Infertility Survivors Finally Heard
Greetings from the 95+ plus degree Detroit area heat. It’s day 25 of 32 in my parallel universe. I arrived on the eve of Memorial Day in the Detroit area 26 years ago to the day after I packed my bags to pursue a new life out west. My original plan to enjoy June 2022…
Late April, early May brings a certain incessant MD marketing madness. Serenity now, right? Curious to know your frame of mind as we approach the second Sunday in May this year. It could range from fragile to numbingly indifferent to WTF awful. All or none of the above or anything in between. There is no…
Bronchitis has left the room. Good riddance one month of debilitating exhaustion. Three weeks of high-dose prednisone (a shrew-making steroid if there ever was one) plus regular rescue inhaler. Ten days of antibiotics. Twice-daily plus corticosteroid inhaler and nasal spray. Deep, glorious breaths. Life is good. So great to be back to something resembling normal….
Tribalism at its best provides a haven and kinship. Who doesn’t like to feel accepted and validated? Tribalism at its worst, however, fuels misunderstandings, culture wars, and, at the extreme, ugliness. Most of us have witnessed or encountered all of the above. My latest tribal experience stemmed from my participation in Slate‘s podcast, What I…
There are few things harder than bearing witness to suffering, grief, or pain. When we hear someone’s sorrow in their breaking voice, our hearts clench. Our eyes well up. Empathy, the glue that holds humanity together, kicks in. Empathy causes us to ache in unison. We cast about, sometimes helplessly, to find a way to…
Groundhogs Day, the movie, once again feels fitting as we head into two-plus years of pandemic strangeness. That’s just one film comparison. There are others (and various analogies) that also come to mind. Take the sci-fi space-related films The Martian or The Midnight Sky. If I may riff further. In many ways our house, now…
February, please! First, I’m not gonna lie. January 2022 tested me in a big way. Some might have viewed Omicron as nothing more than an inconvenient speed bump. That wasn’t how I saw it. While fully vaccinated and boosted, the very idea of a *more* transmissible variant prompted dread. Why? I’ve had more than enough…
Childless Not by Choice (CNBC) folk don’t often get much visibility. That’s why I was surprised when an email query landed in my inbox several weeks ago. It came at the same time my husband was in pre-op for outpatient surgery. Suffice to say, I knew how I’d be spending my time in the waiting…
IVF survivorship as a concept didn’t exist when I first considered the medical procedure. That was in the late 1990s. All I knew came from the well-oiled IVF industry hype machine. The growing and enormously profitable business portrayed IVF as the science world’s answer to modern family formation. IVF clinics intentionally portrayed this hugely invasive…
Warmth, wonder, and pearls of wisdom drop into our lives when we least expect them, don’t they? Late this afternoon, for instance, amid a spectacular late autumn sunset. Warm sunlight bathed my face and waves softly lapped at my feet. This natural beauty overwhelmed so thoroughly that, well, I burst into tears. There was nothing…