When the Doctor Becomes the Patient: Overcoming Cancer & Finding Unexpected Blessings with Dr. Robin Hall

Robin Hall, she's discovered what it means to be on the other side of illness.

Through our interview, you will hear the same thing that I did.

Is that who she is, what her journey is, it's a testament to resilience, to intuition.

And of course, the unexpected blessings that come out of life's toughest challenges.

This, my friend, is all inside of today's episode, episode 309.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, are you ready to flip the script on life?

Did this doors to better days.

And that's exactly what we do here at Quick Race and Inspiration.

Your host, Kevin Lowe, take the flip and script on your online.

And over 20 minutes of being completely blind, it is quite inspiration, motivation, and encouragement to just review.

Stop.

SPEAKER_01: What's up, my friends?

Welcome back into the podcast.

I am excited to have you here with me today, getting ready to introduce you to Dr.

Robin Hall, a woman with an amazing story to share.

But before I do, I want to remind you that I still do have going on my summer special where I'm offering free 30-minute one-on-one coaching sessions all summer long.

All you have to do to sign up is text Summer 2024, all one word, no spaces, summer 2024 to the phone number 33777.

That is 3377.

That is, of course, in the show notes if that makes life easier.

But text summer2024 to that phone number, and I will give you a link to my calendar for you to book that totally free coaching call with me.

And one last announcement before our interview with Dr.

Robin Hall is I want to give a shout out to one of my biggest fans.

And that is my mom, Teresa Lowe.

Her birthday is this week, and I just want to say, happy birthday, mom.

Thank you for always supporting me, supporting the podcast, and just being an awesome person in my life.

If you would like to hear more about my mom, be sure to check out today's show notes where I will leave a link where I interviewed her not too long ago.

With that, here is my interview with Dr.

Robin Hall.

SPEAKER_02: So I was one of the few female physicians in my medical school class, and that was quite challenging.

I faced a lot of stereotyping.

Blue-eyed blonde people would say, Well, you don't look like a doctor, and I'd say, Well, what's a doctor supposed to look like?

But I felt like I had to work harder than the men, but I'm really glad that I did that because I've had 32 years of a wonderful career meeting lots and lots of interesting people, and that was what I was supposed to be doing.

That was my God-given purpose.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that is absolutely amazing.

Wow.

And I mean, talk about just the resiliency within you to pursue that, especially, you know, kind of against the odds in terms of the fact that, you know, you didn't have family history.

You were a woman going into this male-dominated, you know, profession.

I mean, that just speaks highly of you at a young age.

SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you.

I tend to, once I decide that I want to do something, I don't ever give up.

And and it was tough.

I will tell you, that first year in medical school, because I'd been out of college for four years, it was really different.

I had to study a lot different, a lot harder than I had to before.

And there were times that I asked myself, why did I leave Proctor and Gamble?

You know, I was making a decent income, and then you go into medical school and you make nothing.

And you are spending so many hours studying, and it's hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

You know, you really have to set aside immediate gratification because it's much later down the road.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.

Now, did you throughout your career always practice, you know, like working with the same type of patients, or did your kind of career evolve into other aspects of medicine?

SPEAKER_02: Well, I'm board certified in family medicine.

That was my residency program.

And I had a private practice right out after I finished my residency.

And a few years later, I sold that practice to a nonprofit health system.

It was not something that I wanted to do, but there was a lot of changes going on in managed care medicine at that time, and three different hospital groups approached me to buy me out, and I ended up selling because it's very difficult to compete against a big system like that.

What a lot of people don't realize is that you have to negotiate for your reimbursement rates, and a solo doctor doesn't have the negotiating power that a large health care system would have with the insurance companies.

And so back then, some, and I don't know if it's still that way now, I'm sure it probably is, but Managed Care Plan could say, well, we have enough doctors in this area.

We don't need you on our plan.

