Women's Health

Being Asymmetrical

1 October 2024 Leave a Comment

Katie Brockie

Looking at myself in the mirror who is it,
Who is that lopsided stranger
Washing up and down the shore

Patricia Goedicke, from ‘Now Only One of Us Remains’

In 2023, I had a mastectomy. When I left the hospital, I was given a Dacron-stuffed soft fabric oval pad to use as a temporary prothesis for when I was able to wear bras again. It reminded me of the rolled-up pairs of socks that some girls used to stuff in their bras at high school – and of the other girls talking disparagingly about ‘falsies’. It was a few days until I was brave enough to look at myself in the mirror. When I did, it was an extraordinary feeling. A strip of surgical tape lay across the left side of my chest, which was now … empty. When I looked down, I could see my stomach sticking out. As many women also experience, it was hard enough to love my own body before I had surgery, but now I was wondering if I could love my asymmetrical body. Is it okay to love a scarred, one-breasted body, or should I book myself onto the waiting list for reconstructive surgery, ASAP?
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The female “KISS” for desire

9 November 2020 1 Comment

Shalini Kumar Palathinkal

Did you know that among animals, especially rodents like mice and rats, the females decide when they are ready for some action? You know what I mean … wink, wink. That’s right, the female rodents decide when, and with which male, they want to mate to produce offspring. And this decision is made with the help of a particular type of neuron in the brain that is essential for maintaining fertility, called kisspeptin.

Thus, unlike in humans, the need for mating is prompted in most mammals only around the time of ovulation. This ensures the highest chance of fertilisation. Particularly in rodents, the female controls the initiation and timing of copulatory contacts with the male, triggering the mate preference and sexual motivation circuit in their brains. However, what controls the neural circuitry to drive the female rodents to be suddenly sexually receptive to the males, in comparison to when they are not, remains elusive. An international team of researchers led by Dr Julie Bakker from GIGA Neurosciences, University of Liege, Belgium in 2018 may have some answers to this intriguing question.

#vaginalmesh not #pelvicmesh: Let’s call it what it is nē?

20 July 2020 13 Comments

Iona Winter

Eight weeks post-op, a simple procedure to inject Botox into my pelvic floor and I was done with the pain. During a trip to town to see the GP (again), a 40-minute drive with a tennis ball under my nono, I’d felt a strong urge to scream. The pain was unbearable. After the GP I drove for another hour – my current idea of hell (the driving bit) because everything from my vagina down to my foot goes numb. I worked my shift at the library, and when I got home the bloody fire wouldn’t start. Let’s just say the fire copped an earful. Thankfully I live alone.

Pain (of any kind, I’m thinking laterally here), like anger, is a potent force. Invisible pain does not mean that it’s all in our heads. And while I realise it’s difficult for others who are unable to fix it, just stop with the silencing, please.

Beat

8 June 2020 1 Comment

A. W.

According to Wikipedia, a beat is the moment in a scene at which increasing dramatic tension produces a noticeable change in the consciousness of one or more characters. An event, a decision, a pivot.

Beat.

Someone suggested Big Little Lies as a good lockdown watch. I remembered to breathe and then remembered turning the page to the first tellings of domestic abuse in that book when I read it years ago. It made me shake and cry. I didn’t see it coming. I’d bought in completely to the perfect smiling family, because it must be so, because look at the pictures on their wall.

Beat.

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Dreaming with my body

2 December 2019 Leave a Comment

Rata Gordon

“Dreaming with my body” follows on from a previous article by Rata Gordon, “Expressive Arts Therapy: Arts-based research and new motherhood”, which you can read here.

Motherhood is undervalued. And I feel like my culture’s view of what a mother should be is limited. I have a sense of somehow trying to claw back a self that is individuated from my child and active in the public sphere, because the question looms: is being just a mother enough? And what constitutes a good enough mother in the face of climate change, mass extinctions and a global mental health crisis? My child must live in this world.

I am trying to be intimate with the world around me, feeling the sharp edges with my toe and tasting the salt water with my tongue.

I wonder whether Attachment Theory’s usual version of a good enough mother, in terms of wiping your child’s nose, having ordinary devotion, cuts it. How can I nurture not only my own child, but the world that I am bringing her into, and all that I love?

I have found that there is no greater opportunity for being told how to think, act, breathe and scratch my nose than becoming a mother. A whole flurry of social and cultural institutions, norms and practices would like to dictate how I mother, and who I am now that I’m a mother. They land like fine silt, becoming denser and heavier with time if I don’t move beneath them.

I want to feel that the stories I tell are true, but I also want to show that there are other possible untold stories lingering underneath and in between.

Menstruation, myth, and medicine

2 December 2019 Leave a Comment

Sandy Thomson-Conklin

Otago Girls High School. Image courtesy McNab Collection.

I was twelve years old, munching away on some crackers in the back garden when I noticed an uncomfortable wetness in my knickers. I hopped to the loo and was surprised to discover that I had got my first period. I immediately grasped what had happened; my mother is a nurse and my family has a decidedly casual attitude towards the human body and its functions. I ran and proudly shared my news. Tearing up, Mum explained how I was now a young woman. Together we went over the practical accoutrements, and she presented me with a silver necklace adorned with hearts to mark the occasion (and satiate my rampant preteen consumerism). Though my experience of the bloody menses itself is not new or unique, I have learned that the openness and practical knowledge is. Roughly fifty percent of the world’s population is biologically female, and almost all females will menstruate for some 3,000 days in their lives. Most girls begin their monthly bleed between the ages of 11-16, and will continue to bleed for five (give or take) days each month for the next 30 years. Societally, menstrual blood is taboo. Historically, it has been taken as evidence of females being the ‘weaker sex.’ Keeping this shameful secret shrouded is a long-running custom. Time and time again inferiority has been upheld through religion, the medical profession, or internalised shame passed from mother to daughter.

In 1948, a young female medical student at the Otago School of Medicine, M. W. Wray, investigated menstruation as part of her fifth year Preventative Medicine dissertation. She found a serious lack of information about the average girl’s experience in New Zealand. Rather than accepting the status quo, Wray decided to collect some data. 120 permission slips were sent to parents of students at Otago Girls High School, requesting their daughters be interviewed about menstruation. A mere half of the permissions were returned signed, and fewer than sixty girls were interviewed.