Dawn Damon: Well, bravehearts, my guest today is a registered nurse, board-certified health and wellness nurse coach, the founder of Wellspring of Life Coaches, who is passionate about helping midlife women who are in seasons of transition, and that's us, isn't it? Mm-hmm. And in so many ways, she has overcome. Please welcome my guest today, Mandy Horn.

Dawn Damon: Welcome, Mandy!

Mandy Horne: Hi. Thank you for having me, Dawn.

Dawn Damon: We're so glad to have you. Mandy, your story includes so many incredible, brave seasons, from these major health things that we just talked about at 19, then motherhood, adoption, burnout, and starting a business coaching. Just tell us, looking back as you see, how did those brave defining moments shape who you are today?

Mandy Horne: Yeah. I would probably say that sometimes bravery is just being honest with the season that you're in, because we go through multiple seasons of our lives. It's just realizing that what you're in, what you're doing is no longer working, and admitting that, admitting that you're tired, you're burned out, whatever it is that you're going through, that these changes...

I know a lot of women, like, grieve some of these changes they go through- Mm-hmm ... especially that midlife season, empty nest, all of those things. But knowing that you're where you're supposed to be for a reason, and if you sense God calling you into something else or redirecting you, to just be still and listen, and to hear where he's leading you, so.

Dawn Damon: Yes. Can you share with us just a little bit about that journey? I mean- Mm-hmm ... especially the story, you know, at 19, having this predisposition to heart disease. Mm-hmm. And then your motherhood, adoption. Just give us a brief intro of some of your experiences.

Mandy Horne: Yeah, definitely. Okay. So, when I was 19, it started a little bit before that, like into my senior year of high school, just started having some major health stuff. It was misdiagnosed basically for an entire year, just because of my age. Mm-hmm. And I also had been to the same family practice physician since I was a baby, so he kind of knew me, and he was like, "Oh, you just have, you know, a new onset of asthma," things like that. So I'm gonna give, like, the short version of this, okay, 'cause it's gonna be a long story.

And I was having a lot of vomiting at that time, too, which we later found out was my liver, um, being poisoned basically. So that just kind of fast-forwarded everything. Like, he sent me in for testing, got me into cardiologists. All of these things moved very quickly to where all of a sudden I was at the hospital, I was having my first open-heart surgery. It didn't go well. They ended up, long story short, doing two more. I was there for a full six weeks with those three heart surgeries. And the reason it took so long, they were really trying not to have to replace any of my heart valves, so that I wouldn't be on blood thinners long term for the rest of my life, and the risks that come with that with pregnancies and all of that. So that's the very short part. I can go in more depth if you'd like to.

Dawn Damon: I know, and I asked you kind of a loaded question. Like, how- Yeah ... can you explain all of this in just a matter of time?

Mandy Horne: Yeah.

Dawn Damon: But basically, this doctor saved your life is what I'm hearing. Yeah. Because without that, uh, in God's sovereignty, he saw to it that you got that doctor. And then you, you did pretty well, although they probably were saying to you, you know, getting pregnant would be, could be very dangerous.

Mandy Horne: Yeah.

Dawn Damon: And yet motherhood was one of your desires.

Mandy Horne: Oh, it was like the only thing I ever dreamed of being a child was growing up being a mom. You know, that's all I really cared about. And I had other dreams of maybe jobs and stuff, but they were really, would be on the back burner compared to wanting to be a mom. So that was probably the biggest push during those heart surgeries. I didn't wanna have the valve replaced because, at that point back in '96, they weren't quite where they are now. Knowing that, you know, their people do do well long term.

Dawn Damon: Thank you.

Mandy Horne: And yeah, so we didn't know what the future held at that point, and I thought I was gonna be having surgeries all the time. Whether it's God just intervening and taking care of my heart or- Yeah, I mean, I, I really think it is, 'cause there's been just crazy things over the years, and God has always just taken care of it. I do sometimes think that at some point I'll need heart surgery again, but hopefully not. You never know. Our God is mighty and can do anything, so. But yeah, to fast-forward to the question of motherhood, I ended up falling in love with my husband. We got married. I still had that dream and desire to just…

I knew adoption was part of our story, was gonna be a part of our story, and my husband always dreamed that too before we even met. But I wanted to experience pregnancy so badly, and I just cried out to the Lord, like, "Please, just let me experience it once. Just let me enjoy it, to know what it's like, to experience that, because it's such a desire of my heart." And then I said, "And a little cherry on top, could you make it a little girl with blonde hair and blue eyes?"

Dawn Damon: Ah.