Well, if that was the case, then you wouldn't be able to get those patients that are on, you know, Blue Cross, Blue Shield, or United Healthcare or whatever plan that it was.

So I sold the practice and I became the lead physician for this hospital group and worked for them for 10 years.

And then I just became very disillusioned with corporate medicine, with all the paperwork, with all of the insurance requirements.

You know, my whole purpose was to take care of people, not paperwork, to put my stethoscope on the patient, not the paperwork.

And so I took a huge leap of faith, midlife, and decided to start a concierge practice.

And that was unheard of in 2005 when I did that.

And in fact, people thought I was absolutely crazy.

They said, you know, you've had this great career, you've been close to new patients for years, and you're gonna start over again.

But I knew that that's what I was supposed to do because a concierge practice is a situation where you take less patience, but you're able to spend more time with them and really take time to educate them about prevention.

And it's a fee-based system where they pay a membership and get all their care for that membership.

And it's really the kind of care that everybody deserves.

Unfortunately, not everybody can do it, but it's a different economic model, and it was very rewarding for me.

Despite the naysayers, it was a thriving practice, and I just sold it a couple of years ago to one of my colleagues.

SPEAKER_01: Okay, interesting.

I'm going to assume that that probably leads into my next question, and that is I read something, and it's you talked about the difference between optimal health care and sick care.

Talk to me about that.

SPEAKER_02: Well, typically people go to the doctor when they're sick.

They call up and say, I have a sore throat or a rash or chest pain, whatever it is.

In the insurance world, in the managed care world, you are trading volume for reimbursement.

So you see a lot more patients for less reimbursement.

And you really only have time to take care of that one complaint or that one symptom that the person has.

And that was very disturbing to me because a symptom sometimes is just a sign of something bigger that's underlying.

And I just never was trained to put a band-aid on everything or give a pill for every ill.

But my training was to look at the whole person.

And I know that when you're having to see patients so fast and you don't really get all of the history, there's things that you can miss.

And so the straw that broke the camel's back was one day a young woman said she was coming in for a sore throat.

But when I walked into the room, she was crying.

And when I asked her what was going on, she said that she had been date raped.

Well, you can imagine that's a far cry from a sore throat.

And that is not something that I could just say, I'm really sorry that happened, but I have to move on to the next patient because I was only given five minutes to see you.

You know, that just goes against everything that we stand for.

And interestingly enough, in medicine, we always say things happen in threes.

I had two or three of those kind of incidents where I thought that I was walking into one situation that was going to be a quick visit, and it turned about to be something much more serious.

And so when that happened, I just started praying about it.

I just knew that something had to give, that I needed to get back to what I was really trained to do, and that was to take care of the whole person.

And then I heard about this concept of concierge medicine.

And so I kept praying about it.

And one day I went home to my husband and I said, You're gonna think I'm crazy, but I want to quit my job and start this unique model of medicine.

And thank God I have a very understanding husband.

And he said, You need to do what you feel like you need to do, and I'll be there to support you.

So that's what I did, and it took two or three years to really build it up because nobody, I was one of the first in Texas and in the United States to have this kind of model.

And people didn't know how to advertise it.

The bankers didn't want to support it, even though I had a very good track history.

They thought it was going to be too big of a risk.

But I was able to get it going, and then I was able to practice optimal care.

And what I mean by that is optimal care is keeping people healthy, not just seeing them for a symptom.

And so in the new practice, the physical exams would be about three hours long because I would go over an extensive amount of lab work with them.

I would do a head-to-toe physical, which is everything from skin check to musculoskeletal exam to neurologic exam to talking to them about their family history, all of the things we were trained to do, but time did not allow us to do.

And because of that model, I know that I saved lives that I wouldn't have saved in a different model.

Because sometimes what a lot of people may not realize is that I'll take, for instance, a rash.

Somebody can come in with a rash, and a typical knee-jerk reaction for many doctors would be: here, use this cream, and if it doesn't go away in a few days, call me back.

