This week’s episode features a story about PMDD, as told by someone whose life was completely owned by it. Shalene Gupta is the author of The Cycle: Confronting the Pain of Periods and PMDD, and she tells a truly harrowing tale of Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, a hormonally-driven mood disorder. It shredded her physical and mental health, and upended her relationships, her work, and even her sense of self. In our conversation, Shalene laid out these visceral, raw experiences with honesty...
15 days ago • 3 min read
**If you like what you hear on Overlooked, please leave us a review - on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you're listening.** I first heard of 'Female Athlete Triad' only last year, and if you haven’t heard about it yet, I’m not surprised - it seems a truly overlooked women's health condition. As its name suggests, it shows up in women athletes in three ways - menstrual dysfunction, energy deficiency, and … wait for it, osteoporosis. In athletes. My guest on this episode was equally taken aback...
29 days ago • 2 min read
I've been wanting to do a PCOS episode for ages now, but frankly didn’t know where to even begin. There’s a lot that’s overlooked about polycystic ovary syndrome, even though it affects one in ten women of reproductive age. It’s prime Overlooked territory, right? And then I found Elle Murata, a women’s health researcher, and after talking to her, I learned that the impact of PCOS goes way beyond the ovaries, and its role in brain health is even more overlooked and understudied (anxiety,...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
This week’s episode of Overlooked features stories from First Person Health, a new workshop which helps participants tell their story in sound, and you'll hear from Melissa Kirk, who tells a moving story about her cancer diagnosis, and Kasia Woźniak, whose experience of an anxiety attack while driving is truly memorable. Listen to the episode One of the topics we cover in this workshop is the idea of transformation. Life-changing moments are few and far-between, but these are the stories that...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
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...
2 months 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...
3 months 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...
3 months 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,...
3 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...
4 months ago • 2 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,...
4 months ago • 3 min read