Ovarian Quotes

She should have remembered her past experiences in the relationship wars and not let herself get so excited. Evidently her hormones had overruled her common sense and she had become drunk on ovarian wine, the most potent, sanity- destroying substance in the universe.

But Anya, you're not any girl, you are someone very special. You have a gift of happiness that's almost magical". To Anya the gentle fluttering of new life within reminded her that Adam had not only been there in Stockholm but would remain with her forever. "It is completely possible. Idiopathic reversals of ovarian failure are well documented in the literature.

I find the treatment of royalty distinctly peculiar. The royal family lives in palaces heavily screened from prying eyes by fences, grounds, gates, guards, all designed to ensure the family absolute privacy. And every newspaper in London carried headlines announcing PRINCESS ANNE HAS OVARIAN CYST REMOVED. I mean you're a young girl reared in heavily guarded seclusion and every beer drinker in every pub knows the precise state of your ovaries.

If a relative has suffered Ovarian or Breast Cancer, get the genetic screening. It saves lives.

On the floors above Delivery, in flowerless rooms, women lay recovering from hysterectomies and mastectomies. Teenage girls with burst ovarian cysts nodded out on morphine. It was all around me from the beginning, the weight of female suffering, with its biblical justification and vanishing acts.

The ovarian world is the product of a life rhythm. The moment a child is born it becomes part of a world in which there is not only the life rhythm but the death rhythm. The frantic desire to live, to live at any cost, is not a result of the life rhythm in us, but of the death rhythm. There is not only no need to keep alive at any price, but, if life is undesirable, it is absolutely wrong. This keeping oneself alive, out of a blind urge to defeat death, is in itself a means of sowing death. Every one who has not fully accepted life, who is not incrementing life, is helping to fill the world with death. To make the simplest gesture with the hand can convey the utmost sense of life; a word spoken with the whole being can give life. Activity in itself means nothing: it is often a sign of death.

I don’t know if I ever liked you,” I say, and bathroom acoustics being what they are, the declaration is magnified and that much more unkind, which makes me feel bad until I see that he is missing a shoe, and I feel it anew, this terrible disappointment in myself that I am happy to take out on him. He is the most obvious thing that has ever happened to me, and all around the city it is happening to other silly, half-formed women excited by men who’ve simply met the prerequisite of living a little more life, a terribly unspecial thing that is just what happens when you keep on getting up and brushing your teeth and going to work and ignoring the whisper that comes to you at night and tells you it would be easier to be dead. So, sure, an older man is a wonder because he has paid thirty-eight years of Con Ed bills and suffered food poisoning and seen the climate reports and still not killed himself, but somehow, after being a woman for twenty-three years, after the ovarian torsion and student loans and newfangled Nazis in button-downs, I too am still alive, and actually this is the more remarkable feat. Instead I let myself be awed by his middling command of the wine list.

Although a male physician could quite easily, and convincingly, assert that ovarian cancer was “silent,” if you were to really listen to women who have had ovarian cancer speak, you’d find that it wasn’t so much that the disease process was silent—but that they were. Conditions that seem to lurk unnoticed in a woman’s body go unnoticed by others because, for one thing, they are an assumed part of womanhood, and, for another, women are taught to keep those pains private. I’ve often found it curious that when a woman is suffering, her competence is questioned, but when a man is suffering, he’s humanized. It’s a gender stereotype that hurts both men and women, though it lends itself to the question of why there is a proclivity in health care, and in society, to deny female pain.

and I feel it anew, this terrible disappointment in myself that I am happy to take out on him. He is the most obvious thing that has ever happened to me, and all around the city it is happening to other silly, half-formed women excited by men who’ve simply met the prerequisite of living a little more life, a terribly unspecial thing that is just what happens when you keep on getting up and brushing your teeth and going to work and ignoring the whisper that comes to you at night and tells you it would be easier to be dead. So, sure, an older man is a wonder because he has paid thirty-eight years of Con Ed bills and suffered food poisoning and seen the climate reports and still not killed himself, but somehow, after being a woman for twenty-three years, after the ovarian torsion and student loans and newfangled Nazis in button-downs, I too am still alive, and actually this is the more remarkable feat. Instead I let myself be awed by his middling command of the wine list.

How can you kill something that never existed? We’re all winners in the ovarian derby, yet I never heard anyone crying about the—if you will excuse the biological term—the sperm who were the losers in the race.

Gene patents are the point of greatest concern in the debate over ownership of human biological materials, and how that ownership might interfere with science. As of 2005—the most recent year figures were available—the U.S. government had issued patents relating to the use of about 20 percent of known human genes, including genes for Alzheimer’s, asthma, colon cancer, and, most famously, breast cancer. This means pharmaceutical companies, scientists, and universities control what research can be done on those genes, and how much resulting therapies and diagnostic tests will cost. And some enforce their patents aggressively: Myriad Genetics, which holds the patents on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes responsible for most cases of hereditary breast and ovarian cancer, charges $3,000 to test for the genes. Myriad has been accused of creating a monopoly, since no one else can offer the test, and researchers can’t develop cheaper tests or new therapies without getting permission from Myriad and paying steep licensing fees. Scientists who’ve gone ahead with research involving the breast-cancer genes without Myriad’s permission have found themselves on the receiving end of cease-and-desist letters and threats of litigation.

