopy,
he said, should I be worried about anything?
And my comment was, no, I think everything's going to be fine.
And then I had the colonoscopy. Pete, it's great sleep. It's not nearly as bad
as what people think it's going to be. The breath is not horrible.
I remember waking up in the recovery room now as a patient, and the gastroenterologist
was talking to the husband.
And I guess I was in and out a little bit, but then she looked at me and she
goes, We found a mass in your colon.
And I looked at her and I said, You're telling me I have cancer?
And she said, No, I don't know that for sure.
And being a doctor, we use all kinds of terms when we're talking to patients.
There's a mass there's an abnormality we see
something that's not normal i just knew in
my mind i said you're telling me it's easier and i said you've got to get me
to dr isaac pain he's the colorectal servant here at bengal infirmary he's one
of my friends so he came and saw me there in the recovery room i can remember
him putting his hand on my head And he said,
we're going to take this out. We can take this out.
No problem. And I said, I want it out as soon as possible. Can you do it tomorrow?
He said, no. I need to get some other stans. Got a CT stan.
Had an MRI of my brain. That's the first thing everybody worried about is your
brain. I have to hang my brace on.
Had a PET scan. The PET scan showed that I had two lymph nodes that were lady level. See them.
We knew that. got noted to surgery. Isaac Payne took me to surgery and he did
a room audit collectively, which I'm a big fan of.
I got to tell you, he took out about 11 inches of my colon and 21 lymph nodes.
And I stayed in the hospital two days and went home.
And weirdly, I felt better after surgery, probably because my hemoglobin and
hematocrit jumped back up to normal and I had energy again and I felt good. it.
And so I was just waiting for that pathology to come back. And the oncologist
called me while I was at home with my family, referring from surgery.
He said, look, those two lymph nodes that we saw in the PET scan,
they were positive. They did have cancer and none of the others did.
And he said, that's great news. We were all thinking that there was going to
be seven, eight plus lymph nodes positive.
And he said, well, we think we got it all with surgery, but we want you to do
too. I fear being just as will caution.
So, um,
I had a port clit in, started talking about chemotherapy.
And this whole world of ontology, it's huge.
And I really knew nothing about it other than the little bit of ontology that
we see of a neurosurgeon, which is very different than general ontology.
And there were all of these treatment options that were given to me.
And you could take oral QA therapy
or you could do it all IV and one was going to be three
months and one was going to be six months and there's this
circulating tumor DNA now that they're doing and
it was just my so I asked for a second opinion I went up to UAB which is home
for Lee now and I got a second opinion and so we decided that we would do three
months of QA therapy all IV the all-stole-fox-c-f-o-l-f-dope-x.
It's been around for a long time. It's an old treatment, chemotherapy.
I tolerated it really well, really had minimal side effects.
Didn't leave my hair, obviously. It has thinned out a little bit, but not too bad.
Did not get neuropathy, which is one of the biggest side effects of whole talks. Thank goodness.
Hands and feet are fine. been very interesting being on this side of medicine
although it's not my first time being on this side of medicine and you don't
know this and none of my social media mans that's either but,
about six months after I finished residency in my first job I started having
terrible headaches horrible headaches and it then it went down my left arm and
so I thought I had a herniated disc So I was going to see a chiropractor,
get a massage, all this kind of stuff.
And finally, one day, the headache got so bad and a whole steel in my arm.
And I told my husband, you got to take him to the hospital.
He did a CK spin and said everything was normal in my brain.
Sent me home, treated me with a complex migraine.
Turns out I had a sacral sinus, transverse sinus and cortical vein thrombosis.
Wow. So I got... I had a neurosurgery problem.
Up to UAV. I spent two weeks at UAV as a patient on the neurosurgery service, nonetheless.
So it has been very interesting. I would not wish that on anyone. Wow. So...
What was it like as a wife and a mom and somebody who medicine to face that
sort of, hey, I could die.
I could die from this at a younger age than I thought. What was that like for
you on an emotional level, psychiatric level, spiritual level?
So I think I had this near death experience already with my sagittal sinus thrombosis.
I did not have a child at that point.
