Period 28: The Tardis is my therapy
In the last two weeks, covid has hit our house twice (based on the timing of infection, my spouse got it while teaching and, while testing negative during his run of Paxlovid, our oldest child then got it at school). Both of them are symptomatic and testing positive and isolating in their rooms and at various moments it has been quite scary. My youngest brought home a stomach bug last Friday (hence no newsletter), then had a relapse this Wednesday. I haven’t been able to get the full story of out of her but what I know of the incident at school that required my pickup is that it involved a rather dramatic expulsion of lower GI materials into… a garbage can.
For two weeks I have done little more than dishes, laundry, cleaning and sanitation, cooking, errand running, and cleaning up human vomit and poop. I have not written a word, until this afternoon with this newsletter. I’ve watched a lot of Doctor Who (oh my God, David Tennant are you not the perfect tragic hero but boy did the Doctor do Martha Jones dirty) while doing said dishes, laundry, cleaning and sanitation, cooking, and errand running (not during excrement cleanup though, I do have my limits).
I have stayed healthy (SO FAR <KNOCKS ON WOOD>) from both luck and my own increasingly extreme methods to keep me safe enough to keep taking care of everyone. I have decided that I am The Chosen One, tasked to bring my family to safety, and that as such I must be protected or else the entire Clancy-Harley realm falls into darkness.
"He's like fire and ice and rage. He's like the night, and the storm in the heart of the sun. He's ancient and forever. He burns at the center of time and he can see the turn of the universe. And... he's wonderful."
That's who I like to think I am right now. Until my spouse or oldest finally starts getting better and I can go back to being me.
I want to be very clear here, and I don’t care whether I lose subscribers on this, it’s a free newsletter: everyone else choosing not to mask put my family in danger. My two children have now each had covid, and we still don’t know the long-term repercussions of those infections. My spouse, who is a two-time cancer survivor and has asthma, has gotten covid. The people we are all supposed to be protecting have gotten sick, because we all forgot what public health means, and what it means to live in community with and to be accountable to other people.
If you made it easier for other people to feel comfortable not masking, if you have stopped, please know there is a giant wave happening right now, the next largest since omicron, and you can still be part of the solution. You can be a node that creates one more bit of distance between vulnerable people like children, the elderly, the pregnant, cancer survivors, the immune-compromised, and the many many other people at risk for terrible outcomes if they get this infection. You can’t look at a person and know if they are at risk. So give a shit about other humans and put on a mask.
It is not in fact that hard to care about other people… even if you feel like you’re one of the only ones left.
What’s hard is standing in the face of all that uncaring day after day.
Links
A study looked at the kinds of journals women versus men tend to publish in, based on different types of incentives. According to the open science bros we are all supposed to be publishing our science papers in open science journals – these are journals that are not behind a paywall and thus can be read by anyone. The drawback is often that the paper authors have to come up with the money to make the paper open. The problem is, most prestige journals still are not open science, or if they are, the fees to make one’s paper open are prohibitively expensive. A team of researchers found that in the face of these constraints, women academics tend to publish more open science, and men academics tend to publish more prestige. A sentence in the abstract put it best: “Overall female researchers appear to contribute more to the public good of open science, while their male colleagues focus on private reputation.” But you can read the paper yourself here.
Many of you know that I’ve spent a decade or so studying and doing advocacy work around sexual harassment in science, including co-authoring a National Academies report and a bunch of <cough cough OPEN ACCESS> papers. Well, as you might expect it’s still very much happening: The AP has just published a major exposé showing how many reports of harassment and assault were covered up in the Antarctic. What’s enraging about this situation is that as usual the solutions appear to be about how to better handle reports rather than put more efforts into preventing harassment in the first place. If any of you are interested to learn more about actual best practices, I’ll direct you to the follow-up report to the one I co-authored (though I also have a co-authored commissioned paper in there that is the basis of one of the chapters): it’s called Promising Practices.
Weirdly, the harassment story isn’t the only relevant polar research one out there this week! And at least this is a good one: the UK Polar Network surveyed their members and found the vast majority received no training on how to deal with menstruation while conducting fieldwork. Managing menstruation, and toileting more generally, are significant barriers for people who want to get into field science. So it’s exciting that they are now considering how to better educate and prepare people, and create better field conditions, so that people can menstruate, and manage it, when in remote spaces.
Weird period fact
Aside from trying to keep (most of) my appointments and meetings, I haven’t worked in two weeks, so I haven’t had time to write a proper weird period fact. HOWEVER. I have a menstrual disc update for you.
Remember a few WPFs ago when I shared the paper that showed that discs actually hold the most menstrual effluent, compared to the cups, underwear, tampons, and pads measured? It’s the one that erroneously said menstrual products were only tested with saline, and that’s what everyone put in their headlines. Well, I promised I’d try a disc on my next period and I did.
It… didn’t work? At least this cycle. I had bought some Flex disposable discs and was encouraged by the fact that they were said to work well for people with prolapse. The problem is, they are perhaps less great for people with anteverted uteruses.
I put the disc in – which was a little bit of a challenge – but once it was in it was very comfortable. It was also very easy to remove. So hooray on both of those counts! However, despite wearing it for several hours it did not collect a drop of blood. Upon reading up on it a bit more I’m almost certain it’s because of where my cervix is positioned. The disc’s position just can’t capture effluent from my uterus.
I actually have some more discs and think I’ll try it a few more times next period, rather than the one time I tried last period. It’s possible if I mess with insertion and positioning that I can get it right. But I will say that even though it did not actually collect any menstrual fluid (I wore a pad at the same time and it got soaked) I was really happy with how comfortable it was and how easy it was to remove. So if either of those issues were a barrier to your trying a disc – and you do not have an anteverted uterus like me – you may want to give it a go!