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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Midwifery… Deja vu all over again?
Well, I see that midwifery is back in the news again, so I thought I’d revisit the issue -my last look at it was in November, 2012. Its not that I’ve changed my opinions -I haven’t; nor that I have since discovered something new and compelling about the role of midwives in pregnancy -I continue…
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Hope springs Ephemeral?
I sometimes wander through medical journals like a tourist, stopping here to gaze admiringly at a headline, pausing there to read a letter or two. Occasionally, I stumble upon a piece of information tucked away like a child under a quilt on a winter bed -interesting stuff that would still not likely find its way onto the six…
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Postpartum Depression -Just words?
Postpartum depression -I know these are only words, medical words, I suppose: descriptors. Language. But for all we’ve done with these particular words, what little attention we seem to have paid to them, they are still only words. And yet they describe a condition that has dogged us for millennia: the darkness that follows pregnancies like a…
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The Wrong Idols
I guess we’ve always needed idols: things beyond our ken or ability to achieve; things for which we strive but are just out of reach. They’re more than goals; they’re so desirable we almost worship them. They are what we are not -or at least not any more- but because they are so prized, they assume…
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The Miracle (part 2): a woman’s story in 2 parts
“Emily.” It was the doctor’s voice, and he was leading her into a seat in his office as if she were an old lady. “Emily, it’s good to see you again…” his voice trailed off as he inspected her. “But you were supposed to have come back to see me a month or so ago,…
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The Miracle (part 1): A woman’s story in 2 parts
It was still there, no doubt about it. She patted her stomach warily, as if she were afraid it would go away with too critical an examination. But it was real -or as real as any present could be inside a box- hidden away, untouchable: Schrödinger’s cat… Some things required faith; not everything in life…
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