This episode features Nancy King Reame, Professor Emerita at Columbia University's School of Nursing, who tells an overlooked and really extraordinary story about how her laboratory was set up in the early eighties to test tampons for absorbency. Back then tampons were not standardized - think about it this way: when you go out to buy sunscreen, you can get an SPF in 15, 30, 50 - and you know what you’re getting. Until Nancy came along, there was no scale for tampons that would allow women to...
19 days ago • 4 min read
It seems like the episode about cesarean births really resonated with so many of you, and I’ve had some wonderful, enriching conversations about how it brought to mind a range of memories and experiences for people. Here are some of them: this first one is from a listener in Oakland, Brianna Darcey, who got in touch on Instagram. And then, my friend and collaborator Aarti Vaid Pedersen commented on a post I wrote for LinkedIn about my own experience: Aarti and I also spent some time talking...
29 days ago • 1 min read
This is a significant year for both my kids: the older one turns 21 and the youngest is 18. I love them madly of course but looking back to the day they were born and reminiscing fondly is not a thing I do. Both my boys were delivered by emergency c-section at a hospital in London. With my second child, I was told my life had to be saved. My memories of this night are very hazy but visceral, and it took me a very long time to recover. I truly think that my body still carries the legacy of...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
This week’s episode of Overlooked features stories from our very first cohort of First Person Health, a new workshop which helps participants tell their story in sound. The idea for First Person Health came from the first season of Overlooked, where I used my mom's audio diaries to craft a larger story about ovarian cancer. I’ve been working professionally in audio for 25 years now, but I feel strongly that the skills I leaned on to create that first season can be learned and used by anyone,...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
I met Michelle Zimmerman at an event for femtech startups last year. It was the kind of thing where you mingle and work your way around the room, but when Michelle and I started talking, we stayed talking for a long time. We have a bunch of things in common: we’re both Canadian, and we’re both ‘previvors’ - a term and a concept that Michelle’s company, ‘Previvor Edge’, a cancer prevention and early detection clinic, is built on. Even after my mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, it took me...
2 months ago • 3 min read
Last month, I saw an image of my brain. 'Golda's grey matter' On the 29th of December, I took myself off to the emergency room after a blinding headache lit up my forehead. The pain was off the charts - I tried to describe it in the audio essay I did for this week’s episode. Listen to the episode I went to my closest emergency room. It’s the kind of facility where you wonder if you’re just not better off at home, but I stayed the course, eventually spending about seven hours there. At the ER,...
3 months ago • 3 min read
The language Cait Reeves uses to describe pain is truly unforgettable. Cait lived with adenomyosis for years before she got a diagnosis, which came about through her determined efforts to get to the bottom of what was causing this intense pain. She used an analogy to describe to her doctor what the pain in her womb felt like: a garden trowel carving out the insides of a pumpkin. Her doctor winced too. Adenomyosis is a condition where the tissue in the lining of the uterus grows into the...
4 months ago • 2 min read
Have I got a story for you If you're a long-time listener of Overlooked you'll remember a little inside joke between me and my mom that we'd make when recording season one. Every time we came across some gnarly, deeply science-y thing, like how PARP inhibitors work in cancer treatment - I would ask mom to explain it to me. And she, being a science major and high school chemistry teacher, would totally nerd out on that explanation. My eyes glazing over, I would wait till she got it out of her...
5 months ago • 3 min read
Do you know the difference between 'migraine' and 'migraines'? It’s not a semantic point - apparently doctors now refer to it as ‘migraine’ because it is a complex set of symptoms which are collectively considered a chronic disease. Maybe you heard my friend and collaborator Sally Herships talk about those symptoms, in the episode we did earlier this year - a visceral description of an all-over body condition, nausea, pain, headache and more, through her powerful audio diaries. Many of you...
5 months ago • 2 min read