Mandy Horne: And is she? She is, yes, yes. Oh. So long story short, like, I went to some perinatal doctors in Austin, Texas, things like that, just to make sure, and they were like, "Oh, yeah, no problem. You just kinda gonna need to stay on top of it, you know, do pregnancy tests frequently, so as soon as you find out you're pregnant, get off of the warfarin medication and onto heparin injections." And so it's like, okay, sounds easy enough. It didn't go quite that easily.

Dawn Damon: It didn't go that easily, from what I'm reading. What happened after she was born?

Dawn Damon: Yeah.

Mandy Horne: Yeah, so just a few little hospitals. And they had a goal of simply trying to keep you stable. We don't wanna put an epidural in you, because we don't know if there could be a risk of bleeding in your spine or things like that, being on blood thinners. There was a whole plan between the hematologist and the OB doctor at that time, but things didn't go exactly how they were supposed to, so I ended up having a C-section, never dilated past one after 19 hours of labor. Oh. It was horrible, but that's okay. Everyone has their lovely birth story for sure.

Dawn Damon: Mad respect. Yeah.

Mandy Horne: Yeah, so I went for a C-section. I remember reading the plan from the hematologist and OB, and they were just like, "Okay, post-op, after she's in the recovery room, we need to wait, like, 12 hours before we start her back on anticoagulants," which was a certain type of injection.

Well, when I was in the recovery room, I remember being groggy and just looking up, and as a nurse, there's a certain Lovenox, which is a type of blood-thinning injection, and I wasn't supposed to have that. Heart valve patients were not supposed to have that. It wasn't what I needed after recovery, and they said they needed to wait at least 12, if not a little bit longer, hours after. Well, I heard that distinct sound that the Lovenox injection made at that point, they're a little bit different now, and then I looked up and I saw that nurse carrying it away. And I was like, "I wasn't supposed to have that." Like, it was just, like I don't know where things got messed up, but I was not supposed to have that injection right now. Like, it's gonna put me at a huge risk. So sure enough, I don't know if, you know, if that is the whole reason why I hemorrhaged, but I did, and developed thrombocytopenia. They couldn't stop the bleeding. They flew in a doctor who had literally the day before just taken a new radiology class, learning about stuff he could do within the uterus to stop hemorrhaging and things like that. So, my OB doctor had not seen that radiology friend since medical school. Ran into him in the doctor's lounge, was just talking about his patient, you know, having all these problems, and he was like, "I literally just got back from learning that yesterday. Let me just try it on her." So saved my life. That was, that was it.

Dawn Damon: Yeah, I mean, you've had two near-death experiences, and these doctors have saved your life. And, you know, a couple of different times as you're sharing your story, Mandy, you're saying, you know, it didn't turn out like it was supposed to or it didn't go like it was supposed to. What have you learned about God and His faithfulness when life doesn't go the way you dreamed that it would go, or that it was supposed to? You have a similar story with adoption. That didn't go the way you thought it would, either, did it?

Mandy Horne: Yeah, right. Absolutely.

Dawn Damon: What does that tell you about God?

Mandy Horne: Oh, He knows us so much better than we know ourselves, and He has just a perfect, unique story. And I, I think so often we get angry at God, say, you know, it didn't go, this shouldn't have happened, you could have prevented it, things like that. But He sees the big picture, and I wouldn't be where I am today without any of these stories, without these journeys, because I've been able to use my testimony to help other women over the years, to grow in my faith and my walk with Christ. Because He was there, there's absolutely no doubt through any of those that He was right there with me, through every single little thing. Mm-hmm. And sometimes we're just really hard-headed, and it takes some of those, I think those big miracles to get our attention and put our eyes back on Him, oftentimes, so, yes.

Dawn Damon: Yeah. And to know that, yeah, we can trust God. Your story goes on because after that, children, no more children for you. And so then you adopted a little boy. There's a whole big story there. The power of that story is that when you got your son, things were okay for a while, but then you found out the diagnosis that there was autism.

Mandy Horne: Right.

Dawn Damon: Attention deficit disorder, but also ODD, which is oppositional defiant disorder. Is that correct?

Mandy Horne: Correct.

Dawn Damon: Yeah. That is a whole big, large assignment, if you will, from God, 'cause that's another whole area of time and attention and focus. That had to have been, in our minds, maybe what we have called a didn't go as I thought, or an interruption to my life that I had dreamt of.

Dawn Damon: How did you all navigate through that?

Mandy Horne: I think we're still in it, but yes. Mm-hmm. How do we get through most of it? My husband and I were recently on a podcast together, a marriage one, and as we were kind of reflecting on that, yeah, I think to where our son Jacob could have been in the biological family that he was born into, and who he is, he gets very hyper-focused on things, or he is very easily influenced by anyone and everyone, oftentimes to a negative. And I just can't even imagine where he would be if he were in that dark place with his biological parents. I'm just trying to be sensitive to what I say.

