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I have Hashimoto’s disease. So do about 30,000,000 other Americans, give or take a few million. I wonder if you might have it? It’s the most common of all autoimmune diseases and more than ninety percent of people (mostly women, natch) who are hypothyroid have it, even if they don’t know it. The symptoms range from brain fog, sleep disturbance, extreme fatigue, unexplained weight gain, intolerance of cold, joint and muscle pain to low libido, digestive issues, bloating and puffiness,a tendency to get carpal tunnel syndrome, etc. I have been ingesting prescribed thryoid hormone- either natural or synthetic- for thirty years but I did not know I had Hashi’s until about 6 years ago. That’s because conventional medicine does not differentiate between autoimmune thyroid and hypothyroid, because it treats them identically, so the doctors didn’t bother to tell me. If you had cancer, would you want to know what kind of cancer you had, even if the treatment of chemotherapy and radiation would be used no matter what type of cancer it was? I know so many women who have been told their blood levels are fine, so their complaints must be psychosomatic. Sheesh! (which means full out SCREAMING RAGE without adequate outlet. Do I hear the sounds of the largest class action suit in history?) The real question is why is the thyroid gland- the master gland of metabolism that communicates with every frigging cell in your entire body- so often ‘attacking itself’? At this time in our history, the U.S. has a veritable epidemic of autoimmune diseases, which are said to affect well over 60,000,000 people, or about one in five. Next time you count about 25 people in the grocery line while you wait impatiently, know that 5 of them have so much inflammation in their bodies, that their bodies are confused and attacking their own cells. Probably 3-4 of them have Hashimoto’s. Autoimmune diseases were extremely uncommon a century ago, so we know we have created and are responsible for near epidemic numbers of people with autoimmunity. There are now over 100 autoimmune diseases that are new to medical lexicon and are occurring at alarming rates. Our polluted environment, nutrient-deprived foods, and the ingestion of toxins like additives, plastics, mercury fillings, as well as unresolved trauma and highly stressful lifestyles result in chronic inflammation, which gravitates to an organ or bodily system that has some type of inherent weakness, causing the profound distress that eventually becomes an autoimmune disease. Our bodies cannot take the toxic ingredients that they are tasked with assimilating or the toxic environments they must live in. Virtually every chronic autoimmune disease shares in common that the body appears to be attacking itself (more on that in a future post), including but not limited to: multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, interstitial cystitis, fibromyalgia, systemic lupus erythematosus, Graves’ disease, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, Sjögren’s syndrome, systemic sclerosis, dermatomyositis, primary biliary cirrhosis, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, psoriasis, vitiligo, bullous pemphigoid, alopecia areata, idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy, type 1 diabetes mellitus, IgA nephropathy, membranous nephropathy, relapsing polychondritis, and pernicious anemia. Hashimoto’s is by far the most common autoimmune disease, affecting 30,000,000 people. Alzheimer’s, sometimes referred to as Diabetes 3, and other memory disorders are now considered autoimmune disorders of the brain. How do cells go from being healthy and happy to pissed off and inflamed? The cellular breakdown happens over our lifetimes and autoimmunity is the expression of prolonged inflammation building upon inflammation. However, now more and more children have autoimmune and chronic health issues at such very young ages and we can see that our kids are inheriting our chronic conditions, thereby starting off their lives with tendencies towards inflammation. How to deal with the overwhelm of having an autoimmune disease, getting medical advice that does not help and living with chronic pain? How to move into resolving the health problems and healing? I am here to say that many, many of us are doing it, sometimes quickly and other times slowly. For me, it was very slow and sometimes imperceptible. It happened over two decades and continues, as I also had chronic back pain, interstitial cystitis and systemic candida. I no longer have brain fog and my digestion is better. I sleep well and have as much energy as I need. My overall fluish feeling and muscle pain of twenty-five years has disappeared. My bladder is not overactive. I still have intolerance to cold which I manage with a lot of extra warm sweaters and socks! I am here to say that there is hope. I did it slowly and often my healing journey was frustrating. I was my own guinea pig. I no longer have any mercury fillings. I do not eat gluten, processed foods, or soy. I eat very little to know foods with dairy or sugar. I use stainless steel and glass containers, having gotten rid of plastic tubs and teflon. I have ingested Chinese herbs and all sorts of supplements for years. I have seen every type of healing practitioner imaginable. I have tried so many different approaches to food and eating and fasting. I have done therapy and coaching. I have prayed for clarity and guidance. Now there is so much more information and options. People are healing faster. Their trajectories are a lot more linear than mine was because we know so much more. So don’t give up. There is relief and support waiting for you! If you are struggling, try working with a coach and learn how to take small steps towards success! #health #autoimmunity #thyroid #cell