But that rash can actually be a sign of an underlying illness.

And if you just put a band-aid on it, or like I say, give a pill for every ill, you may be missing something that's brewing that you could catch early and give a very different outcome to that patient.

Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.

100%.

SPEAKER_02: So that's optimal care.

And so I felt like I was really doing my job if the patients weren't having to come in because we were doing all the appropriate screening and they knew how to take care of themselves, they knew how to eat properly, they knew about their genetics because we did nutritional education, we tested for genetics that a lot of people don't even know exist.

For instance, there's a heart attack gene.

A lot of people don't know about that.

If you have the heart attack gene, it doesn't mean you're gonna have a heart attack, but it means you're at increased risk.

And so I'm going to be paying a lot more attention to that aspect in that person as a maybe with someone else.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.

Now, I know that you're not in that field anymore, but is that a trend that would pick up more popularity?

SPEAKER_02: Well, there's more and more doctors converting to concierge medicine, but one of the things that is confusing to people is they think that every concierge doctor is the same, but but it's not.

I had my own model, my own way of doing things, and that included a lot of this.

Well, I had a stroke and heart attack program called the Bell Donine Method, and we did peptide therapy, hormone therapy.

We did a lot of things as part of my concierge practice.

Other doctors don't have theirs set up that way.

Basically, what's the same across the board is that the person pays a membership, and some concierge doctors may take a couple of hundred, some people may take several hundred patients.

And so having that access to a personal doctor that you can reach 24-7 is what is consistent throughout concierge medicine.

But then how they run their practice and what they offer for that membership fee is what's different.

But yes, there's many, many more concierge physicians now than there were when I started.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah.

It's really a unique way of looking at medicine.

I think it's it's so very different than what we're used to.

How long would you end up being in this role, having this practice, until a period of your life that you refer to as the uh perfect trifecta?

SPEAKER_02: So I had that practice for 18 years.

And the only reason I retired early was because of the perfect trifecta.

Would you like for me to go into that?

SPEAKER_01: I would love to learn about the perfect trifecta.

Okay.

SPEAKER_02: So here I am going along in my concierge practice.

Everything's going great.

I have a thriving practice.

I needed to bring in another doctor because we had grown so much and had a loving husband and a daughter, and that's where that quote comes in: Life is what happens when you're making other plans.

So one morning, my husband and I were getting ready for church, and he said, Robin, I've got this lump in my neck.

Would you come feel this?

And I went over and I felt up the lump.

And with my medical training, I knew initially, I knew immediately that we had a problem, that he probably had cancer, and that this was either a lymph node that was metastatic from another cancer, or it could be a lymphoma.

Lymphoma is cancer, you know, the lymph nodes.

And so I got him in to have the evaluation, and unfortunately, it was not only lymphoma, but it was stage four lymphoma.

And it doesn't matter if you're a doctor or not, when you hear that C-word, it's scary.

It's scary for everyone.

And so I found myself in the first phase of that trifecta, and that was as a caregiver.

And so it's very, very different to be a caregiver and watch the person that you love go through chemotherapy and watch what chemotherapy does to their body and how weak they get.

And it was very, very difficult because at the same time, I'm trying to run a business and see my patients and be there for my husband.

So they don't teach you that in medical school, you know, taking care of your patients in the office and in the hospital is very different than caregiving at home.

And so I walked along his side, and then five years later, one morning I get out of the shower and I see that one of my breasts is larger than the other.

And that's not something that you want to see if it's a new finding.

Now, a lot of women are not symmetrical, but if it's something new, that's a warning sign.

And um I checked myself.

I also felt a mass.

And this was very disconcerting because I had just had a mammogram and an ultrasound seven months before that, and it was perfectly normal.

But uh I got in to the doctor, and lo and behold, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.

So that's the perfect trifecta.

I now have a husband with stage four cancer that I'm caring for.

