The Iron Ring

I don’t plan on writing much about being a mom on this reinvention of my blog (promise!) but every now and then some news item about babies, pregnancy or childbirth catches my attention as both a mom and a scientist and this weekend was one of those cases. So bear with me.

I read this in the Times about Ina May Gaskin and the homebirth movement. I was struck by the writer’s story of her own birth experience which has many similarities with other women I know, although for the record it is entirely unlike my own experience. The writer’s labor simply didn’t progress enough and after some back and forth with her doctor and her midwife she had a c-section. I don’t pretend to understand all there is to know about childbirth and for the record, I disliked hearing my prenatal yoga instructor say “the universe won’t give you a baby you can’t deliver” (really?). But I do have some thoughts on those women who simply have a stalled labor. I think as mammals we are programmed to stall labor when we feel danger. Our bodies think “wow! Maybe this isn’t such a good time for giving birth!” its kind of a flight-or-fight thing and its completely subconscious. If you really want to give birth vaginally and someone keeps coming in the room and tapping their wrist you can see how your stress hormones might rise. I’m not suggesting that we stop monitoring how labor progresses or that doctors should act like its progressing fine or something. I just think maybe we should be a little less scared of things overall. Less scared of pain and childbirth itself, less scared of c-sections, less scared of imagining all the things that could go wrong.  And at the risk of sounding too rainbows and roses (see previous post?) it would be nice if no one preached anything at all about childbirth and allowed women to simply make informed decisions without guilt.

I may not be heading to Tennessee anytime soon to give birth but I think its great that the option exists. Yet simultaneously I wish Ina May Gaskin’s book was not such a ‘must read’ for expectant Brooklyn women.

I will be brief tonight.

I read this online today and I think it is wonderful.

I am a pessimist who goes by the term ‘realist’ and I’m married to an optimist. I have always subscribed to low expectations; whenever I apply to things (college? Graduate school? Jobs?) I figure it won’t happen and that leads to pleasant surprises and few disappointments. My spouse does not agree with this approach and recently I allowed myself to get excited, maybe even optimistic, about an opportunity. And it didn’t pan out after all. And I was disappointed. But after reading the article linked above, I think I missed the boat a little.

The author describes an interview where the interviewer told her she was naïve to think she could be hired given her professional experience. She replied “If I didn’t think I could do the job, I wouldn’t be here” and she got hired.

Optimism isn’t just being hopeful, even extremely hopeful, that you will get what you want, optimism is the sheer confidence that it will work out.

Happy Friday before Memorial day weekend……….. I can’t think of many things better than a sunny holiday Friday

In the Summer of 2009 just after I finished my PhD I started having some weird symptoms in my legs. I noticed it when I walked to my car at the end of the day. It’s a long walk, so long that they offer shuttle service I hardly ever take, and I noticed that sometimes by the time I got to my car my legs were so…….. tingly……….. that I had to wait for them to return to normal before I could drive. I thought it was my shoes. Then I thought it was my pants. Then I thought it was the heat. Then in the Fall I went to a doctor. She detected an iron deficiency but iron pills didn’t change anything. She sent me to a neurologist who ordered an MRI and discovered a spot on my spinal cord.

I can still remember where I was when he called and told me the MRI showed a spot on my spinal cord that indicated demyelination. I remember crying. As a neuroscientist I knew enough about spinal cords to be scared. I knew how much time and money was spent on trying to figure out how to reverse the process of demyelination. I knew about MS. But, to my surprise and relief, after a host of tests it was clear that I didn’t have MS. That one spot on my spinal cord was the only ‘positive’ result. I could write a long list of diseases I don’t have, many of which I can’t pronounce. And my neurologist told me that although it wasn’t MS, I was probably going to develop MS. I will never forget how cruel it was to tell me this casual hypothesis so offhandedly and with no statistics.

In the end, all I really have is a weird spot on my spinal cord and nothing else. For some patients, it happens again and again and sort of ‘becomes’ MS but I have few risk factors for that. The more time goes by, the better my chances of the whole thing ending here. They gave me this awesome name/diagnosis, but basically that’s just medical jargon for ‘inflammation of the myelin that goes across the spinal cord’. The whole experience reminded me of something I read in the New York Times about detecting some forms of cancer. Doctors are starting to think that some cancers, particularly breast cancer, go away on their own and that super-sensitive detection could lead to unnecessary treatment. But people got upset and maybe even frightened at the idea of changing the standard age of routine screening to 50 from 40.  And who can blame them for being scared? Especially when mammograms are the accepted gold standard for detecting breast cancer.

But what are the psychological and societal implications of knowing too much about our own health? We can detect pregnancies now using home tests before a period is even missed leading to unnecessary heartbreak when the pregnancy fails. In at least some areas doctors are starting to understand psychological impact of knowing too much about our health; patients must undergo counseling before having a test to see if they will develop Huntington’s disease. But many times we become so enticed by the idea of having conclusive testing that we run full at full speed. I don’t know about you but I love diagnoses. Perhaps it is the American way?