He is the most obvious thing that has ever happened to me, and all around the city it is happening to other silly, half-formed women excited by men who’ve simply met the prerequisite of living a little more life, a terribly unspecial thing that is just what happens when you keep getting up and brushing your teeth and going to work and ignoring the whisper that comes to you at night and tells you it would be easier to be dead. So sure, an older man is a wonder because he has paid thirty-eight years of Con Ed bills and suffered food poisoning and seen the climate reports and still not killed himself, but somehow, after being a woman for twenty-three years, after the ovarian torsion and student loans and newfangled Nazis in button-downs, I too am still alive, and actually this is the more remarkable feat. Instead I let myself be awed by his middling command of the wine list.

The findings indicate that having higher levels of PTSD symptoms, such as being easily startled by ordinary noises or avoiding reminders of the traumatic experience, can be associated with increased risks of ovarian cancer even decades after women experience a traumatic event.” The more severe the trauma symptoms, the more aggressive the cancer proved to be.

I prefer to thin of it as rebooting my ovarian operating system.

There’s a macabre medical maxim that says that the good people get the worst diseases. If a person is generous of spirit and comes in with a nagging abdominal discomfort the week after she runs a marathon, we’ll discover she has stage-four ovarian cancer. The racist pedophile who drowns kittens on Sundays survives being struck by lightning and lung cancer as he chain-smokes into his nineties.

What spa?’ mum asked, busy at the kitchen sink. She said the word spa the same way some people would say, ovarian cyst. ‘I didn’t want to be shuffling around in paper knickers all day, Lara. I’ve a million things to do.

Myriad Genetics, which holds the patents on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes responsible for most cases of hereditary breast and ovarian cancer, charges $3,000 to test for the genes. Myriad has been accused of creating a monopoly, since no one else can offer the test, and researchers can’t develop cheaper tests or new therapies without getting permission from Myriad and paying steep licensing fees. Scientists who’ve gone ahead with research involving the breast-cancer genes without Myriad’s permission have found themselves on the receiving end of cease-and-desist letters and threats of litigation. In May 2009 the American Civil Liberties Union, several breast-cancer survivors, and professional groups representing more than 150,000 scientists sued Myriad Genetics over its breast-cancer gene patents. Among other things, scientists involved in the case claim that the practice of gene patenting has inhibited their research, and they aim to stop it. The presence of so many scientists in the suit, many of them from top institutions, challenges the standard argument that ruling against biological patents would interfere with scientific progress

In 1962, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize for their discovery. Franklin was not included in the prize. She had died in 1958, at the age of thirty-seven, from diffusely metastatic ovarian cancer-an illness ultimately linked to mutations in genes.

The Human Genome Project, the full sequence of the normal human genome, was completed in 2003. In its wake comes a far less publicized but vastly more complex project: fully sequencing the genomes of several human cancer cells. Once completed, this effort, called the Cancer Genome Atlas, will dwarf the Human Genome Project in its scope. The sequencing effort involves dozens of teams of researchers across the world. The initial list of cancers to be sequenced includes brain, lung, pancreatic, and ovarian cancer. The Human Genome Project will provide the normal genome, against which cancer’s abnormal genome can be juxtaposed and contrasted. The result, as Francis Collins, the leader of the Human Genome Project describes it, will be a “colossal atlas” of cancer—a compendium of every gene mutated in the most common forms of cancer: “When applied to the 50 most common types of cancer, this effort could ultimately prove to be the equivalent of more than 10,000 Human Genome Projects in terms of the sheer volume of DNA to be sequenced.

In the 1970s, while researching in the Library of Congress, I found an obscure history of religious architecture that assumed a fact as if it were common knowledge: the traditional design of most patriarchal buildings of worship imitates the female body. Thus, there is an outer and inner entrance, labia majora and labia minora; a central vaginal aisle toward the altar; two curved ovarian structures on either side; and then in the sacred center, the altar or womb, where the miracle takes place - where males gives birth. Though this comparison was new to to me, it struck home like a rock down a well. Of course, I thought. The central ceremony of patriarchal religions is one in which men take over the yoni-power of creation by giving birth symbolically. No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin - because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life. No wonder the male priesthood tries to keep women away from the altar, just as women are kept away from control of our own powers of reproduction. Symbolic or real, it's all devoted to controlling the power that resides in the female body.

Here’s a fact: I have great breasts, which have warped my spine. More facts: My salary is very low. I have trouble making friends, and men lose interest in me when I talk. It always goes well initially, but then I talk too explicitly about my ovarian torsion or my rent.

It is undignified to inject yourself with hormones designed to slow or enhance ovarian production. It is undignified to have your ovaries monitored by transvaginal ultrasound; to be sedated so that your eggs can be aspirated into a needle; to have your husband emerge sheepishly from a locked room with the “sample” that will be combined with your eggs under supervision of an embryologist. The grainy photo they hand you on transfer day, of your eight-celled embryo (which does not look remotely like a baby), is undignified, and so is all the waiting and despairing that follows.

The last time I told one of your would-be paramours nay on your behalf, she damn near unmanned me. This time I wish protection when I deliver the news. ’Tis not amusing. You think what you do is dangerous? I defy you to be in my boots for one moment when I face the great Ovarian Horde in your stead. (Kit)

For a long time being female was treated by science and medicine as being akin to having a serious psychological disorder. Women were routinely prescribed hysterectomies or anxiolytics like valium to treat the symptoms of hysteria which is a syndrome with symptoms that are suspiciously similar to the symptoms of being of human female who has to deal with stupid sexist bullshit. Although scions and medicine has come a long way since these sorts of practices were common place every woman i know has had an experience of being treated as less rational version of a man. Sometimes even by our own doctors simply by virtue of our gender. There belief that women are irrational and therefore underserving of the same rights as men is something that has lingered in the public consciousness in a huge way. And women are very aware of this. We have to listen to a lot of people say a lot of dumb shit about our hormones and about whether we deserve the right to control our own fertility. These types of claims particularly when combined with sciences and medicine mishandling of women for so long have made it very difficult for anyone, even female scientists, to have thoughtful conversations about things like women's hormones and fertility regulation. These topics unaddressed by science are often met with suspicion by anyone who has ever owned a pair of ovaries or is an ovarian sympatist.

