Doing "cleanses" is a popular practice, which usually means temporarily purging certain foods from your diet and taking some kind of supplement (often a juice or shake) to help your body release toxins. I think afterwards many people just go back to the way they were...
Fariha Roisin describes her experience growing up in Living With My Mother's Mental Illness. If you have a few minutes, please read it and let me know if your childhood was similar to Roisin's experience. I wonder how many people grew up in similar circumstances...
During a recent interview with The Huffington Post, Jon Krakauer said his 1996 climbing of Mount Everest was a mistake. This is startling because in his 1997 book Into Thin Air, he explains that reaching that summit was a dream he'd had all his life. In many ways, it...
Four ibuprofen every three and a half hours. I even set my alarm to wake me up in the middle of the night so I wouldn't wake up to PAIN. Keeping the air conditioner on high so I can use the heating pad while it's in the 90s outside (30s Celsius). Staying home a lot so...
(My original post about my fibroid tumor is here.) So I decided to go with the Lupron treatment for my uterine fibroid tumor symptoms, but in the two weeks since my doctor appointment, their office has been having a hard time getting the paperwork through. The cogs of...
Someone from the Midwest Institute for Minimally Invasive Therapies commented on a recent post and sent me a link to the Chicago Fibroid Clinic. I'm passing it on for anyone who is suffering with fibroids and considering a hysterectomy. What I forget is that the...
So, I've been battling horrible menstrual cramps for months now and I've gone as far as I can with acupuncture, chiropractic, herbal supplements, diet, meditation and exercise. After eight months of drastically changing the way I eat and getting good results, the...
Last November, I cut out sugar, grains, dairy and caffeine at the suggestion of a doctor who identified those things as contributing to my hormones being out of balance. Having gone on this type of diet a few times in my life, it's felt familiar even though it's also...
Previous post on weight & health: The tyranny of sugar is over In my last post I wrote that I believe I could get physically hooked on sugar again, but not emotionally. Those can be hard to distinguish, but what I mean is that when I cut out sugar last November,...
Part I is here. The worst of the sleep disruption went away by the third night after she stopped taking Norco, but her mood plummeted the next day. She woke up feeling anxious, tense and worried. In the mirror she saw an ugly person with a ruined middle aged body. She...
It was just five days. Her prescription was for 20 pills to be taken every six hours. After the doctors in the emergency room couldn't figure out what was causing the intense pain in her abdomen, they gave her the prescription and told her to go home. It wasn't...
Previous post on weight & health: Kicking a sugar addiction Last night I dreamt I was eating layer cake. I scooped off the sculpted yet gooey white frosting with my finger and wrapped my mouth around it. In other dreams I've abstained from desserts or only...
There's a part of the human brain that processes face recognition. Being able to distinguish and recognize faces is a very specific skill that gets a region all its own because being able to tell family from friend from stranger is critical to survival. Unfortunately,...
Previous post on food & fatness: The pain has receded I am in the process of trying to kick my addiction to sugar. For almost seven months, since November 2014, I've done a pretty good job of reducing my ingestion of sugar of all forms, which means I've...
Previous post on weight & health: Hooray for fat yoga! I finally had a mostly decent menstrual experience two weeks ago. I'd been suffering since November from horrible cramping that made me cry. On a scale of 1 to 10, the pain's grip spent hours at 10,...