-
What’s in a name… Cancer?
Words are important. Quite aside from meaning, each has its own shade, its own temperature. Rose calls forth a mood, an emotion, an expectation that is quite distinct from, say, daisy. Words are little coloured post cards that tell stories and paint pictures; each word elicits a miniature portrait in the brain. Together, they tell stories, individually they hint at…
-
Tainted Breast Milk
I have to admit I’m worried. I’m worried that we have so successfully indoctrinated new mothers that their babies will suffer irredeemable hardships if not given breast milk, that they will seek it out whatever the source and wherever the source… My concern is not over the long-since proven benefits of breast milk, nor whether mothers…
-
An exploration of Menopause as a Boundary Phenomenon.
For years now, and especially as I age, I have been compelled by the idea of edges. Boundaries. Something different obtains there, something that differentiates them from whatever they demarcate. They are privileged areas, faerie-tale areas. Think, for example of silhouettes -treetops, say, against an evening sky; they are nothing but edges: intricately crocheted patterns, filaments of black against the dying…
-
A Canadian stem cell bank account?
There is method in the madness, the desperate rush for ontogeny. Cells huff and puff, some listening for instructions, others heading off in all directions like missionaries to new and just-discovered worlds. It is a busy place, the initial blastocyst turning into a multicelled embryo, as ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, organs materialize out of apparent chaos, and form…
-
Mental Health in prison?
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons –Dostoyevsky got that right. But in the years since he wrote it, have we learned anything? Have we learned enough? Prisons may have changed over the years to include more individual rights, more facilities and even more education… But for the most part they still…
-
Are Secular Values Different?
I am concerned. I am concerned that how I dress, where I come from, or even what values I hold dear will be held against me. I am concerned that who I am will matter less that how I appear. To paraphrase a recent Ontario ad, I am concerned that what I wear on my head will…
-
The Ageing Gynaecologist: a Paean
I grow old… I grow old… I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Well, maybe not, but I do think that things unfurl differently with age. The world is just that little bit more tinged with memory, red-shifted as it were, softened with colours no longer as bright, but deeply embedded and integral. Constituent. Fundamental. I…
-
The Health Care Paradigm
The Middle East has been in the news a lot; the Middle East is the news, with its tentacular failures reaching out to all and sundry, near and far, friend and foe. It sticks like Velcro to anything that has ever passed; it is the spider at the center of a web whose boundaries are still…
-
Take my milk for gall
Come to my woman’s breasts and take my milk for gall. Even Lady Macbeth was not without an opinion on the uses of a woman’s breast… And so it continues to this day; almost everybody has an opinion on breast feeding. This runs the full gamut from the harangue of Elisabeth Badinter in her March 2012 article in…
-
Lost… in an ER?
There is an incident which resurfaced in the news recently that has both embarrassed and outraged me: the inquest into a death. Five years ago, a double amputee in a wheelchair died in an Emergency Room after being overlooked -and neglected- for 34 hours! ( http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/08/06/brian-sinclair-inquest-waiting-room-death_n_3711355.html?utm_hp_ref=email_share ) No, this is not a woman’s issue -although it might as easily have been a…
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
musingsonwomenshealth.com 