Doctors are mostly guessing at how drugs affect unborn babies and the women carrying them. This bias isn’t limited to people who have or are planning to get pregnant. Throughout the history of medicine, women have been included in far fewer medical studies, less research and fewer drug trials than men have been. This is true even during studies and drugs for things that solely or mostly affect cis women, like breast and ovarian cancer. It’s absolutely unacceptable. And yet it still continues, to this day.

In 2006, the Vogelstein team revealed the first landmark sequencing effort by analyzing thirteen thousand genes in eleven breast and colon cancers. (Although the human genome contains about twenty thousand genes in total, Vogelstein’s team initially had tools to assess only thirteen thousand.) In 2008, both Vogelstein’s group and the Cancer Genome Atlas consortium extended this effort by sequencing hundreds of genes of several dozen specimens of brain tumors. As of 2009, the genomes of ovarian cancer, pancreatic cancer, melanoma, lung cancer, and several forms of leukemia have been sequenced, revealing the full catalog of mutations in each tumor type. Perhaps

The salicylic acid content in plants may help explain why traditional, plant-based diets were so protective. For instance, before their diets were Westernized, animal products made up only about 5 percent of the average Japanese diet.72 During this period in the 1950s, age-adjusted death rates from colon, prostate, breast, and ovarian cancers were five to ten times lower in Japan than in the United States, while incidences of pancreatic cancer, leukemia, and lymphoma were three to four times lower. This phenomenon was not unique to the Japanese. As we’ve seen throughout this book, Western rates of cancers and heart disease have been found to be dramatically lower among populations whose diets are centered around plant foods.73

As though if I could make my body fit on one of these tiny barstools, I'd be in a perfect, fulfilling relationship instead of forcing myself to get through this date, wishing I could just disappear. Of course I know that none of that is true. That I can't change my body type (and don't even want to!), that thin women are no more happy than I am, that these insecurities are seeded and tended in my brain by the weight-loss industry, which profits from our collective self-loathing to the tune of $70 billion each year-despite the fact the 97% of diets fail. (Side note: What if we put all that money towards solving actual health problems instead? Could we cure ovarian cancer, like, tomorrow?) I know all these things, but tonight, I just can't feel them

Moreover, puberty is not just about the onslaught of gonadal hormones. It’s about how they come online.9 The defining feature of ovarian endocrine function is the cyclicity of hormone release—“It’s that time of the month.” In adolescent females puberty does not arrive full flower, so to speak, with one’s first period. Instead, for the first few years only about half of cycles actually involve ovulation and surges of estrogen and progesterone. Thus, not only are young adolescents experiencing these first ovulatory cycles, but there are also higher-order fluctuations in whether the ovulatory fluctuation occurs. Meanwhile, while adolescent males don’t have equivalent hormonal gyrations, it can’t help that their frontal cortex keeps getting hypoxic from the priapic blood flow to the crotch.

feel it anew, this terrible disappointment in myself that I am happy to take out on him. He is the most obvious thing that has ever happened to me, and all around the city it is happening to other silly, half-formed women excited by men who’ve simply met the prerequisite of living a little more life, a terribly unspecial thing that is just what happens when you keep on getting up and brushing your teeth and going to work and ignoring the whisper that comes to you at night and tells you it would be easier to be dead. So, sure, an older man is a wonder because he has paid thirty-eight years of Con Ed bills and suffered food poisoning and seen the climate reports and still not killed himself, but somehow, after being a woman for twenty-three years, after the ovarian torsion and student loans and newfangled Nazis in button-downs, I too am still alive, and actually this is the more remarkable feat.

I pull into the driveway outside of my father's house and shut off the engine. I sit behind the wheel for a moment, studying the house. He'd called me last night and demanded that I come over for dinner tonight. Didn't request. He demanded. What struck me though, was that he sounded a lot more stressed out and harried than he did when he interrupted my brunch with Gabby to demand my presence at a “family”dinner. Yeah, that had been a fun night filled with my father and Ian badgering me about my job. For whatever reason, they'd felt compelled to make a concerted effort to belittle what I do –more so than they usually do anyway -- try to undermine my confidence in my ability to teach, and all but demand that I quit and come to work for my father's company. That had been annoying, and although they were more insistent than normal, it's pretty par for the course with those two. They always think they know what's best for me and have no qualms about telling me how to live my life. When he'd called me last night though, and told me to come to dinner tonight, there was something in my father's voice that had rattled me. It took me a while to put a finger on what it was I heard in his voice, but when I figured it out, it really shook me. I heard fear. Outright fear. My father isn't a man who fears much or is easily intimidated. In fact, he's usually the one doing the intimidating. But, something has him really spooked and even though we don't always see eye-to-eye or get along, hearing that fear in his voice scared me. In all my years, I've never known him to sound so downright terrified. With a sigh and a deep sense of foreboding, I climb out of my car and head to the door, trying to steel myself more with each step. Call me psychic, but I have a feeling that this is going to be a long, miserable night. “Good evening, Miss Holly,”Gloria says as she opens the door before I even have a chance to knock. “Nice to see you again.”“It's nice to see you too, Gloria,”I say and smile with genuine affection. Gloria has been with our family for as far back as I can remember. Honestly, after my mother passed away from ovarian cancer, Gloria took a large role in raising me. My father had plunged himself into his work –and had taken Ian under his wing to help groom him to take over the empire one day –leaving me to more or less fend for myself. It was like I was a secondary consideration to them. Because I'm a girl and not part of the testosterone-rich world of construction, neither my father nor Ian took much interest in me or my life. Unless they needed something from me, of course. The only time they really paid any attention to me was when they needed me to pose for family pictures for company literature.

