#back pain clinic in uk

[deeparcadecreation]

[bucksfoot]

You already know UK chiropractors can help with back and neck pain. But did you know they can help with much more too? Here are 12 examples.

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

“Every year, about 25,000 (UK) women who give birth — approximately 4 per cent — are so distressed that they meet the diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder. That makes birth one of the biggest causes of PTSD in the UK according to the Birth Trauma Association charity – probably coming second only to sexual abuse and rape. Hundreds of thousands more women are traumatised. This is a major health crisis. And yet it is barely discussed…

According to figures from NHS Resolution, the arm of the Department of Health and Social Care that handles litigation, 62 per cent of the total clinical negligence cost of harm in 2022-23 (£6.6 billion) related to maternity.”

When my husband and I left for hospital on a Friday afternoon, we had no idea what would happen. The next few hours would change my life. For good and bad. It had all started with a cervical sweep the day before. I was 40 weeks and 4 days pregnant and, frankly, I’d had enough. My pregnancy had been uncomplicated in terms of my baby — she was healthy throughout, albeit had spent much of her time in the back-to-back position. But I had found the nine months increasingly difficult. From around 20 weeks I’d suffered from pelvic girdle pain, which, for me, meant increasingly agonising pain in my lower back. Walking and other everyday movements became difficult. The only place I felt vaguely comfortable was in water. Swimming was a relief.

Women are offered a sweep to help induce labour. A midwife inserts their finger and sweeps around your cervix. It’s about as basic as you can get. They’re trying to separate the membranes of the amniotic sac that surround the baby from your cervix. This then releases hormones, which may help start your labour. “Some women find the procedure uncomfortable or painful,” NHS guidelines say. I found it excruciating.

“Oh,” the midwife said, as I lay in a rather compromised position. “I might have broken your waters.” This didn’t make sense to me. I’d always assumed that when my waters broke, I’d know about it. Apparently not always, and I was instructed to call the hospital if contractions hadn’t begun within 24 hours as I was now potentially at risk of infection.

They didn’t start. And I did what I’d been asked. The voice on the phone was chirpy — everything sounded fine, stay at home, we’ll be seeing you soon enough. Half an hour later, my phone rang. “Where are you? You’re meant to be at the hospital,” the woman said angrily. I needed to come in immediately to be examined.

It was late Friday afternoon and it was busy. We took the last of the beds in maternity triage. And my waters broke in earnest. That solved the mystery, I suggested. No, I was told, and the water birth I’d hoped for was out of the question — too risky.

Strong and regular contractions started immediately. We were moved to a glorified cupboard that had been turned into a makeshift holding room. I was denied any pain relief because it was “too early”, and told that someone would bring me some paracetamol when they came to “examine” me.

It seems obvious when you think about it, but I had never been told what being “examined” meant. Nor thought about it. It sounds medical. But it’s literally a midwife sticking their fingers inside you. I was 3cm dilated. Plenty of time to go, apparently. It was 9.30pm. I felt sick and in enormous pain. Both were dismissed — until I vomited everywhere. And lost control of my bowels. This would happen several more times over the coming hours. I felt utterly ashamed. Again, it’s common — but I hadn’t been told.

I continued to ask for pain relief and continued to receive none. An hour later, I was 7cm dilated — in full labour — and finally received some paracetamol. There was no space on the labour ward. In just another half an hour, I was fully dilated and ready for the baby to come out. No one seemed to know what to do. The midwives were panicking. And that made me scared. This was my first baby. I didn’t know what to expect. We were rushed to the ward. Already, nothing had gone the way I wanted, or the way it had been talked about at National Childbirth Trust (NCT) classes. Eventually, I was given gas and air to ease the pain. But only for about 20 minutes. Apparently it was “distracting” me too much and I needed to push.

Two hours later there was still no baby and I was in agony. A doctor arrived, took a brief look and said cheerily, “You’re going to be fine. You’re going to get that baby out.” And then he left. My maternity notes state, “PLAN: continue pushing.” I have no idea what this refers to — like so many of my notes. There was no plan. If there was, it wasn’t one I had agreed to. Finally, after another hour the decision was made that the doctor would use a ventouse — a suction cup that sits on your baby’s head — to help deliver my baby. Apparently I consented to this, but I have no recollection of doing so. And I’m ashamed to say I didn’t know what was being asked of me. My doctor didn’t use the word ventouse. He used “Kiwi”, which is a type of ventouse. At the time, I didn’t know what either were.

I remember screaming in pain and then my daughter finally being born. She was placed on my chest for less than a minute. I was examined, told I had a fourth-degree tear that must be repaired and that I needed to sign a consent form for surgery straight away. “Look at the state of her,” my usually mild-mannered husband said. “How can she possibly sign a form?” I couldn’t. The writing on that form is barely legible, but they would not proceed without it.

