☀️ Field Notes: July 2024 ☀️
This collection includes Farideh's new song "Female Body," best and worst habits for your teeth, impossible medical decisions, and several gorgeous poems
Hello, dear friends!
I hope your July has been a sweet month for you, perhaps steamy, perhaps filled with summer reading, perhaps spotted with cool weekend naps.
I’m shifting Field Notes to a monthly collection. I’ll save things all month long, and send you a nice package at the end of the month of favorites.
I’m realizing, looking back at this first monthly potpourri, that I’m savoring more poetic reflections of health and living in our bodies, and reading fewer news articles and research studies. How about you these days?
Here’s the first monthly Field Notes, for July 2024. Enjoy!
Brianne
✏️ Otherwise, a poem by Jane Kenyon
Oh, this poem. It echoes a truth I already know in my cells, yet repeats it back to me so simply. No matter the day, it is a useful truth for me.
This poem begins:
I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
Read the full poem here.
🎶 Female Body song by Farideh
Musician and comedian Farideh has a new catchy song out about the female body that goes …
“Morning sickness, endometriosis, menopause, migraines, PCO — What’s happening to your body?
We don’t know, cuz we never really studied the female body!”
If you haven’t heard her tune You’re Such a Good Dad, it’s awesome, too.
🔬Whose Bodies Get Studied in
If you are curious about the history of research on human bodies, this is a terrific interview by
with health and science journalist Christine Yu, who wrote Up to Speed: The Groundbreaking Science of Women Athletes.This interview focuses more on sports research than disease research. Here’s one shocking example of something designed for men that didn’t work for women, explained by Christine Yu in the interview:
“One of the most vivid examples of the implications of excluding women from sports research is the story of pro cyclist Alison Tetrick, which I share in the book. She moved pretty quickly up the ranks but she assumed that being uncomfortable in her saddle came with the sport. Her discomfort not only kept her from riding in an optimal position at times, it led to tremendous swelling and tissue damage in her genital area. It got so bad that she eventually had to have plastic surgery to trim the excess skin so that she could continue riding. Afterward, she learned that many pro riders have had the same procedure multiple times. They just never talked about it.
“The problem stemmed from the saddle. The women’s saddle was based on a design developed for men. There’s a cutout in the center to relieve pressure and increase blood flow to prevent numbness and erectile dysfunction in men. When it came to adapting it for women, designers made the saddle wider and the cutout bigger to accommodate women’s generally wider hips. The problem is that while the cutout worked for men, it essentially created a vise around women’s labia where the tissue would descend into the cutout and swell, leading to pain and tissue damage. I feel like some basic user testing at the beginning of the design process could have prevented some of these issues!”
🎆 Happy Interdependence Day in
I appreciated this essay by
on Independence Day, calling out the reality of our interdependence."… interdependence isn’t an idea. It’s a fact. None of us enters or survives this world alone. We are born and live in an interconnected web of care and support, from our family to our friends, teachers, and neighbors. Even our local governments, with their water and sewer systems, roads, schools, and libraries, exist to manage our shared resources for the common good. Or they can. And the Earth cares for us, too, in case we’ve forgotten where our food comes from. To quote Paul Harvey, “Man — despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments — owes his existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.”
“Our interdependence, in other words, is the truth. Everything else is fiction.”
🦷 Best and Worst Habits for Your Teeth (NYT gift link)
I learned from reporter Markham Heid: Don’t use charcoal toothpaste, as it wears away your precious enamel; wait 30 minutes after eating to brush; swishing water around in your mouth after eating is helpful.
And this tried and true reinforcement:
The secret to healthy teeth and gums isn’t much of a secret: Brush twice a day, floss once a day and visit a dentist regularly for cleanings.
“It’s not sexy or surprising, but this is what works if you want to avoid cavities and gum disease,” said Dr. Matthew Messina, a clinical director and assistant professor at Ohio State University College of Dentistry.
🌊 Surf School in
A lovely essay by
on the unpredictability of life drawn from trying to catch a wave. One of my favorite parts:“Those waves appear in sets—if you miss your chance, there’s another rolling in behind. (Might not be today, but there’s always tomorrow.) For a person who frequently frets that ‘big breaks’ have passed me by, it was a life-giving relief to look out to that flat horizon and think—ANYTHING could be coming. On the sea, and in life.
“Your next great ride is building in a yet unseeable swell. And when it does suddenly make its appearance, you’ve got to paddle like Hell to catch it. I never understood the confluence of luck and effort so clearly.”
