Pelvic Organ Prolapse (And Why We're Talking About That Today)

(If you arrived here via a Google search, feel free to skip to the bolded headline below.)

I have gotten some weird e-mails in my day.

Random people wanting to talk, Jake Gyllenhaal fans who haven't caught on to my shtick yet, porn webmasters begging to trade links...you know.  That whole scene.  And oh, yeah.  Every so often, someone who is writing for an unexpected but thoroughly legitimate reason.

Like Drugwatch.com, a site sponsored by The Peterson Firm to raise awareness about the potential negative side effects of drugs and medical procedures within an ill-informed American public.

No seriously, this shit's legit.  I clicked on a bunch of links on the site and everything.  Why would they contact me?  I have no idea, but because I still harbor the remnants of a social conscience, and because our dependence on the for-profit medical industry in this country is a very real concern of mine (even though I don't believe I've ever stated that publicly...how did Drugwatch know?!) I responded to the e-mail they sent me:

"Dear Becky," they said (except not in those words; I'm dramatizing this), "we think your blog doesn't totally suck and we were wondering if you'd be interested in helping us spread the word about Pelvic Organ Prolapse."

"Dear Drug People," I said (except not in those words; see above), "I have no idea what you just said to me, but I can do some research..."

"Dear Becky, we will give you the blog entry.  All you have to do is post it."

"Dear Drug People, hook me up with that bizniss."

So here you go!  A real issue in real America that may affect a real person (like you!).  You thought you just read this blog for the philosophically self-absorbed Breakaway posts, but I am here to tell you that I know better than you, and that no one who wasn't interested in informing themselves on deeper issues would put up with me, so here's a deeper issue for you:

Pelvic Organ Prolapse: What is it? What You Need to Know

Pelvic Organ Prolapse is a common condition for women approaching menopause or headed into their senior years. Approximately 50 percent of all women are diagnosed with some form of Pelvic Organ Prolapse (POP) in their lifetime. POP is a condition where the muscular and connective tissues that hold a woman's pelvic organs in place — namely the uterus, bladder and bowels — begin to weaken.

Women with mild POP might not experience any symptoms, while severe cases can result in a great deal of discomfort or present problems with incontinence or irregular bowel function. Pelvic Organ Prolapse is almost always treatable with non-invasive procedures, although sometimes surgical intervention is required.

This stock photo came with the article.

What Causes Pelvic Organ Prolapse?

The most common cause of POP is pregnancy and childbirth. Other situations can put a women at higher risk as well: obesity, smoking, pelvic injury or a woman's ethnicity can all be factors. Caucasian women are more likely to develop POP than other ethnic groups. Most of the time, pregnancy and childbirth are not the only cause of POP. As a woman approaches menopause, her body begins to shut down the supply of estrogen. This causes the connective and muscular tissues in her pelvis to weaken further. Issues with POP usually emerge when women are between the ages of 50 and 79.

The symptoms of POP are felt when the ligaments and connective tissues that support internal organs weaken. Depending on the type of POP, women can experience their uterus, bladder, and/or rectum "dropping" into their vagina. In women who have had a hysterectomy, the top portion of the vagina can begin to detach and collapse as well.

Symptoms of Pelvic Organ Prolapse include:

•    Not being able to insert a tampon anymore
•    Actually feeling a collapsing organ in the vaginal canal
•    Pain or discomfort
•    Incontinence
•    Constipation
•    An inability to urinate or have a bowel movement without supporting the vagina
•    A slow and/or weak urine stream
•    Urine may leak during sexual intercourse

Treatment for Pelvic Organ Prolapse

In many cases, treatment for POP is not necessary. Any doctor that immediately suggests an invasive surgical procedure for mild to moderate cases of POP should be questioned, and a second opinion is warranted. There are always risks associated with surgical procedures, especially if a doctor is using a synthetic mesh material called transvaginal mesh, which is considered high risk.

If treatment is desired due to discomfort or physical debilitations, there are several non-invasive treatments that may be successful in preventing and/or correcting the symptoms of POP.

•    Pelvic floor exercises: Kegel exercises, yoga, and Pilates are all daily activities that can strengthen the pelvic floor and core muscles to reverse, reduce or prevent symptoms of POP.

•    Lifestyle changes: Maintaining a healthy weight, eating well and not smoking can all improve and/or prevent POP.
•    Vaginal pessary: Vaginal pessaries have been used successfully for women experiencing mild to moderate symptoms of POP. 

Women who do need surgical intervention should insist on the use of their own tissues in place of any vaginal mesh products. Many women who had the mesh surgery are now experiencing severe complications, which have prompted the filing of vaginal mesh lawsuits against the manufacturers. 

(Special thanks to Jennifer Mesko for the content of this post.  Jennifer is an editor for Drugwatch.com.  She draws on her journalism background to keep consumers informed about drug safety and other relevant news.)