I know how lucky I am that my medical issue began and ended at that MRI. Believe me when I say that I remind myself of that every single day. But some part of me wonders if I dodged that bullet how many more am I dodging without knowing? Which ones would I be better off knowing about? And what sort of test could I have done to determine that?

Despite my promise to be more ‘personal’ I will not be able to talk about my own research in too much detail. Its probably better because I spend enough time talking and writing about it anyway and it might bore you to death (yeah yeah there is no such thing as boring topics just boring writers, I read The New Yorker too).

Anyway, what I can, and will, do, is try to describe what it is like to work in a scientific lab, which in and of itself is unlike any other work environment.

I suppose the best place to begin is by explaining that we have test tubes and microscopes and shelves full of chemicals and about two dozen refrigerators and freezers instead of cubicles and plants and copy machines. At least I’m guessing that most offices have cubicles and plants and copy machines? I am 31 and have only had a real ‘job’ for three years so I am no authority. One of the best parts of my job is that I can wear whatever I want to work. Sometimes I literally wear pajamas. I won’t wear anything I would hate to ruin with above-mentioned chemicals et cetera, and I therefore have tons of clothes that are too nice for work. Today I wore yellow crocs. Of course, one of the downsides to this is that I work with a bunch of people who think they can wear whatever they want to work. I see sandals with socks on a daily basis. Patterns on patterns. Leg warmers without irony. On the rare occasion when I have decided to wear a sports jersey to work I get lots of confused enthusiasm.

Which brings me to one of my favorite stories. My boss used to work at a University with a pretty big sports program and he was excited one day at lab meeting about a major championship they were competing for. The kind of championship that happens in March and involves “brackets” and “seeds”. He showed everyone a few powerpoint slides of the inside of the arena at his old University and started to get all excited about the game. He said, “I hypothesize there will be one more Championship flag up here next year!”……………….

silence………….

“does anyone have any idea what I’m talking about?”………….

OK.

Its been a while.

And I have no excuse. I am reminded of an article I read (in the Times? Who knows? Couldn’t find a link) about people who start twittering and end up only writing one tweet. Like “looking for pie”. Or “is anyone out there?”. I suppose my blog constituted more than just dead tweets but still, I abandoned it in April of 2008.

A lot has happened since April 2008. Too much for one post I think. The links to the right are to other dead blogs. “The Engaged Guy” is now the “Married Dad”.  In any case, its time to start writing again.

When I was in graduate school I could not see the forest for the trees. In fact, I couldn’t even see the damn trees most of the time I just saw dirt and sometimes leaves and I had a vague idea that the sun was up there somewhere but something was blocking it. I know it sounds crazy but I figured I would be a graduate student for the rest of my life, sitting at my desk underground in the leaky lab listening to the hum of the window unit waiting for the door to fly open in a rage. At some point during a visit to my parents I ran into my high school English teacher who asked what I was up to and said something nice about how she was sure I was a great scientist and all but she was surprised I wasn’t writing. And then I saw Robert Bazell on NBC and I thought “whats with that stupid journalist thinking he knows something about science”. And then I googled. Sorry Dr. Bazell! Kind of legit actually! In any case, I started thinking about writing. I went to an NASW conference. I met Ivan Oransky. I got paid to write some stuff for him. I got a column in the DP. I felt professional and legitimate. I am convinced that these writing experiences are the only reason I finished my PhD (whether that was a good or bad thing remains to be seen but more on that later).

This blog started as a writing outlet because I had exhausted my more ‘official’ writing outlets (The Scientist, The Daily Pennsylvanian) and I knew I needed to keep writing one way or another. But the last year of graduate school swallowed me up whole and spit me out or at least spit out my insides leaving me a shell of a person too terrified to even ask my new boss a question or breathe a word to anyone at work that was anything other than positive. More on that later. Point is, writing a 400-page thesis often leaves one unable to write other things for quite some time. Or see straight.

And now I am in need of a writing outlet once again. A lot has changed. I’m a genuine P-H-D now and have added professional editing to my CV. I work for a brilliant and understanding scientist. I’m a mom (yeah yeah more on that later too). I have some decisions ahead of me and I think that writing, and perhaps reinvigorating this blog, might help. Its going to be a lot more personal. That’s because I’ve realized I’m no longer reading popular media pieces about broad scientific discoveries and forming opinions, I’m actually reading about ALL kind of people and events and politics and forming all kinds of new ways of looking at them and placing them into context. I’m out of the forest and the trees and the valley and the continent and I’m glimpsing the earth through a tiny window in my space shuttle. At some point I will have to choose a spot to land comfortably but for now I’m enjoying the view and I’m going to share it. My apologies if you were hoping for more writing on research ethics, in fact, shout out to anonymous poster #1 (the comment that is not spam) on April 24, 2008. I appreciate the positive feedback but we are taking this blog in a new direction. Sit tight.