Tag: surgery

Recently, my mother passed away and very soon after two of my young nephews died within 10 days of each other. I was also traveling internationally and had an emergency surgery. My days began to blur. I couldn’t eat or sleep. My heart was heavy and my body couldn’t move. The grief my entire family was feeling became overwhelming and resulted in great stress on my body.

Have you ever experienced a time in your life when stress took over your body?

Thong undies for toddlers.

Push-up bras for eight-year olds.

Sneakers to "tone" legs for preschoolers.

Marketers keep pushing that "too sexy, too soon" envelope on our young daughters, and we are seeing impact on our daughters’ self-esteem and body images.

Keep in mind that it isn’t just one advertisement or one commercial  that affects a young girl’s self-concept, but the constant slew of images pushing a "too fast, too soon" look. And that’s exactly what our girls are exposed to these days. The "constant" seeing or hearing over-sexualized messages can be damaging to a young girl’s mental, emotional or moral well being.

If only I was Tyrian Lannister of Game of Thrones—knowing things about who was going to win the war for the iron throne instead of this taboo topic of infertility. If someone five years ago would have told me, a marine and total man-child, everything I know now about infertility, I would’ve laughed in their face.

When you think about infertility you usually think about the perspective of the woman. There is a lot more going on in the uterus than there is in the testicles. The human woman's reproductive organ is a mystery even today.

Honestly, I didn’t know if I could rely on my husband as I approached back surgery to correct my scoliosis. Before my date with hospital destiny, which would involve a long and difficult recovery, John and I weren’t doing well. We’d been married more than a decade, but were busy in our separate careers: mine as a screenwriter and university professor and his as a space architect designing for Life Beyond Earth. In fact, I sometimes felt he might as well have been on another planet. We were on two separate paths and that year, prior to my surgery, we had even considered separating.