Also, Isabel’s essay on “the crone & her baby” is fantastic.🔥
✈️ Flying in a plane during this summer Covid wave? in
I’ve heard that the plane is supposed to be safer than most places for catching illnesses because of its ventilation system.
measures the air on his recent trip to find out:“… the most practical way to estimate the quality of present ventilation might be a carbon dioxide meter. We got one during those darkest days. When CO2 levels exceed 700 parts per million (ppm) most experts agree this is stale air. Fresh outdoor air is around 420 ppm. Recall that >700 in a building is a minimum standard for acceptable air turnover.
Here’s the airport in Philly, in the tunnel as we are boarding the plane. 1985 is not good, unless it’s the year 1985, and you are Michael Jackson…”
Look at all of his readings here, from the boarding tunnel to the in-flight measurements. Whew. This post made me rethink flying without a mask.
❓ Questioning the impossible by Dr. Rachel Gallant (JAMA)
As a pediatric oncologist, Dr. Gallant has seen so many families struggle when cancer-treatment options dwindle and they have to make difficult decisions.
When she has to do the same for her own mother, she realizes how impossible it truly feels:
“I now recognize that the feeling that I thought was doubt at the time was actually denial. Although there was a part of me that knew comfort care was the best decision given the circumstances, another unconscious part of me didn’t want to accept what was happening. I didn’t want to make the decision to transition to comfort-focused care. I could think of a thousand other things that I wanted. I wanted my mom to be alive, healthy, and able to enjoy life. I wanted to hear her voice again. I wanted to spend another Christmas with her. I wanted more time. But the reality was this—I couldn’t have what I wanted and I had to make a decision that I didn’t want to make. And although it seemed objectively straightforward given all the information we had, the decision was anything but.
“This is the position my patients’ families are in at the end of their child’s life—forced to choose between cancer-directed treatment that carries risk of toxicities or comfort-directed care, both of which are ultimately likely to result in death. They are confronted with a decision that feels unclear in the moment despite whatever data they may have in front of them. They’re in a position they never wanted to be in, facing a decision they never wanted to make. In that moment, there is an element of denial that seems to cast a veil of doubt. I have always respected the gravity of the decision to transition to palliative care. Now, more than ever, I understand that even if the answer seems obvious to me, I am on the outside. Having been on the other side as a caregiver at the end of life, I have a new degree of empathy for families who struggle with these decisions at the end of their child’s life because when the decision is yours to make, it feels impossible.”
💡 In a First-of-Its-Kind Program, Physicians at This Medical Center Now Write “Power Prescriptions” (JAMA)
For a straight-forward article, this one brought up so many mixed feelings. (Why can’t we as a nation support everyone having a livable space with electricity? Why do medical centers have to keep filling the gaps where policy is failing? Why can’t we truly support each others’ health at the systems level? It would also be cheaper in the long run to be preventative!) Still, I very much appreciate creative programs that help with hardships and health, and this was an interesting idea that could be replicated:
“Over the past year, physicians at Boston Medical Center (BMC) have written hundreds of letters to energy companies to prevent their patients’ utilities from being shut off. Massachusetts passed a law in 2009 that protects power customers with illnesses from having their utilities terminated. Physicians at BMC have been screening their patients for energy insecurity since 2017 to identify whether they have difficulty paying an electric or heating bill. Although the letters help keep the lights on for many of these vulnerable patients, they aren’t a sustainable way to address the financial strain energy bills may have on patients. So, last fall, BMC started a program to address this social need via a new prescription: clean power.
“The novel program uses energy bill credits generated by a new 365-kW solar panel on BMC’s administrative building to reduce patients’ electric bills. The solar panel sends unused electricity to the grid, which is virtually metered and valued into clean energy credits. BMC donates the credits to the energy accounts of participants in the Clean Power Prescription program—the first of its kind in the nation.”
🔥 Crone Fires, a poem by Rebecca Sturgeon
This poem was inspired by a hot flash. Poet Rebecca Sturgeon sends out short and beautiful poems, a delight in my inbox. Sign up for her newsletter Our Daily Breath.
My hands are made of smoke.
Smoke, entwined in my hair
shining silver when it hits the light.
Smoke, rising from the transformation of an aging body
from the fires burning in my pelvic bowl.
Something destroyed.
Something created.
I am the fire.
Come. Warm your hands at my body.
That’s all for July, my friends. Two days left. August is on its way. As Isabel Cowles Murphy wrote, “it was a life-giving relief to look out to that flat horizon and think—ANYTHING could be coming. On the sea, and in life.”
To our journeys,
Brianne
So glad to be here!! Thank you for your kind words ❤️