Broadly speaking, components of processed foods and animal products, such as saturated fat, trans fat, and cholesterol, were found to be pro-inflammatory, while constituents of whole plant foods, such as fiber and phytonutrients, were strongly anti-inflammatory.938 No surprise, then, that the Standard American Diet rates as pro-inflammatory and has the elevated disease rates to show for it. Higher Dietary Inflammatory Index scores are linked to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease939 and lower kidney,940 lung,941 and liver function.942 Those eating diets rated as more inflammatory also experienced faster cellular aging.943,944 In the elderly, pro-inflammatory diets are associated with impaired memory945 and increased frailty.946 Inflammatory diets are also associated with worse mental health, including higher rates of depression, anxiety, and impaired well-being.947 Additionally, eating more pro-inflammatory foods has been tied to higher prostate cancer risk in men948,949,950 and higher risks of breast cancer,951,952 endometrial cancer,953 ovarian cancer,954 and miscarriages in women. Higher Dietary Inflammatory Index scores are also associated with more risk of esophageal,955 stomach,956 liver,957 pancreatic,958 colorectal,959 kidney,960 and bladder961 cancers, as well as non-Hodgkin lymphoma.962 Overall, eating a more inflammatory diet was associated with 75 percent increased odds of having cancer and 67 percent increased risk of dying from cancer.963 Not surprisingly, those eating more anti-inflammatory diets appear to live longer lives.964,965,966,967 But how does the Dietary Inflammatory Index impact body weight? Obesity and Inflammation:

Test Tumor Markers Twice a Year There are many tests available that could indicate cancer, and indicate it at a stage early enough for effective treatment. These are PSA, for the prostate, and CA-125 for ovarian cancer. If CA-125 is above 20 u/ml, see your gynecologist. For PSA, trend is important, meaning more than one measurement is needed. If PSA rises more than 0.6 ng/ml in a 12 month period or less, see a urologist. If PSA is over 3, a urologist should also be consulted.

Test Annually TSH - indicator of thyroid function Test Every Six Months PSA (men) - indicator for prostate cancer CA-125 (women) - indicator for ovarian cancer

It’s the medication to treat the ovarian stuff. I’m still having side effects—GI symptoms.

acne also comes from other experiences. Women with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), who demonstrate exaggerated insulin responses and higher blood sugars, are strikingly prone to acne.11 Medications that reduce insulin and glucose in women with PCOS, such as the drug metformin, reduce acne.12 While oral diabetes medications are usually not administered to children, it has been observed that young people who take oral diabetes medications that reduce blood sugar and insulin do experience less acne.13

systems work better when perceived as fair. Buffett launched into an intriguing thought problem he called “the ovarian lottery.” You are to be born in 24 hours. You are also to write all the rules that will govern the society in which you will live. However, you do not know if you will be born bright or retarded, black or white, male or female, rich or poor, able or disabled. How would you write the rules? Buffett

Before anesthesia, surgeons removed bladder stones, drained ovarian cysts, and amputated legs, but little else; they were rewarded for their speed more than their skill. A surgeon named Robert Liston, in an attempt to best his own speed record for amputating a leg, accidentally cut off one of his patient’s testicles and two of his assistant’s fingers.

Gates’s strong patronage of HPV vaccines (Gardasil and Cervarix) deepened suspicions that he was weaponizing vaccination against human fertility. Merck’s clinical trials showed strong signals for reproductive harm from Gardasil.177, 178 People in the study suffered reproductive problems including premature ovarian failure at ten times background rates. Female fertility has dropped precipitously beginning in 2006 in the United States, coterminous with Gardasil uptake.179, 180 Historical drops in fecundity have occurred in every nation with high Gardasil uptake.181

The experts agree with them about the importance of the quality of the debulking: “there is absolutely nothing the doctor can influence, including choosing the type of chemotherapy, that affects a woman’s chance of surviving her ovarian cancer as much as the quality of her initial surgery . . . Sadly, however, only between 30 and 50 percent of the women with ovarian cancer in any given geographic region will have optimal surgery.” I

Terry Tempest Williams: “I look at Mother and I see myself,” she writes during her period of caretaking; or worse: “A person with cancer dies in increments, and a part of you slowly dies with them.

It is one thing to renounce willfulness, another to be robbed of willingness.

To pursue my career, I had always lectured myself that no momentary hesitancy or stoppage should be called a writing block. One must simply determine to go on writing, period. “Apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair”: the mantra I learned from Sandra and recited to undergraduate and graduate students assured them that personal effort and the struggle to continue expression would win out with the reward of word following word in paragraphs and pages that reflected their thought processes and clarified themselves to themselves. But what to write about not wanting, not doing, not knowing how to get through minute by minute of this dull but fearful day, even though (thankfully) there is no pain (I try to concentrate on this), just discomfort.