Standing ovation, Mr. Nolan.

What a remarkable ending.

:)

Darker Than I Like My Knights

Of course it was the Batman movie.

I knew that as soon as I turned on the TV, though it took CBS This Morning another ten minutes to confirm it.

Have you heard?  Christopher Nolan's trilogy is "cursed."  It's a dark story, acted out by troubled celebrities who walk dark paths to portray their dark characters.  Christian Bale went nuts.  Morgan Freeman almost died.  A stuntman on The Dark Knight actually did.

And remember when the Joker killed Heath Ledger?  Heath's among the legends now - those anxious souls whose performances are remembered and revered, though only within the context of the personal demons that wrought them - but the internet wasn't always kind to him.  Not before he died and certainly not after.  Remember how we blamed the Joker?  How we got so sucked into the story and the character that we assumed Heath must have too?  We didn't know where the line was between fantasy and reality, so we blamed a made-up character for destroying a very real person. 

With a little perspective (not to mention countless other distractions in the interim), we don't say that so much anymore; actually we don't say much at all about someone who's been gone for four and a half years.

But to this day no one thinks of The Dark Knight without also thinking for a second about poor, dead Heath Ledger.  And now, before most of us have even seen it, we already have the narrative in place for The Dark Knight Rises.

One of the victims of last night's shooting is getting a lot of attention today.  Funny, talented, self-confident, intelligent...I can say with complete certitude that Jessica Redfield was all of those things, though up until 11:30 this morning, I had no idea who she was.  She's famous now, three hours later.  She was tweeting from the movie theater last night, and now we're all silently in awe of the last thing she ever posted to Twitter:

 

In the hour that has passed since I last checked her Twitter page, she's gained 2,000 more followers.  Two thousand.  There will never be another update from her.  In a month, will these thousands even remember who she was?  Why they followed her?  Why would anyone bother clicking "follow," except to indulge a morbid fascination with death?  It makes it "real" to see a face associated with a tragedy...but it doesn't make it final.  Something of the mystery of death is masked when you're granted the opportunity to click a button and "connect" with a dead person.

She was a blogger, too, in addition to being a compulsive tweeter.  Her last blog entry, once it's read by more people, is destined to become a permanent part of the lore.  Early last month, she narrowly missed a shooting at a mall in Toronto, and her deeply unsettled feelings about how and why she escaped harm make for compelling reading.  The entry is haunting, graphic, and bone-chilling, especially within the context of what happened next.

It fits so well into the story, right?  Part of the curse?  How else could you describe someone who came within minutes of death by a random shooter, and then lived out five restless more weeks before returning to that exact fate, if not "cursed"?  We can read her words with voyeuristic satisfaction because we've been spoiled:  we know how the story ends and she didn't.  

It's almost like a movie.  Something not missed by the first few commenters who read her story on USAToday.com:

No condolences, no comments on her genuinely shitty luck; just a list of trite pop culture references for a girl who could have been any of us, because who among us hasn't been looking forward to the movie that cost her her life?

Warner Brothers is already wringing its hands at what this means for the box office numbers, but I suspect they'll still make their millions.  People like Christopher Nolan's vision of Batman.  They think the world he lives in seems "real."  It's ironic, in a way, that we use "real" to describe our escapism.  We slip into movie theaters for two hours at a time to leave the world behind, but we're never far from the bigger distractions of an online world where dead people live and real life sounds like the movies.  That this happened is a horrific tragedy, and one that will likely have repercussions far beyond the weekend box office.  But do we really understand that?  Collectively?  Do we even want to?

How strange that we live in a time when movies seem more real to us than the world in which we watch them...

iCrazy

Because I'm just outsourcing the reading material on this blog all the damn time now, I wanted to share a link to an article.  (And yes, I realize that probably none of you will read it.  It's cool!  It makes me feel better to have posted it, regardless.)

Is the Web Driving Us Mad?, from last week's Newsweek.

It is relevant, it is interesting, it is the reason that I am on a severe Facebook diet right now.

It is also highly ironic that I am pointing this out to you on a blog and asking you to read it on a screen.  But the information is good, and it gives an authoritative voice to what I've always said about smartphones.  I get a lot of crap from people for not having one, but my standard response is that I don't want the internet on my phone because if I had it, I'd find a reason to use it.

And...exactly.

Blog Roll!

Who IS this person with the brand new Tumblr account and an encyclopedic library of gifs?!

Whoever it is, in the past three days, he's gotten Memphis talking by describing our city in a freakishly accurate way.  Though most of the posts on the new What Should We Call Memphis blog are probably meaningless to non-Memphians, I think anyone who reads the B Channel can appreciate THIS ONE.

Amazing.  (And hilarious.)