I'm a physician caring for other patients, and now I have breast cancer.

The doctor's not supposed to get sick.

You know, the doctor would supposed to be the one taking care of everyone else.

And so my life was turned upside down in a matter of minutes, and I had to make a lot of changes to take care of myself and the practice.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.

Your breast cancer, what stage was it?

SPEAKER_02: Well, fortunately, we caught it very early, and so it was at the first stage, and I only had to, well, I had to make a very difficult decision, and that was to have a double mastectomy, because the size of the tumor was a problem, and it was with only one millimeter of my skin, it could have come out through my skin.

But the godsend from the whole thing was that it had not gotten into my lymph nodes, which is highly unusual with the size of tumor that I had, and uh so I did not have to have chemotherapy.

The mastectomy was difficult enough emotionally and physically, but I just feel blessed that I didn't have to have chemotherapy.

And then eight weeks later, I went back to surgery and had reconstruction.

SPEAKER_01: Wow.

SPEAKER_02: I was out of the office about three months.

SPEAKER_01: Wow, wow, wow, wow.

What a um rough period of time between your husband and you, and of course, caring for other sick people at work.

SPEAKER_02: Um You know, it was very, it was very difficult, and I was just so blessed that I had another doctor that and a nurse practitioner that took up the slack and they took care of the patients while I was out.

And, you know, in a concierge practice, I limited mine to 200 patients.

And to give you kind of an idea, most doctors in a managed care settings have several thousand patients on their profile.

And so 200 patients doesn't sound like a lot, but with the depth of what we delivered, if I took any more than that, I wouldn't be able to deliver the kind of care that I was promising.

So you really get to know those people very well.

And we were very transparent with them.

I told them that I had breast cancer and I didn't want them to worry about me not coming back and that they were in good hands.

But when I went back to work, I just started having this nagging feeling or divine message, whatever you want to call it, that I was supposed to go ahead and retire early.

Now, this was not in my game plan at all.

I love practicing medicine.

I love the challenge of figuring out difficult diagnosis, I love the social aspect of it, everything about it, but I just kept feeling that I was supposed to step away.

But I didn't know where that was coming from.

But it was like a sense of impending doom, and I didn't know if something was going to be changing with my husband.

By this time, he was still doing well.

He but he'd been through three totally different chemo regimens, and they had told Him, there was nothing else they could offer him.

They said he was too old to have a bone marrow transplant because it would be too difficult for him.

And but he was he was persevering, he had a great mindset, he was doing well.

So I didn't know if that feeling of impending doom was about him or if something was about to happen to my father, because my father was in his middle 90s at that time.

And this was two years, almost three years ago.

And so I went to my husband and I told him that.

And I went to my colleague and said, you know, I know this wasn't the plan, but I really feel like I need to retire early.

I really feel like there is a reason for this.

And so again, praise the Lord, he was able to get the funding and bought me out.

And then I worked for him part-time until last year.

And just a couple of months or so after I retired, my brother-in-law, my husband's brother, was diagnosed with metastatic bladder cancer.

And they lived in Arizona, and we were able to go and be with him and his wife, and he wanted me, my brother-in-law wanted me to be the go-between or the liaison between the oncologist and him because he didn't know what questions to ask.

And he wanted me to help him with that.

As difficult as that was, because I was the one that had to tell him that they didn't think he was going to make it more than three months.

As difficult as that was, I would have never had that opportunity to help if I had not gone ahead and listened to that voice that said, you need to step away.

So that whole feeling of impending doom, that's what it was.

It was my brother-in-law.

And unfortunately, he did succumb to his illness uh in less than three months.

But, you know, my cancer was a catalyst to me retiring early, being there for my brother-in-law, continuing to be there for my husband, and for writing my book.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah.

Wow, wow, wow.

The three months that you were there helping to take care of your brother-in-law, did you know that it was going to be such a short amount of time?