By way of summary, then, I ask, what does medical knowledge do to or for women dealing with ovarian cancer? Many of us manage to appreciate the preciousness of the present moment and find a spiritual pot of gold at the end of treatment not because but in spite of medical interventions, for the state of contemporary approaches to ovarian cancer is a scandal.

The words of Corinne Boyer, a Canadian woman who died of ovarian cancer a decade ago, complement the patchwork of sentiments expressed by many of the others I studied: “Is this my protest against what is happening to me? No—it is a protest about what is happening to all women. Or, more exactly, what is not happening for them. I am reconciled for myself, and anticipate the entirely spiritual life that awaits me. What I was not reconciled to—nor should anyone be—is the injustice to women in allocating such a paltry medical research budget to illnesses that are specific to women.

Sex hormones/Reproductive health history. Sex hormone imbalances can be a factor in Hashimoto’s, and here is some of the information I ask for on my health history forms: Do you currently take, or have you taken oral contraceptives or bioidentical hormones? Do you currently take, or have you had an intrauterine device (IUD)? If you answered “yes,” was it a copper or hormonal IUD? How many live births have you had? Were they natural births or Cesarean sections? Is there a history of ovarian cysts? Is there a history of uterine fibroids? Is there a history of endometriosis? Is there a history of fibrocystic breasts?

That night (as on all nights), when the lights get turned out, Don and I lie on our backs side by side with his left hand cradling my right. “I worry that this sickness is taking over your life, Bear,” I murmur in the dark now permeated by a bathroom nightlight he has just affixed. “I have no other life,” he responds while gently stroking my fingers. “I don’t know what to hope for,” I whisper. “Let’s hope for a good summer,” he says.

If there weren’t so many damned umlauts in Pema’s last name—it is a royal pain to find the damned symbol list—she might be worth consulting and quoting, for she believes that “when we encounter pain in our life we breathe into our heart with the recognition that others also feel this.” Can I learn to deepen compassion by realizing that my distress is shared, that there are many other people all over the world feeling pain worse than mine?

Pema of the many umlauts

Tonglen (the Tibetan word that means ‘to give and to receive’) consists of accepting another’s suffering and distress, making an offering in return [with] all the confidence and serenity one can muster. This simple sharing of someone else’s suffering means being with him or her, not leaving that person alone.” Breathing in the pain of another, breathing out relief and release might whittle away at my solipsism. Tonglen is believed to be “one of the great meditation jewels that offers a way to nurture the natural energy of mercy and basic goodness.

I want the quiet concentration of each everyday task to fill me with an active love of living and a passive acceptance of dying,

I wish to cultivate the mystic intensity of each moment alone or with others, to reflect on each second’s untold vibrancy. To make the moment of being stand still—that’s how Virginia Woolf frequently thought about her quests in consciousness. What I seek is “a willingness instead of willfulness, an ability to take life on life’s terms as opposed to putting up a big fight,” as Lauren Slater expresses it in Lying, her astonishing memoir about the impossibility of telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

The interwoven branches of the firs droop from the weight, bendable but not brittle. I want to be just as still and somehow pliable and permanent in each moment of being alive, to ponder how transient and yet how pregnant each instant feels.

While reading, I am moved by cadences and vocabularies, values and contexts tangential to or beyond me, but somehow pertinent to how I might begin to apprehend myself and the world differently or how foreign worlds I never encountered or even imagined might catch my attention and sweep me up in their sustained asymmetries.

how does my worthless life get lived without me?

the pedagogy of pain. I am pathetically grateful to the doctors for righting the wrong they had done.

I am dying without death; living without life.

The “peace which comes from selflessness,” Karen Armstrong explains, “is a condition that those of us who are still enmeshed in the cravings of egotism . . . cannot imagine.

Think of those mythic or fantastic creatures granted eternal life without eternal health and youth: the Cumaean Sibyl, for instance, or the Struldbruggs in the third book of Gulliver’s Travels. Immortal but decaying and dead to affection and curiosity, Swift’s Struldbruggs may be exempt from physical termination but their unending devolution into querulous, envious, and impotent senility can only horrify Gulliver and the reader with “the dreadful Prospect of never dying.” Death has departed from their world only to leave them miserably incapacitated in a never-dying but always degenerating afterlife. “What is truly horrible is not death but the irremissibility of existence” or “the facticity of being riveted to existence without an exit,” as the philosopher Simon Critchley puts it more abstractly. The

She was enraged with herself. But by then, she was gone, too, the death certificate saying ovarian cancer but Silas knowing it was the rage that killed her: she grew those tumors like teeth to eat herself alive.

in BRCA-1 has a 50 to 80 percent chance of developing breast cancer in her lifetime (the gene also increases the risk for ovarian cancer), about three to five times the normal risk.

BRCA-1, a gene that strongly predisposes humans to breast and ovarian cancer.