And while we're on the subject of new blogs, I'd like to extend a shout-out to my good friend Melissa, who has started a fantastic new nature blog.  Melissa is a pretty incredible photographer, not to mention a talented writer, and I've been excited about this new blog of hers ever since she mentioned the idea to me. 

When I was in elementary school, I wanted to be an entomologist; instead, I wound up a struggling writer.  Melissa, on the other hand, thought she was headed toward a writing path...until she grew up to be a hobby-entomologist.  (No wonder we're friends!)  But regardless of your personal interests (or career goals), you'll surely gain some soul-restoring good from looking at the images she's captured.

Two very different sites.  Two very enthusiastic thumbs up.

Today in Random Poetry...

We look back on the past with affection, it’s true. 
But how often we tend to forget, 
That wisdom and peace are married to time 
And thus age we must never regret.

I don't know.  No, literally, I DON'T KNOW.  Apparently I was writing age-themed poetry last year and sticking it in obscurely-named Word documents!

As you may have gathered, I periodically sift through my expansive documents folder on my hard drive just to see what treasures I've forgotten about.  And I'll be damned, I always find something.  Always!  I don't even know how a person can fill up as many Word documents as I have (and then immediately forget about them), but I find shit all the freaking time!  Tonight, I discovered a recap of my 2008 (huh) and an untitled poem dated May 28, 2011.

Quoted above is the final stanza of that poem.  I don't know whether it's stellar or saccharine, but maybe it's both and either way, it's very me...

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

On January 12, 2011, I finished a book called Abraham Lincoln:  Vampire Hunter, which I had asked for for Christmas because clearly any book with a title like that was going to be AWESOME.

Except it WASN'T, and I wrote a quasi-melodramatic blog entry about my feelings about the book, and then I never published it.  

When the trailer for the movie version (now in theaters) started to make the rounds, I dug up my review to remind myself why it was that this story wasn't half as fantastic as it should have been...

(Written January 2011.)

The concept is simple:  Treasured American hero and noted honesty whore Abraham Lincoln fooled us all into thinking his life had nothing to do with vampires.  But this is WRONG.  In reality, Abe led a double life, one that history remembers and one that was heavy on beheading the undead.  The tragic losses in his life?  Mostly because of vampires.  His skill with an ax?  Totally because of vampires.  The Civil War?  Just as much about vampires as it was about slavery.

Abe chronicled his slaying escapades in an angsty journal which author Seth Grahame-Smith (most notable for his previous book, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) gains access to.  What follows Grahame-Smith's "discovery" is Abraham Lincoln's life, rewritten with the "truth" inserted in all the right places...

It could have been brilliant.  It should have been brilliant.

Here's why it wasn't:

1.  I'll start with the most subjective point, which is the method of storytelling.  Quotations from Abe's journal are liberally used to bolster the narrative, often with only a line or two of exposition in between block quotes.  With the story being told in the third person and Abe's diary (obviously) written in the first, I found it difficult to remain immersed in the story while constantly switching narrators. 

However, that's probably a personal preference more than anything, so I'll move on to...

2.  The humor.  Or rather the lack thereof, seeing as how there was absolutely nothing funny about this book.  It's a book called Abraham Lincoln:  Vampire Hunter.  And there are no laughs.

3.  Abe's "secret identity" never comes into question, nor does it ever cause any problems for him.  Ever.  He just walks around and kills vampires sometimes and sometimes he doesn't and no one ever really knows or cares or says anything to him about it.

4.  At the risk of sounding insane, the plot was too believable.  The vampire storyline fits too neatly into the existing history of Abe's life!  Where were the near-misses?  The drama we never knew about?!  The evil villains that time forgot?!?

5.  Abe himself is a dark and melancholy protagonist.  I rooted for him not to kill more vampires but to just get shot already because he was depressing the hell out of me.

6.  The entire Civil War, arguably the richest part of this story to insert vampire history into, is crammed into a few short chapters at the end of the book. 

7.  And some other stuff, but mainly, I just didn't think this book was any fun.   

2.5 out of 5 stars.  Well-written, poorly executed.  (Excellent cover, though.)

Anyone else read this book (or see the movie)??

OH, MYSPACE!

I logged into MySpace earlier today and saw that, on my homepage, there was a playlist called "Old Profile Songs."

WAY more excited about this than I should have been, I clicked, hit play, and CANNOT STOP LISTENING.


Songs that used to be on my MySpace profile:

1.  "Leader of the Pack" (The Shangri-las) - Best use of sound effects in any song.  Ever.

2.  "No Matter What" (Badfinger) - One of the first artists signed to the Beatles' newly-formed Apple label, Badfinger was originally called The Iveys, and scored their first hit with the song "Come and Get It," penned by Paul McCartney.  Don't you feel more educated now?  Most people do when I start spouting off Beatles (and Beatles-related) facts...