I had no idea what had happened. I lay in an operating theatre in pain, silent tears rolling down my face. I was frightened. The anaesthetist was amazing and stayed with me while I was repaired. I am so grateful for that, at least. But I also feel guilty about it. It was half past three on a Saturday morning and she was the only anaesthetist on duty at the London hospital. Other women may well not have received the pain relief they needed because of me. “Will I be able to have any more children?” I asked as I stared at the ceiling.

After surgery I was moved to the high dependency unit (HDU) and reunited with my daughter. I finally held and fed her for the first time. That morning is a blur. My notes tell me we stayed in the HDU for five hours before being moved to a ward. It was there that I attempted to understand what had happened to me. I was in pain, barely able to move and soaked in blood. I asked various midwives to explain what had gone on. They repeated that I’d had a fourth-degree tear, but I didn’t know what that meant. One line, in scribbled handwriting, stands out when I look at my notes: “We don’t have any written info about fourth-degree tears.”

Eventually, a midwife appeared with some information they’d printed off after googling it. As I read it, I sobbed. I was 35 years old and thought my life was over; that I would be incontinent. And still no doctor came to explain. The medic who’d delivered my daughter was eventually marched to my bedside more than 48 hours later.

I am perhaps unusual in that I’ve always wanted children. We had done what many middle-class suburban couples did at that time and attended NCT classes. The underlying message of these was: try to avoid a caesarean section at all costs. “Natural” births were best, and even better just to breathe through it. No need for pain relief. I remember in our penultimate class bringing up the subject of tearing during labour. I had seen a TV feature on it that week and it struck me as important. “If most of us are going to tear to some degree, it would be really helpful to talk about that,” I remember saying. “It would be good to know how best to care for ourselves afterwards, that kind of thing.” The answer was no, there was no need. Instead, we proceeded to get on all fours and “moo” like cows and then practise putting nappies on a doll.

Up to nine in ten first-time mothers who have a vaginal birth will experience some sort of tear. The least invasive kind involves only the skin from the vagina and the perineum — the area between a woman’s vagina and anus. These tears usually heal quickly and without any treatment. Second-degree tears involve the muscle of the perineum and require stitches. Third and fourth-degree tears are the most serious. These involve not just tearing of the skin and muscle of the perineum but the muscle of the anus. In fourth-degree tears, the injury can extend into the lining of the bowel. These deeper tears need proper surgical repair under anaesthetic.

I don’t really have any happy memories of the first few days or weeks after we left the hospital. I was completely in love with my baby, but I felt shellshocked. I couldn’t process what had happened and there was no one who offered to help me. A different midwife was sent to our house every couple of days to weigh our daughter. I had no milk the first few days and she had lost a fair bit of weight. Even when my milk came in, I found breastfeeding painful and difficult, in large part because it hurt so much to sit down.

I cried quietly every day for several months. Often it would come completely out of nowhere. I’d be talking or watching television and I would just start to cry. Several midwives wrote in my notes in those early weeks the same phrase: “Mum is anxious.” I don’t think I was. I was traumatised. Several weeks later, I was told that I was “lucky” by the midwife examining my stitches. Apparently the doctors had done a “wonderful” job at repairing me and it looked “beautiful”. I now know that I was fortunate to be repaired properly and immediately after the birth. But the last thing I felt — then or now — was lucky.

After several months I desperately needed to have some control over my life again. I had never felt so helpless, lost and infantilised. But my overarching feeling was anger. I wrote to the chief executive and chair of the hospital to complain and was invited in for a debrief. The head of midwifery was lovely, apologised and followed through on her promise to try to prevent other women facing the appalling lack of communication I had. The hospital now has a specialist perineal health clinic too.

But the attitude of the consultant obstetrician whom I met with my husband floored us both. It was about six months after the birth, but I was still under the care of a consultant urogynaecologist. (I subsequently had two further operations: the first 14 months after giving birth to remove an undissolved stitch that was causing pain but hadn’t been spotted, and another six months after that.) My urogynaecologist had told me not even to consider giving birth vaginally again. The risk was too great, he explained. If I tore again, there was a 30 per cent chance I couldn’t be repaired and I’d be incontinent. The obstetrician said the opposite — don’t rule it out! I saw red. “How dare you,” I growled. I remember saying that he would never be so cavalier about a man’s body.

Every year, about 25,000 women who give birth — approximately 4 per cent — are so distressed that they meet the diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder. That makes birth one of the biggest causes of PTSD in the UK according to the Birth Trauma Association charity – probably coming second only to sexual abuse and rape. Hundreds of thousands more women are traumatised. This is a major health crisis. And yet it is barely discussed.

