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The Health Activist Writer’s Month Challenge
Once again inspired by my countrywoman, Marie, over at Journeying Beyond Breast Cancer, I have decided to dip my toes in the water and try something completely different.I will be attempting to write a post a day for all 30 days of April. By no means am I an expert on health; in truth, I’m amazed by just how little I knew about my own health until cancer came calling. Now, I have something to say, possibly every day this month. Not just about my cancer or me, but definitely about health. To help me along the way, WEGO Health has provided a month’s worth of health-related daily prompts to…
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when mammograms miss: righting a wrong
Maybe I should just let it go. As I’ve been told at least twice since I “resumed normal activity,” I look just like myself. You would never know, unless you asked to see, that I really don’t look like myself at all. Hidden under my clothes, since the DIEP flap reconstruction that ushered in my new year, is a trivial but nonetheless relocated belly button, its circumference now dotted with tiny red scars. Below it, a thin scar, reminiscent, ironically, of a pinkish ribbon lain across my lower abdomen, literally from hip to hip, with angry red reminders on either end where the JP drains had pulled excess fluid. And then…
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in my genes: the patent on my life
Mindlessly channel surfing yesterday afternoon, before I opened an email from Breast Cancer Action, I happened upon Anderson Cooper, in full-blown talk-show host mode, fawning over savvy Spanx inventor, Sara Blakely. Fresh off the cover of Forbes magazine, as the youngest ever self-made female billionaire, the affable Ms. Blakely gave me hope that somewhere inside me, lying dormant, is a billion dollar idea, a simple but powerful invention that will change the world. At the risk of being a snob, I’m hoping when my brilliant idea finally comes to fruition, that it will be something with a little more gravitas. Something a little less Spanx, a little more Penicillin. To give Ms.…
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missing mother’s day again
In Ireland, Mothering Sunday is the fourth Sunday in Lent thereby falling on a different date every year. In America, Mother’s Day arrives each year on the second Sunday in May. As a mother living in America with a mother living in Northern Ireland, I should by now have developed a strategy to cope with this annual conundrum. Especially this year when I have depended so heavily – and daily since the breast cancer diagnosis – on the comforting colloquialisms from the woman on the other end of the line, on the other side of the world. My mother. Without the email reminders from online florists and the showy Hallmark displays that…