3.  "21 Guns" (Green Day) - AHH, 21st Century Breakdown.  At the time this song was featured on my profile, I publicly ranked this album as greater than American Idiot.  I was wrong.  But it's still great stuff.

4.  "Before the Lobotomy" (Green Day) - See above.

5.  "If U Seek Amy" (Britney Spears) - I do love that Britney Spears.

6.  "Circus" (Britney Spears) - See above.

7.  "Womanizer" (Britney Spears) - Okay, three in a row was a little overkill.

8.  "I Kissed a Girl" (Katy Perry) - Actually, this one I have no explanation for.  I don't even like Katy Perry. 

9.  "Double Shot of My Baby's Love" (The Swinging Medallions) - I first heard this song on our local oldies station and could hardly believe what I was hearing.  Don't let Leave It to Beaver fool you.  Our parents were listening to scandalous things in the early- to mid-sixties!

10.  "See You Again" (Miley Cyrus) - Aww, I always liked this song, because I'm 12, but now it has special significance for me because the last time I visited Kara before she died, she tried to talk me into making Post Secret postcards with her.  I...declined.  But she made one, and on hers, she admitted that she listened to this song about a billion times after her first date with her then-brand-new boyfriend.  Oh, Kara... 

11.  "Bad to Me" (Billy J. Kramer) - Of all the songs that Lennon and McCartney wrote and then handed out to other artists, this is my second favorite.  (Nothing beats "World Without Love.")

12.  "How Far We've Come" (Matchbox Twenty) - This was the first song I downloaded from iTunes after I bought this computer.  I know this because any time I listen to my "Purchased" playlist, this is the song that starts us off.  I still love it.

13.  "It's My Party" (Lesley Gore) - I put this up when Jake Watch ended.  I thought I was making a coy statement about my frame of mind, but thinking about it now, I can't imagine anyone putting enough thought into my MySpace profile song to catch any subtle messages I was trying to convey.

14.  "World Without Love" (Peter and Gordon) - See "Bad to Me."

I know there were tons of others (I specifically remember "S.O.S." by Rihanna being in there at some point), but that was probably enough in terms of recording my MySpace history.  Just interesting enough to provide nostalgia, but not thorough enough to cause any real embarrassment. 

Well, except for the Katy Perry thing.  I'm still confused about that.

When “Skinny” Was a Dirty Word

I don’t often share links, but I thought today’s Yahoo! feature on old advertisements for products to help women gain weight was pretty interesting.  And not just because there was a time in the very recent past when enough people wanted to gain weight that companies actively went after their share of that market.  (Though I do find that fascinating and utterly foreign in the world we currently live in.)

No, my main interest in these ads is the way they universally put a negative spin on the word "skinny."

And that led me to remember something from my own childhood that I had forgotten about:  my parents' extreme aversion to the word. 

I was always very thin as a child, but my parents would get borderline angry if anyone called me “skinny.”  “You are not skinny," they would adamantly tell me anytime I reported someone had described me as such.  "You are thin and you are healthy!"

As a result, I, too, developed a negative connotation with the word, and even now only rarely use it...

So I wonder which came first?  Did advertisers play off of people's dislike of the word?  Or did the dislike come from advertisers' spin on it?

All I know is that it'd be pretty bizarre in this day and age to get mad at anyone for calling you "skinny."  Weird.

Becky's Unsolicited Movie Reviews: Magic Mike

I got carded for the second time in my life at the movie theater tonight as I bought my ticket for Magic Mike.  The first time I got carded was a few weeks ago for 21 Jump Street.

Apparently the Malco Theater Company here in Memphis does not think that I am old enough for Channing Tatum.  (BUT THEY ARE WRONG.)

So.  Magic Mike.  I felt...sad as I left the theater.  And slightly confused.  And maybe a little dirty.  In other words, I felt exactly as I've always envisioned myself feeling should I ever visit a real male strip club.  And then dirtier yet when I found out that the movie was (at least partially) based on Channing Tatum's own experience as a male stripper. 

The theater was almost full, almost entirely women, and good Lord, they yelled at that screen like Matthew McConaughey could hear them.

But for me, the flashy dance numbers did little to overshadow the serious (and sometimes - interestingly - relatable) story of what happens when you sell yourself for a quick buck but then somehow lose sight of your bigger dreams along the way.  And how the company you keep can drag you down before you know what's happening.  And how sometimes male strippers fall for smart chicks.  (Alright, that last was undoubtedly mostly fantasy thrown in for the predictably female audience, but it provided a nice, non-skeezy subplot nonetheless.)

If you're the type of person who likes watching men strip down to American flag thongs, you will probably love this movie.  And if you're the type of person to constantly see parallels to your own life in movies about 30-year-olds who are stuck in neutral then...well...you might want to save this one for a rental.

3.5 out of 5 stars.  And I'm going to go take a shower now.