He leaned over and pulled from the bunch a bright red ribbon that had a key attached to it. "This one in particular said that I was to make sure you received her gift or else she would poison me while I eat. So in lieu of hiring a taster for my meals, I wanted to make sure it reached you." Stryder rolled his eyes as Kit took it and broke the seal on the note that was also attached to the ribbon. His brother read aloud. "Milord, 'tis with great honor I give you the key to my chastity belt. Meet me tonight in the rose courtyard. Ever your lady, Charity of York" "A key to a chastity belt?" Christian asked in an amused tone. "Aye," Stryder said, his voice thick with ill humor. "And an invitation to a forced wedding if ever I saw one." Christian laughed again at that. "And you wonder why I prefer to wear the garb of a monk. It's the best shield I have found against conniving would-be brides, and even it isn't foolproof, as you have seen." Stryder handed the key back to Kit. "Tell the lady I am previously engaged." Kit arched a brow at that, then headed for one of Stryder's plate codpieces. He frowned as he watched his brother place the codpiece inside his hose. "What is it you do?" "The last time I told one of your would-be paramours nay on your behalf, she damn near unmanned me. This time I wish protection when I deliver the news." Stryder joined Christian's laughter. "'Tis not amusing," Kit said, his tone offended. "You think what you do is dangerous? I defy you to be in my boots for one moment when I face the great Ovarian Horde in your stead." "And that is why I send you, my brother. I haven't the courage to face them." "What?" Christian said in feigned shock. "Stryder of Blackmoor afraid? I never thought I would live to see the day a mere maid could send you craven." "The day you doff your cleric's robes and don your crown, Your Highness, you may taunt me on that front. Until then, I know you for the coward you are as well." Christian's eyes danced with mischief. "Women do make cowards of us all." Kit opened his mouth to say something, then must have rethought it. Grabbing a shield, he headed for the door. "If I don't return by night's fall, please make sure I am buried on home soil." -Kit, Christian, & Stryder

Women should know the truth. They can take it; they are adults, not children. If a mother opts for formula rather than breastfeeding, there is good evidence that her baby will score lower on IQ tests and will have a higher risk of many illnesses including some cancers, diabetes, respiratory illnesses, diarrhea and ear infections. She should know that her own risk of breast, ovarian and uterine cancer will be higher, as well as her daughter’s risk of breast cancer. The mother increases her own risk of diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and becoming overweight by “choosing” formula feeding. There is accumulating evidence that the risk of mental illness (alcoholism, ADHD, schizophrenia) is increased by not breastfeeding. A recent study suggested that even behaviour problems in adolescents are more likely if the child was formula fed. The longer the child is breastfed, the lower the risk both for the child and the mother.

But today it is possible to find out through a blood test whether you are highly susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer, and then take action. . . . Life comes with many challenges. The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.” —ANGELINA JOLIE1

Hirsutism is however, more than a cosmetic problem because it usually represents a hormonal imbalance, resulting from a subtle excess of androgens that may be of ovarian origin, adrenal origin, or both. The

Among women eating totally raw diets, about 50 percent entirely ceased to menstruate. A further proportion, about 10 percent, suffered irregular menstrual cycles that left them unlikely to conceive. These figures are far higher than for women eating cooked food. Healthy women on cooked diets rarely fail to menstruate, whether or not they are vegetarian. But ovarian function predictably declines in women suffering from extreme energy depletion, such as marathoners and anorexics.

Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.” —Joshua 1:9 (NIV) Tomorrow I’m going in for one of my regular cancer tests, and today I’m fighting my “What if” fears. What if my cancer comes back? I’m nearly seven years out from being diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer when I was given a two-year life expectancy. I’ve beaten all odds. But a couple of doctors told me that “stage IV ovarian cancer always comes back.” So far, I’ve proven them wrong, but every time I make an appointment for a checkup, the “What if” fears start creeping in. What if my test is not good? “Don’t go there,” a friend advises me. But I have to go there. My way of dealing with my fears is to look the worst-case possibilities square in the face. I’ve even created my own scenario for this fear-facing exercise. I imagine my fears stuffed into an imaginary room. It’s a scary but sacred place, because I know that nothing in that room surprises God—and He invites me to “go there” because Jesus is there too. He walks alongside me as I explore each fear, imagining what my life would be like if that worst possibility became a reality. What if my cancer comes back? I picture Jesus answering, “If your cancer comes back, I will still be with you. I will still give you what you need, one day at a time. I will still love you with an everlasting love. And I will still give you a future with hope.” Soon, I know that even if my worst fears become reality, Jesus’ promises are still true. That gives me courage as I go off to my cancer test once again. Lord, Your promises sustain me. Always. —Carol Kuykendall Digging Deeper: Prv 1:33; Phil 4:19; 2 Pt 1:1–11

1. GROWTH HORMONES IN MEAT When you eat conventional meat, you’re probably eating hormones, antibiotics, steroids, and chemicals created by the fear and stress suffered by the animal during slaughter and in its inhumane living conditions. In 2009, two Japanese researchers published a startling study in Annals of Oncology. They pointed out that there has been a surge in hormone-dependent cancers that roughly parallels the surge of beef consumption in Japan. Over the last twenty-five years, hormone-dependent cancers such as breast, ovarian, endometrial, and prostate cancer rose fivefold in that country. More than 25 percent of the beef imported to Japan comes from the United States, where livestock growers regularly use the growth hormonal steroid estradiol. The researchers found that US beef had much higher levels of estrogen than Japanese beef because of the added hormones. This finding led them to conclude that eating a lot of estrogen-rich beef could be the reason for the rising incidence of these life-threatening cancers. Injected hormones like estrogen mimic the activity of our natural hormones and prevent those hormones from doing their jobs. This situation creates chaos. Growth hormones may alter the way in which natural hormones are produced, eliminated, or metabolized. And guess what? Hormone impersonators can trigger unnatural cell growth that may develop into cancer. The United States is one of the only industrialized countries that still allows their animals to be injected with growth hormone. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, and the entire European Union have banned rBGH and rBST because of their dangerous impact on human and bovine health. US farmers fatten up their livestock by injecting them with estrogen-based hormones, which can migrate from the meat we eat to our bodies—and possibly stimulate the growth of human breast cancer, according to the Breast Cancer Fund, an organization committed to preventing breast cancer by

Having a BRCA2 mutation makes you more susceptible to melanoma, for example, so you would need to take extra precautions to protect yourself from harmful sun exposure, including wearing sunblock and sun-protective clothing when outdoors.

