It's Not Hysteria

Twice over the last few days I've had the opportunity to tell people (not just Matt) about what I'm reading, and I've been gleefully telling people, “a book about women's reproductive health. All about various medical things like endometriosis, perimenopause, and cancers. Because I'm FUN!”

In actuality, this was excellent, straightforward and clear, even if I ended up skipping over some chapters when I started getting freaked out about what Dr. Tang was discussing. And I'll just warn ya, I did spend a decent amount of this book feeling sympathy pains in my lady bits for all the terrible things that can go wrong down there.

Personally: I've been pregnant twice and had the same placenta problem with both of them - I lost the first pregnancy at 24 weeks, and my son Ethan was born at 29 weeks, as soon as my doctors were confident he could survive on the outside. I had kind of just accepted that I might never know what was going on with my body, why this had happened to my babies. And then a few months ago, a routine skin check resulted in me being diagnosed with a rare clotting disorder, which was “consistent with these marks on your skin, your bloodwork, and the problems you had with your pregnancies.” I've never actually had a blood clot, as far as the standard definition goes. But lo and behold - antiphospholipid antibody syndrome is mentioned a couple times in this here book, if not actually explored. (I don't fault Tang for this. It's not a book on pregnancy, and I'm sure if she covered every single thing that could ever go wrong, this book would have been like thousands of pages.)

It's Not Hysteria was published last month, so she was able to cover things as recent as the overturn of Roe, which I appreciated, especially covering a lot of the misconceptions that people throw around when it comes to talking about elective abortion. (I found it quite interesting that the medical field definition of “abortion” applies to ALL fetal death, including miscarriage, and that “elective abortion” is the correct term for what we commonly refer to colloquially as abortion.)

In addition, I follow songwriter Farideh on Instagram, and worlds collided when she released her new song, “Female Body,” and Dr. Tang reposted it, dancing to it with a copy of It's Not Hysteria. Sometimes I love the internet.

Anyway. Read it!