SPEAKER_02: Well, we weren't there the entire three months.

That's just what they, you know, told him that he wouldn't make it that long.

We got there when he went into the hospital, and I was the one, he didn't want to hear it from the oncologist.

So I was the one that had to tell him they didn't think that it would last longer than that.

So we were there during the time that he found out and you know what the prognosis was and all of that.

And then we came back home, but we were in touch with them all along the way and supporting them how we could.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah.

Wow, that is such a rough time.

And I can't help but but wonder from the perspective coming from a doctor where you spent your career obviously not curing cancer, but you're there, you're helping people, you're taking care of people, you're making them well when they're sick, you're keeping them from getting sick.

I can only imagine that it has to be difficult to be there as just a family member when you can't fix it.

SPEAKER_02: It's very difficult because as a physician, that's what you want to do.

You want to fix it.

And it's hard when we can't fix it.

And it's hard enough when it's your patients, but when it's somebody in your own family, it's very difficult.

But it also makes you step back and realize, you know, you're not God and you're just a tool to help people.

And sometimes health care is not curing, but just being there to care and support the person.

And so I feel like that that is what I was able to do.

And like I said, even though even though it was difficult, that was the blessing in disguise.

And that's what I've learned through my entire career, is that many times you'll see things that are difficult or you'll face them yourselves.

But if we look back, and sometimes it's hindsight, sometimes we don't see it at the time, but there's usually something positive that comes from that.

And like I say, my cancer diagnosis was the catalyst to me shifting to pivoting into a different part of my life, but I'm still fulfilling my mission and speaking, doing podcasts through my book to encourage people and inspire people to take care of their health and to realize that tomorrow is not promised.

We have to enjoy every day and find the good in every day because life can change at the drop of a hat.

And you hear that all the time.

It all almost sounds trite, but when it happens to you, you know, it doesn't matter how much money you have in the bank.

If you don't have your health, you don't have anything.

SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.

Health is everything.

SPEAKER_02: Health is wealth, and it's just an interesting dichotomy that my whole career has been focused on prevention.

And then, you know, we end up with this cancer situation.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah.

Before I ask you to start diving into your book, can you share with me about your husband, the outcome of his cancer?

SPEAKER_02: He is doing great.

He's eight years out now.

And uh a couple, well, just a few months ago, he finally was able to have his chemotherapy port removed.

And one of the blessings that we've experienced through this whole ordeal is that we've stopped and taken time to smell the roses.

We've been able to travel, you know, our whole perspective on life has changed.

He's actually still working full-time.

He's a neuropsychologist and a researcher in Alzheimer's disease.

And he feels good, he looks so much better, and he is a walking miracle.

Back when I was in medical school, somebody that had stage four non-Hodgkin's lymphoma did not have a good prognosis.

And I will tell you, we had some very close calls, but they have new treatments now available.

And I think that our faith, his positive mindset, and what we do to try to take care of ourselves has been the difference in his survival.

So, yes, he's doing great, and I'm doing great.

So we feel very, very blessed.

SPEAKER_01: Well, I think we all had a big sigh of relief.

Oh my goodness.

I I was I was scared to ask that question, and I thought, oh, please let it be a happy ending.

SPEAKER_02: You know, when you live it, it's it's hard to, and and all of our friends, you know, are so proud of him and everything, and and family, and everybody talks about him being a miracle.

So I forget that not everybody knows he's doing well.

We hadn't had to that part in the discussion, had we.

SPEAKER_01: Yes, absolutely.

Oh wow.

So here you are.

You you you sold your practice.

You you you had this this feeling that you needed to, you got that answer soon after.

You then were able to be there to help care for uh, you know, your brother-in-law.

He then passes away.

What do you do then?

Obviously, at some point a book came about.

How did the book come about?

What were your thoughts of what in the world do I do with my life now?