I am post-menopausal for about a decade and find societal attitudes about women’s sexuality in this stage of life fascinating. Menopause is a new frontier. We don’t know nearly as much about it as pregnancy or diabetes or heart disease or even dying. Is it because its women’s health and thus a lower priority? Sure, that is part of the reason. But we also don’t know a lot about menopause because we have never lived long enough to adequately understand it. We used to die a lot younger, often before we went into menopause. In “Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life” author Darcy Steinke calls it “an enigma,” and a rarity in the animal world. Few species have long post-reproductive lives. Most female primates in the wild die before they stop cycling.” Menopause is best seen as a modern, human developmental phase, much like the onset of our menses in adolescence. It was not too long ago that women who were getting older- and perhaps more assertive or more melancholy- were written off as dingbats or hysterical or worse. How many were locked up? Now we know the change is a lot more complex, with many implications for wellness, aging and a woman’s personal reckoning with herself and her life. Are we getting darn tired of the male medical gaze into our postmenopausal vaginas yet? Do we want our vaginas described as shriveled, dry and not necessarily receptive to {their} male organs? The male perspective makes us dismissed, invisible, and desexualized. In fact, when I searched for synonyms for the word ‘menopause’ in the online Power Thesaurus, the equivalent words appear to be the epitome of the male gaze: Unproductive, Unfruitful, Sucked dry, Unplowed, Dried up, Wasted, Drained, Exhausted, Desolate, Fruitless, Fallow, Dry Jejune (meaning dull, flat, boring, banal, tedious, uninteresting, insipid, vapid) Look around, fellows! Do women over 50- running companies and making art and leading movements and keeping it all going- deserve such descriptors? Does Nancy Pelosi or Meryl Streep or the late Toni Morrison seem fallow to you? What about the sexy Helen Mirren? We are also knocking it out (despite my dislike of sports metaphors) in the bedroom. The reported rise in STD’s in people over 60 attests to that. How shall we seize and recreate the definition of menopause? What does the post-menopausal vagina feel like from the female gaze? Perhaps a bit smaller due to the converging forces of gravity and childbearing. Perhaps the vaginal tissue is a bit thinner with less estrogen circling about; often resolved with lubricants and specialized organic creams. What word honors the decades of fertility and menstruation that gives way to a new period characterized by confidence, calm, reflection, not putting up with anyone’s shit, and hopefully pearls of earned wisdom? Menopause- or perhaps womanpause- gives us the space to pause, take a breath, and proceed with absolute, quiet clarity. #Menopause #Menstruation #The Male Gaze #Womens Health #Sexuality

The timeline for my bombed vagina starts when my father punched me in the face in one of his tirades when I was about 12 years old. About a decade later I had a hole in my skull the size of a quarter. The nerves of two teeth had died, typically due to blunt force trauma, and infection was taking the place of bone. My dentist put me on antibiotics to knock out the infection before I could have surgery to clean out the decay in the skull and seal it off. The antibiotics took a full year to kill the infection, thereby beginning 15 years of inflammation in the form of countless vaginal yeast infections and urinary tract infections, that ultimately morphed into systemic candida and interstitial cystitis, replete with chronic burning in my vagina and urinary urgency. This made sex very uncomfortable, albeit painful. The pain was at its all time high when I met my future x-husband and it came to shape our sex life. Now that I know about how antibiotics ruin the gut microbiome and cause intestinal permeability, and then brain fog, muscular and joint pain, hormonal imbalance, I realize that I was having a full body implosion, as inflammation and dysbiosis ruled my every day. But it was the bomb that went off in my vagina that caused me the most burning and searing physical pain. Its many years later now and with the aid of functional medicine, acupuncture, herbs, supplements, homeopathic, the elimination of sugar, processed foods, gluten and soy from my diet, I am much better. My exploded vagina has healed through trial and error- and the extreme avoidance of antibiotics. And if I indulge on sweets very occasionally, my vagina lets me know in no uncertain burning terms to lay off, so it can get laid again.