Dawn Damon: Yes.

Mandy Horne: Yeah. So for us, during the journey, I think we ended up homeschooling. That's another story, but yeah, we ended up homeschooling because we just saw the need for some one-on-one, more attention, and the school system just didn't quite meet the needs that he needed, or my daughter needed. And so if we didn't have that time of pouring into him, seeing him, I just see that he would have just been labeled and just thrown off into the rest of the world, and not had that individual attention and help that he needed. It wasn't easy. I kind of remember when he was two years old, taking him to the pediatrician. We lived in Amarillo at that time. And the doctor, I was just like, "I think he has ADHD or something. Something is wrong with him." And he was a sweet little Asian physician, he was just like, "Stop labeling your child. Like, do not label him. He's fine. He's a little boy. He should be wild and crazy."

And so then we kind of put it on the back burner for years. God moved us to Indiana, and I ended up just letting him go to kindergarten, and it was just, like, eye-opening. Okay, this is real. Like, there is something going on, something different. We're not trying to label our kid or something negatively, but we needed to know the truth so that we could help him, and that was, that was the hard part, I think, for a while, is that we didn't want that label, and we had other people saying, "Stop trying to label your kid," but it wasn't that. We, if we don't know, it's kinda, it's hard to know what steps to take.

Dawn Damon: Absolutely. I agree. Sometimes a label is liberating in that it brings understanding. It lifts shame off when you hear something that, "Oh, this is actually something the way my brain is wired. I'm not doing this because I'm a bad little kid."

Mandy Horne: Yes.

Dawn Damon: “I'm not doing this because I choose to." But that label can bring some clarity, and actually, then some hope. So I understand what you're saying there. And I bring that up about your son and all of the things that you've gone through to say that you're not a stranger to hardship. You've been brave in your life. Things have brought challenges throughout all of your life, and I have to ask you, like, you spent years pouring into everyone, as I'm reading your story. Mm-hmm. In nursing, taking care of people. Yeah. In ministry, in homeschooling, your family, your children. What brought you to the point of realizing, you know, I can't keep pouring out of an empty cup?

Dawn Damon: Can you tell us what that is, a global amnesia?

Mandy Horne: Absolutely. So it is something that, honestly, they really don't know all the details of what causes it, but it's, like, 20, up to 24 hours, typically, of total amnesia, where you don't know who you are. And there are different levels of it. You may not know who you are. You may not know the situation.

And yeah, I mean, you name it, it was kind of going on at that time. And I had been having vertigo attacks, uh, leading up to that. That started in 2019, and those are also often related to a nervous system dysregulation. There are lots of other things that can cause vertigo, so don't think that's just that. But I started losing my hearing. I'm deaf in my right ear, like partially deaf in my right ear, and they just kind of come out of nowhere. Thank the Lord, like I haven't had one in quite a while, and they're very rare now, like a few a year. But they do still happen and come out of nowhere, just, yeah, so anyhow.

Dawn Damon: So you definitely had to say, "Okay, it gets to be about me right now. I mean, it has to be about me right now. I can't keep pouring out."

Mandy Horne: Yeah, right.

Dawn Damon: Take some time to look at your life, to find some balance, if you will, or at least some Sabbath, some time to rest and pull away. Yeah. And that's what you did.

Mandy Horne: Absolutely.

Dawn Damon: Then at some point, I had no choice. And then at some point, you felt God calling you to make a transition. And so you said goodbye to your nursing career. And you thought, "All right. It's time for me to share what I've learned with other women who might be going through a similar thing," so you started a coaching practice, another brave thing that you've done in your life.

But that wasn't the end. Like, the Lord just kept stirring in my heart and gave me such a desire and passion for more. Fast-forward through COVID, which was a total nightmare, but that's a whole other story, too. Yeah, so I got through, and that was about the time I was having some of these attacks. We moved my parents in. Everything was kind of going on, and I just sensed the Lord just saying, you know, "It's time." And I started praying through what specifically. I thought for sure He would send me back to become a nurse practitioner, and I had just no peace. I mean, it physically made me sick any time I thought about that. Just that's not what I wanted to do. I didn't wanna go back and learn some things that I didn't necessarily agree with.

So I started looking and praying, and I thought, I was like, "There's nothing else, like, nursing-related for me to do," and I stumbled upon this nurse coaching thing. I was like, "I never heard of that before." So looked into it, got on a little call to find out more about it, and just, like, wept. I said, "This is it." Like, this is what I wanna do. This is where I feel called. And so I was, like, ready to sign up and kind of praying through it with my husband, and the Lord just said, "Okay. You're right. That is it. But not now. You gotta wait just a little bit longer." And that's okay. Sometimes He does put the brake on. And so sure enough, it was after my daughter moved off to her freshman year in college, which is, I think, I needed to experience that emptiness, that's how traumatizing that can be when your babies leave. You have a mixture of joy and also just tremendous grief in some sense of the loss of them not being there with you all the time, all of it. It was very difficult for my husband.