Burr was in. He enthusiastically sent one of his contraptions back with Langman to his wards, where, in an initial group of 100 women, he strapped one electrode to the lower abdomen above the pubis, and the other either on or alongside the cervix.6 Women whose troubles turned out to be caused by ovarian cysts or other non-cancerous medical issues almost always had a positive reading. Women with malignant tumors, however, showed an electrical “marked negativity” of the cervical region every time.7 Langman confirmed their diagnosis with a pathological examination. Cancerous tissues, it appeared, emitted an unmistakable electrical signature. Langman repeated the technique in about a thousand women to see whether his results stood up. They did: 102 of his patients exhibited the characteristic voltage reversals. When Langman operated on them, he confirmed that 95 of the 102 had cancer.8 Even more remarkably, often the masses had not even progressed to the point where the symptoms would have driven them to visit the doctor, never mind obtain a correct diagnosis. After removing these cancers, the electrical polarity shown on the electrometer would normally flip back to a “healthy” positive indicator—but it did not always. When it stayed negative, Burr and Langman suspected that this indicated that they either hadn’t got it all, or the cells had metastasized. Somewhere in the body, a cancerous mass was still sending its nefarious signals. What struck them as especially strange was that the electrode inside the genital tract did not have to be placed directly on, or even particularly near to, the malignant tissue for the anomaly to be detectable. It was like a distress signal was being sent over distances through the body’s healthy tissue.

However, contrary to popular belief, while aging may cause weight gain, menopause itself does not. It can, however, increase your belly fat. How so? Fluctuating levels of estrogen can trigger fat storage in the body, and the belly is the storage shed. However inconvenient this may seem, there is a method to this madness. As ovarian production of estradiol slows down, our body relies on belly fat tissue to produce estrone, estrogen’s backup. We actually need that belly fat to ensure that some estrogen production continues as we age. However, while having enough body fat can help maintain our hormonal health, too much can cause other problems, as we know. This shift can result in an apple body shape, usually accompanied by a buildup of visceral fat—a stealth fat that collects around internal organs, increasing the risk of heart disease and metabolic disorders.

Note that a partial hysterectomy (removal of the uterus but not the ovaries), ovarian cyst removal, or endometrial ablation does not cause menopause but can affect blood flow to the ovaries, prompting menopausal symptoms at an earlier age.

ovarian preservation after menopause might still lower the risk of osteoporosis, heart disease and stroke later in life. As a result, current guidelines recommend ovarian conservation for postmenopausal women with no genetic or additional risks who are undergoing hysterectomy for benign reasons

I remember once reading that ovarian cancer very often went undetected because patients did not have any obvious symptoms early on. I also have no obvious symptoms, I was able to deduce, so clearly I have ovarian cancer.

Testing is instead recommended to evaluate fertility problems or when periods stop at an early age, as with POI. Another reason to test is for polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), a hormonal condition that can impact menstrual regularity and fertility. Labs may also help determine menopausal status for women who no longer have a period due to medical interventions. These include a partial hysterectomy (the surgical removal of the uterus but not the ovaries) or an endometrial ablation (a procedure that removes the lining of the uterus). These procedures stop your menstrual period but don’t stop ovulation. In this case, the occurrence of menopausal symptoms is the first indication of menopause, with blood work providing supporting evidence. In such cases, the levels of estrogen and other hormones, chiefly FSH and another hormone called inhibin B, are measured. Inhibin B regulates FSH production, and it can serve as a marker for ovarian function and follicular content. Normative

Should you be eating soy? There’s been some debate about soy due to the perception of its carrying estrogen, but I want you to understand that phytoestrogens aren’t estrogen, nor do they act like human estrogen. Instead, phytoestrogens are isoflavones, one of the unique phytochemicals in soy beans. There are actually three soy isoflavones: genistein, daidzein, and glycitein. They have a number of health benefits, including: lowering cholesterol, strengthening bones, treating menopausal symptoms, lowering risk of coronary heart disease, and reducing risk of prostate/colon/breast/ovarian cancers. Want even more good news about soy? There are certain gut bacteria that can convert soy isoflavones into an even more beneficial compound called equol. This is like a supercharged isoflavone, giving you even more cardiovascular, bone, and menopausal health benefits. Unfortunately, you need to have the bacteria in order to do this. Equol can be produced by 50 to 60 percent of Asian people but just 30 percent of Westerners. For what it’s worth, diets high in carbohydrates (really meaning fiber) and low in saturated fat are associated with equol production, while antibiotics appear to hinder it. I recommend consuming only non-GMO and organic soy in its whole-foods forms: edamame, tofu, miso, tempeh, tamari, and unsweetened soy milk. Model your soy consumption after the way they do it in Asia. For some delicious ways to consume soy, check out the recipes in Chapter 10.

ROSALIND. (To the audience.) I have two rumors. Twin tumors. Twins scampering around my body on tricycles, dropping handfuls of dirt as they go ... For a moment I think of naming one Watson and the other Crick, but no, I tell myself: Rosalind, dispel the thought. (Beat.) No. I have ovarian cancer. A tumor in each ovary, one the size of a tennis ball, and the other a croquet ball, and they are indeed an efficient pair.