My mom got her wish for death on April 25th, 2017, exactly 5 years and 2 hours after her eldest daughter, one of my two sisters, died. She was 94 years old. She had a great death. A brilliant life-affirming death. She wanted to die. She embraced it. She was ready and open. A few weeks earlier I begged her, tongue in cheek, not to die when I was going to be out of town in NYC for a week with my family. Two days after I returned, she took to her death bed, after what hospice called ‘a cardiac event’. When I came to her room at the assisted living facility, the hospice nurse was already there and my mom looked at me from her bed and said weakly but with a knowing smile, “ See? I gave you New York! Now its my time.” And it was her time. I had moved her out to be near me four years earlier from Florida, also known as “God’s Waiting Room”. At 90 years old, she chose to give up her house, her car, shopping and cooking her own food. Her husband had died a few months earlier, and she had taken care of him and my sister for the prior year. She was worn out with advancing COPD. When she arrived at her new home near me in the Bay area, my mom was convinced she had a year left to live. Her amazement over her longevity never ceased to fascinate her, and I watched as she held on to the desire to live, in part to be there for my other sister who was struggling with health issues. She was warm and very loving, always with a big smile for everyone in her facility and for me, my spouse and my daughters. I took her every Saturday to get her hair done, followed by a family dinner out on the town. She loved pastrami sandwiches and hamburgers. A wheelchair lived in my trunk so we could go to the coast or to a museum or Macy’s for bargain tops for her. She had been on hospice for 2.5 years before she died. She used oxygen daily and loved the attention of the facility’s aides and the hospice caretakers. The hospice nurses fought over who would get to see each week as they all loved her so much. She loved getting showers the aides provided and chatting with her many visitors. The other residents adored her for her fashion and jewelry and warm smile. But in her last year, her ability to hear faded, her need for a walker increased, and her OCPD and congestive heart failure progressed, she would sleep for longer and longer. She fell six times in as many months and started to complain about not wanting to live in a body that was falling apart. We had to have the facility’s nursing team administer her meds due to her short term memory loss and sometimes confusion. This was a big blow to her as she had been so in charge of her meds and loved correcting the medical team. She spoke about not feeling her life had purpose or meaning. She felt her quality of life was compromised and her desire to live was waning. So she was ready. Things turned as her fear of death became second to her desire for it. She started the process for physician assistance in dying but like many others, ended up passing away before she completed it. Her readiness was something else. She was full of love and light. She was surrounded by love and love emanated from her. I got to sit with her for most of those eight days and tell her how much I loved her. She sang me the song, “Don’t cry for me Argentina” and told me she loved me and my sister with all her might. She gradually became less responsive and needed more meds. Her granddaughters and son in law came to say goodbye. Her niece got to say goodbye by phone. The nurses were amazing. She was ready to go and was at peace. She had transformed into love and light. By contrast my mother in law, who had died 10 months prior, was not ready for death and faded quickly and unexpectedly. She did not have a great death, although she was greatly loved by her family. My spouse struggles with the pain of not having gotten to say goodbye. When I miss my mom, I am quickly filled with the love we shared in those last days and the four years we had together. Knowing she was ready and wanted death is a great comfort to me. I am filled with that love whenever I want. I am so comforted by her readiness and willingness to meet her death that missing her quickly turns to a quiet and joyful love. My mom gave me life and the gift of unconditional love for all her days. She gave me an amazing and awesome gift in how she died. I am forever grateful.