Dawn Damon: Yes.

Mandy Horne: And I needed to go through that first, and the Lord knew that. I really thought with the coaching that I would go through it, that I would, of course, I'm gonna, you know, do a coaching thing for postpartum women, 'cause I've done postpartum nursing for over 24 years at that point. But that's not what the Lord said. He said, "You know, do midlife women go through these transitions. You know, hormones, all of this stuff.” And I'm actually in the deep, deep in the heart of all of those things right now myself, but yeah.

Dawn Damon: That's a great thing for us to remind our listeners, too, that you are, um, helping midlife women in these transitions. At the top of the show, we talked about how you could have just lain back and accepted all of these labels. Speaking of labels, you know, that you have a bad heart that it's genetic, that it's gonna be maybe premature death for you, and you said, "No, I'm not gonna just accept these things. I'm gonna do some research."

Yes. "I'm gonna trust God." And now here you are with the wellness coaching and doing all of those things. How is your health today? I mean, you just told us and shared a little bit, but heart-healthy?

Mandy Horne: Absolutely, yeah. I still have to see the cardiologist once a year for a typical once-a-year echo and all that, but I mean, we're hitting 30 years this summer. Yeah. And every time, I think of the first 10-year mark, I was terrified, thinking, you know, "Oh my gosh, my heart's just gonna all of a sudden stop or something." And once I got past that 10-year mark, I was like, "Okay, God has this. It's okay. Trust Him with it," and then do my own things that I can do to prevent going down that spiraling of unhealthy things that kind of run in my family. That realizing it doesn't have to be genetic. There are some genetic things, but there are some things we can reverse, so.

Dawn Damon: Yeah. Beautiful.

Mandy Horne: Yeah.

Dawn Damon: So, as we kind of bring everything to a close today, thank you for sharing your story. Yeah. I know we could have gone deep on all of those things and really gotten into the nitty-gritty. And you're available for women to contact and connect with. In fact, I think you have a free gift. But before we mention that, for a woman who may be sensing God is calling her into something, she might be in that very transition that you talked about. She might be that person who feels kind of some burnout and feels like God's calling her to something else, but she's afraid to step out, or, "Do I have what it takes? Is it too late for me?" What encouragement can you give to her?

Mandy Horne: I think from my own experience, I learned that sometimes that obedience and what the Lord is calling to you, things like that, come before the perfect clarity, before the whole map is shown in front of you, and I think that's hard for us. All of us, it doesn't matter where you are, you really wanna know all the details, what's gonna happen, how can I direct things and make sure that my story goes this way. But that's not where it is. It's that surrender to the Lord, to the Holy Spirit, and taking that one step at a time. The act of obedience and trusting Him along the way. And He will reveal the next step, the next, you know, everything as He knows that you need to receive it, not when you think you do.

Dawn Damon: That's so good. Yeah. It reminds me of a quote from Martin Luther King Jr., who said, "I don't need to see the whole staircase, just the next step."

Mandy Horne: Yes. Amen. So true.

So, brave-hearted women, if that's you today and you feel like God is calling you into something new, just take the next step. Pray. Be at peace. And when you feel that burden or that nudge is not going away, take a baby step. See what God will do with that.

Dawn Damon: Yes. Thank you, Mandy, for being with us. You do have a free gift that you wanna offer our people. Yeah. And we're gonna put that in the notes.

Mandy Horne: Yeah. So there is a free gift that is a three-step guide to stepping into your next path. So, what now God season, when, if you're just asking what, it kind of gives some things you can do, and then there's the option for a free discovery call where we can talk. And then I think I gave you the link also, I have a community and school, the S-K-O-O-L, called Sacred Season Sisters, that's nothing but for midlife women. So we just kinda hang out, talk, share. I do some classes in there, so yeah.

Dawn Damon: Wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you for being with us, being vulnerable today, sharing your story. And, you know, sometimes we look at beautiful women, and we think, "Oh, their life is... They've landed on a pillow. Everything's perfect." And then they, then they hear your story and are, "Okay. Wow." Yeah. "If she can face all of that, I can face what I'm going through, too, 'cause God is faithful."

Mandy Horne: Yeah. Amen. He is.

Dawn Damon: Yes, bravehearted women, I'm going to leave you like I always do, of course, as your bravehearted coach. I believe this is your moment for you to find your brave and live your dreams!