SPEAKER_02: Well, you know, in 32 years of practice and taking care of thousands of patients, I noticed, uh, I observed the difference in how people would react to setbacks.

And so some people would be very courageous and fight things head on.

Other people would let illness define them or a life, life-altering diagnosis define them.

But I was very encouraged over the years by seeing the people that looked at the bright side that saw that there was a reason for that wake-up call.

And in my own life, I had other situations where I had a diagnosis that ended up having a positive outcome.

And I thought, you know, if I've experienced this and I've seen all these patients experience this, I think this would be a good book to have a compilation of these stories of people that have had all different kinds of diagnoses, not just cancer, but positive things that came from it that would not have happened had they not gone through that journey.

And you know, Kevin, not all adverse health situations are life-threatening, but all of them are life-changing.

And as you know from your own personal story, you go through denial at first when you get a diagnosis, even if it's something like diabetes or hypertension.

It doesn't have to be cancer.

And then you get to a point where you either accept it and you start processing it and start working with it and making the best of it, or you can go the other way where you become a victim.

And I wanted to give people hope and inspiration that despite some very difficult things that people go through, many times it took that wake-up call to have an epiphany or to find your purpose or to reconnect with family members or to do something for other people.

And so that's how that book came about.

And it's a compilation of stories.

Some of them were my patients, some are friends of mine, and some were uh referred to me from across the country.

And so that came out in November, and it's been in the bestsellers list several times in six different categories since it came out.

And I've just gotten a lot of positive feedback from people that it really helped them when they saw what other people were dealing with and overcome.

And it's helped them change their mindset.

So if it helps one person, that's what it was all about.

And that's that's how it came about is just observing different people and their reactions to diagnoses.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I just I love that so much.

Such a beautiful take on what otherwise is can be sad, it can be scary.

But the other side of illness, I I love it.

Was that the first book that you've ever written?

SPEAKER_02: Yes.

I've written for newspapers and magazines before, but I had never written a book, and it had been on the back burner of my mind for years.

But after our situation, I went out, I said, this is a perfect time to write this now.

Before I never really had time.

Took me a year and a half to write this book, and it was like a full-time job.

And I, you know, interviewed all the different people and then I wrote it in first person.

But that was my first book, and I may have a sequel to it later on.

I haven't started that now.

It's too soon yet.

SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.

Before we even continue, can you please tell us where we can find your book at?

SPEAKER_02: Yes, it's on Amazon.com.

You can buy it on Amazon or Barnes and Noble, and it's the other side of illness, unexpected blessings.

SPEAKER_01: I will be positive that I link to both of those inside of the show notes for anybody interested.

Dr.

Robin, it has been such a joy talking with you today, hearing your story, your personal journey, your your career journey.

When you look back on it all, what do you feel like is the biggest, most important lesson that you've learned personally?

SPEAKER_02: I think the biggest lesson is just really cherishing every single day that we have.

You know, when we're kids, we're we're kind of think we're invincible.

And as you get older, you start appreciating your health more.

But, you know, before my cancer and dealing with my husband's cancer, I was such a perfectionist.

I'm not saying I'm perfect at not being a perfectionist now, but I'm a lot better.

And I've learned to set boundaries, healthy boundaries.

I've learned to take time for fun and develop friendships and have a tribe around me and let other people help me.

I've learned so many things along the way, but if I had to pick one overriding thing, it's just to cherish every moment that you're able to get out of bed and do things and feel good.

And despite the trials and tribulations, life is a blessing.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.

So beautiful.

Again, thank you so much for being here, for sharing your story.

I just am so grateful.

SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you.

I appreciate you having me.

SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.

For you listening today, my hope is you feel the same as me.

That we just sat here and we listened to this amazing woman share her story, the the parts of life that are difficult, yet the way in which she sees things, the other side of the illness, it just reminds us that there's always a rainbow after the rain.

My friend, get up there and enjoy this day.

This is a great race and it's great.