And the two were very different for me. but the
several times I was more focused on really
just me getting better and getting back to work and
then fast forward eight years and
now I have an eight-year-old and I'm facing a cancer diagnosis and literally
I went whole for my colonoscopy and I dropped down on my knees I've never done
that before and I just prayed don't let this be the last summer with sun Son,
don't let this be the last time with my family.
Don't let this be the last time I did no motivation. That was one of those moments
when your faith smashed into all the things you know about science and outcomes
and statistics and lymph nodes and all this stuff in your head.
That's hard to it's hard to let yourself be hopeful, isn't it?
Yeah, we had meetings with our preacher, my baseball class.
It is amazing to see how people lift you up when you need it,
that's right yeah it was very so Amber what
would you say to those people that wonder because a lot of us wonder like when
we're tested or the things that we believe or think we believe do they turn
out to be true to us like your perspective now is it real is faith is it real
does it hold you up when you're hurt when you're scared when the bottom's dropping
out of your world does it hold up
I think I went through several stages after this cancer diagnosis.
One of the first ones was, why me? Why does it have to be me?
I've already cheated death once.
Why me? Why now?
And I really started praying about it. And when I looked at my family,
I was the person that can get through this.
I was the person that can handle chemotherapy. I was the person that can snap back through this.
And so really, God just showed me, why not you?
And so when my mind changed from the why me to, okay, why not me?
I think it really helped me to be able to share it in a public way on social media.
It helps you to be able to talk about it and
talk about it and the people so that other
people know that you can go through it and you can get to
the other side of it and you can be okay and that yes
cancer happens in young people it's not just an oldie thing so that's really
i think the thing that kind of changed in my mind is the why not me from the
why me and i think once i made that That distinction through prayer,
through conversations with my husband, my mom, my dad, really helped me change my focus.
And it changed my positivity and my outlook on everything. Wow.
Have you had it happen to you yet? Because I can tell you from our perspective,
being a bereaved parent, when I started writing about it, when I started sharing
about it with other people, It wasn't long before I started hearing from people,
hey, I wouldn't have had the words to make it through this if you hadn't shared this.
Have you started hearing from your social media people yet that this mission
that you're on now is making a difference?
That's one thing that I want to talk about social media.
Yes, it can be bad if it's used in the wrong way, but it can be such a powerful
tool to educate people and to show people what life can be like. Yeah. And positivity.
And I've had so many people reach out to me through social media to let me know, hey.
I'm having these same symptoms. My doctor wasn't listening to me.
I went in and told him, look, I really think I need a colonoscopy.
Thank you so much. We found Apollo.
We were able to get rid of it. And just knowing that I helped one person really is all I needed.
I just needed to know that I helped one person to make a difference.
But it's been so much more than that.
And I'm really, I'm grateful to my social media family for that because I really
deep That aspect of it helped me through those dark days during 2-1-0 or B-1. That was, woe is me.
How am I ever going to get over this? And really being able to fit in my phone
and look at the positivity and the prayers coming from all over the world.
It just really, it meant a lot to me.
And I kept responding to people on social media saying, the careers are working. They are working.
You're working. work. If you hadn't been on social media, we never would have
met. Obviously, we'd crossed paths a few times before.
You posted a review of my book. I've seen the interview and tagged me in it.
That's why I reached out to you in the first place.
And then a few months later, you shared about your chemotherapy journey,
cancer and all that. That's why you're here on the show today.
So the full circle is that somebody listening to this today is going to be encouraged
with your story to chase a dream that they might not have been willing to chase
or been too scared to chase or to face an obstacle that they didn't think they
had the courage to face. You're making a difference, Amber.
And I'm so grateful that we've had a chance to talk. And I keep looking forward
to how your story is going to unfold in the future as you go along.
And just give us maybe if somebody's in the acute phase of what they're going
through, they just got the diagnosis, they just found out about the thing,
they're right in the thick of it.
What would you say a pastoral word to somebody who's going through that massive
thing right now? I would tell them, let people lull you.
And people show love in different ways. And for us, we had an outpouring of
people wanting to bring us dinner.
I have friends wanting to take you to chemotherapy. And at first,
I was a little hesitant to let them in that way.
Honestly, I think it's that love that really got me through it.
And my advice to anybody would be, let people love you. Let them show you love.