Yet after my diagnosis and despite my hunch about the disease’s fatality, I did undergo all the operations, therapies, and interventions specialists advised. Given my love of life and of the people in my life, it seemed wrong simply to submit to the cancer’s inevitable progress, to succumb passively and helplessly to the determinism of a preordained death. I had to embark on doing what could be done against the disease—even if, even though it would eventually terminate my existence. To treasure the gift of life and the people in my life, I wanted to take responsibility for dealing with a condition admittedly beyond my control. Like many people with cancer, I sought to cultivate acceptance while consulting and following the advice of medical specialists.

parting looms imminent as death takes dominion over that place in the body framed and famed for giving birth to life. Despite my antipathies toward current treatments, all are designed to make death delay its dominion over the center of the body.

Yet intimations of mortality whispered something else in my ear—namely, that I will love my family and friends until death departs, and since death will never depart, I will love them always and forever.

I will love you beyond my death. I will love you from another space that you will palpably feel, and feel to be me loving you.” Albeit confused, that declaration seemed to speak of the intense emotions sustained by the urgent desire to continue loving the beloved until and after death. I want to live as long as the people I love live. We will live so long as the people we love remember we love them.

Nancy Mairs, a contemporary thinker about disability and dying, wrests with “the psychological ‘undeadness’ of the dead—a consolatory consciousness of the beloved as present though elsewhere.” Such a conviction reflects faith in death as the end of personal consciousness but the beginning of a translation “into an existence no less authentic for my inability to read it.

life without the finitude of death—the inconceivable finality of one’s own death—would be intolerable.

Marie de Hennezel, a French psychologist who works with the terminally ill, believes that “the person who can say to someone else ‘I am going to die’ does not become the victim of death but, rather, the protagonist in his or her own dying.

Why I can report on a computer keyboard what I cannot bear to say aloud remains a mystery to me, but so it goes. Maybe my inability to speak propelled the obsessive reading and writing.

How to distinguish the general noise of the midlife or aging body from meaningful signals that portend danger? In difficult-to-obtain books published primarily by small presses or self-published, the testimonies of women underscore the need for an early detection tool, given the vagaries of symptoms

As a monopoly, Myriad could set unreasonable prices and limit accessibility of services by denying certain types of insurance. Though genetic patents are being debated in the courts today, the profit motive continues to curtail available responses.

Diseased ovaries still represented a deviation from standard femininity, but a differently defined femininity. If nineteenth-century women were thought to develop ovarian disease because of too much libido, their twentieth-century descendants apparently had too little.

For centuries, ovarian cancer patients were effectively told that their aberrant sexuality caused a disease they deserved. Might historic prejudices against ovarian disease have contributed to the miserable state of ovarian cancer treatments today? Sometimes I think, probably not; sometimes I think, you bet. For didn’t Ovariana retard and deform scientific investigations? Didn’t it shape the mind-set of physicians who, until quite recently, were generally men? Doesn’t the disease for the most part affect a subsection of the population—older, post-menopausal women—with little cultural capital?

The hardly noticeable symptoms of cancer pale in comparison to those produced by the surgeons determined to excise it.

Remission is a word that signifies absolution. As Google will guess if you begin typing it, the term “remission of cancer” derives from and echoes “the remission of sins.

All meditations on death should be avoided, according to Reynolds Price: “Never give death a serious hearing till its ripeness forces your final attention and dignified nod.

American antipathy to discussions of mortality has recently stalled efforts to reform the health-care system. As I write, a proposal for patient-driven end-of-life consultations has been caricatured and attacked as an imposition of government-run “death panels” dedicated to euthanasia of the disabled and the elderly. Pointing to widespread opposition to any reconciliation with the inexorability of suffering and mortality, a number of commentators have claimed that Americans exhibit a national addiction to narratives of individualistic self-improvement and perseverance.

According to Philippe Ariès, “the interdiction of death in order to preserve happiness was born in the United States around the beginning of the twentieth century.

Numerous books have confirmed Ariès’s and Gawande’s point that we are death-deprived not only by medical and mortuary businesses but also by much more generalized social prohibitions against acknowledging dying or mourning.

In my absence, who would cherish Molly and Simone with my ferocity and unconditional adoration of who they are, no matter what they do or become? Who would be their biggest fan?

I respect the values that imbued my personal trajectory, I must avoid the degradations and dependencies of pointless suffering. “Death has dominion,” Ronald Dworkin explains, “because it is not only the start of nothing but the end of everything, and how we think and talk about dying—the emphasis we put on dying with ‘dignity’—shows how important it is that life ends appropriately, that death keeps faith with the way we want to have lived.

wish to experience a tranquil dying without whining about or withstanding death. “Like birth,” my treasured collaborator Sandra warns in Death’s Door, “death is surely by its nature undignified.” True, but with the help of hospice at home I wish to avoid being cut, drained, wired, monitored, intubated, and ventilated within the artificial life support systems of an ICU. “To die ‘naturally’ is to find a way to have a graceful death when the prognosis is terminal and further treatments are of questionable value. It is not a rejection of medical science, but rather an attempt to use the sophistication of modern medicine to treat—in a different, better way—those who are seriously ill or near death.” I

To an avuncular visitor who says, “I want to commend you on your attitude toward your impending situation,” I fantasize a non-Buddhist response, “At least I have a life to lose, loser.