Let them crave for you. It just, it really makes a world of difference.
I had no idea having dinner ready for me every day, such a big deal, but it was.
It was like the highlight of my base on how I was looking at my app and seeing,
oh, our Friends for the Sunday School are bringing us this and this to eat tonight.
It was great having that. And I really think that not only my family,
but our church family really holds to us.
And it's been a whole family thing. My son has been very involved.
At first, I was very hesitant to talk to him about it. I didn't know how to approach that.
I didn't really want to say the word cancer to him. He had a friend in school.
So he was in second grade last year. His friend's mom died from breast cancer.
And that really hit Alexander and so she knew what that word cancer meant and
I really didn't want to say that to him because I didn't want him to worry.
So we told him about surgery and he's very interested in all of it.
He wants to see the spars and what did they take out with surgery.
He was very interested. He went there and he went with me to get hooked up one
day. He met with me the last day to get disconnected.
He was very mindful of all that. And over the course of the last three months,
we have shared with him everything.
He knows that Tommy had colon cancer and he knows that I went through chemotherapy.
And he also knows that I'm going to be okay.
Knew that this is hopefully the end
of it there's still some other tests that we have to do to
follow up on this but hopefully this is the end and i
think that was something that nobody can teach you how to do this in that open
school they don't teach you how to talk to people about these bad diagnoses
it's just something that you have to engage through your experiences and your
faith really and how to approach patients with that that's really what i used
to approach out to dinner.
That's the little hardest thing I've ever done is talk to my eight-year-old
about me having kids every night.
Like, then this were on the other side of the hats. He actually broke my heart
the other night. It was his first day back at school, and he loves school.
He's always at school. He loves me with his photos at school.
And the first day of school, you could see in his pictures a lot,
he was just not into it. He wasn't smiling.
So he came home from the first day, and I was like, can we And he looked at
me and he said, is this your last summer with me?
So he did whistle to the end. He thought. Whistled to the end and I was like,
no, sweetheart. This is mommy's office.
Summer. I didn't work with summers. I could spend all summer with you.
We can have so much fun. This is not my last summer.
And that, it is quite my heart. No kidding.
We're three up now and he's at school and he's loving it. That's awesome. Awesome.
Before we go, so people in 150 or more countries are going to hear this.
100,000 people around the world will be encouraged with your story today.
Is it okay? All those people are going to come together and pray for you.
So can we just pray for you now? Is that okay? Absolutely. Yes.
Okay. Father God, just come before you right now as this community of people
all around the world who are,
So committed to going all in for you, going all out in our lives.
And we gather around Amber Gordon today, this young neurosurgeon who's so inspiring
and she's done so much and is going through so much.
We just want to ask you, Father, as her great physician, her creator,
every cell in her body, she's fearfully and wonderfully made.
And you've got a holy mission for her to inspire and encourage people and her family.
And we just ask you that you take dominion over those cancer cells,
eradicate every last one of them, that you strengthen her body,
you embolden her for the mission and the work to which you've called her,
and that you put your hand on her and her family, that they would come against
any challenge that would limit or harm them,
and you just shine her light so that she can inspire and help others.
Father, we're grateful for the work that she's doing, the life that she's living,
and the way that you've put her in this place at this time to encourage all
of us. In Jesus' name we pray.
Amen. Amen. Thank you so much.
Thank you, my friend. God bless you. Thank you. What a great talk.
Thanks, Amber. Yeah, thank you so much. Oh, that's going to help people.
I'm sorry. I wasn't prepared to cry.
That's what's so great about podcasting and everything is you just you have
a chance to show a little different side of yourself to we're in this world.
We're always professional and we're the expert and we're dealing with patients.
But when you start having a conversation
with people, you just never know where it's going to go. Right.
It's so good. I'm grateful for your time. And we, Lisa and I and her dad who
lives with us, have been praying for you.
And I just I'm thankful for you. a friend. What an incredible conversation with Dr.
Amber Gordon. Please follow her on Instagram at BamaBrainDoc on Instagram.
She is showing us what an all-in life looks like. If you haven't gone all-in
yet, my friend, there's only one thing left to do.
Change your mind and change your life. And the good news is you can start today.