“Birth trauma is a broad term, but generally it’s overwhelming distress that leads to a detrimental impact on well-being,” explains Susan Ayers, professor of maternal and child health at City University in London. Estimates “range massively”, she says, but having conducted research into birth trauma for almost 30 years, Ayers puts it at about a third. “If you ask women whether they thought they or their baby was going to die or be severely injured, then it’s around 19-20 [per cent] in the UK. But if people just ask women, ‘Was your birth traumatic?’ some of those estimates are up to 50 per cent.”

“I’M BEATRICE’S MUM,” EMILY SAID, introducing herself to a committee of MPs in March. “Beatrice died during labour at full term in May 2022.” Emily is one of a number of brave women who have shared their traumatic birth stories with the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on birth trauma, during the first parliamentary inquiry into this issue.

“As soon as my labour started,” Emily explained, “I knew it wasn’t right, wasn’t normal.” The details are harrowing: a series of obvious but missed red flags and an attitude from medical professionals that can only be described as cruel. The midwife who shrugged her shoulders when Emily’s waters were meconium-stained; the consultant obstetrician who laughed at the “slimy” feel of that meconium while her hand was still inside Emily.

“The ultrasound scanning machine was brought in and showed that Beatrice’s heartbeat had stopped,” she explained. “At that point I begged, pleaded like I’ve never pleaded for anything in my life for a caesarean, and that consultant obstetrician refused. She said no. And she left.”

“It’s destroyed my life,” Emily says now. “I’m not the person I was before.”

This inquiry has been led by the APPG’s co-chairs, the Conservative MP Theo Clarke and Labour’s Rosie Duffield. They received more than 1,200 written submissions after asking women to share their experiences; that number doubles if you count the letters and emails they’ve been sent informally.

“The thing that’s really struck me is there seems to be a taboo around talking about the risk of childbirth,” Clarke tells me when I sit down with both women in Westminster. There shouldn’t be, she adds. “Something we’ve heard from a number of the mothers coming to speak to us is that there’s such a focus on the baby post-delivery, they almost forget there’s a second patient in the room, and that’s the mother.”

“I was constantly told by GPs that I had nothing wrong with me,” one mother, Sarah, told the MPs. She experienced a major tear that doctors and midwives failed to diagnose. “I was discharged two days later with [an] untreated tear, which very quickly led to enormous amounts of pain, incontinence, faecal incontinence and thinking I was going mad.”

“It’s very painful,” explained Jenny, who also experienced a serious tear that was left untreated, “but the long-term consequences of an unrepaired tear are that I had to give up my job. I’ve suffered PTSD, anxiety, depression. My activities are restricted. My life is impacted in that I have to meticulously plan my day around toilets.”

Another mother, Neera, lost three litres of blood and required more than ten hours of life-saving emergency surgery the day her daughter was born. The haemorrhage had not been picked up by staff. She said she is fortunate to have had the “means and support” to access mental healthcare over four and a half years of her five-year-old’s life. “I have personally spent over £6,000 and received more than 50 hours of mental health support,” she told parliament.

The women who have spoken to politicians as part of the inquiry had different medical experiences. But there were obvious similarities. Their concerns and their pain were dismissed. They were not treated with respect or, in some cases, like human beings. They felt helpless, angry and scared. “Nobody really cares about women,” says Kim Thomas, CEO of the Birth Trauma Association. “What we tend to find with most of these stories is there’s failure after failure after failure. Lots of things go physically wrong… and that continues afterwards in the postnatal period with really poor care.” Almost all women seeking out the charity say their experience was made much worse by the way they were treated during labour. “The number of stories we hear of women being shouted at by midwives or laughed at by midwives is quite extraordinary.”

Birth doesn’t have to be this way. And it isn’t for many women. But women, in England in particular, could — and should — be having better experiences than they are.

Let’s start with serious tears. The number one risk factor is being a first-time mum. There’s nothing much that can be done about that. But the next is having an instrumental vaginal delivery — and in particular one that uses forceps. “Data indicates that we use more forceps than other parts of Europe,” says Dr Ranee Thakar, president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG). While rates in several European countries hover at around 0 per cent, a 2023 study of assisted births in 13 high-income countries found England used forceps in a higher proportion of births — about 11 per cent — than any other.

There are cases where forceps must be used. When babies are premature, suction would cause too much damage to the head. But that’s doesn’t explain the discrepancy. “It’s education,” Thakar explains. “We should be trained to do both [forceps and ventouse], so that we provide the best care to women and use the right instrument for the right baby and the right mother.”

The risk of a severe tear when forceps are used is at least twice as high as with ventouse: 8-12 per cent compared with 4 per cent. Women should be told this. The recent parliamentary inquiry heard other suggestions that might explain why forceps use in England is so high. The consultant gynaecologist and obstetrician Dr Nitish Raut explained that when poor outcomes of childbirth become part of litigation, the question, “Why were forceps not applied earlier?” will be asked. Although they can cause injury to mothers, forceps are the most effective instrument for getting a baby out. If a doctor tries and fails to deliver a baby with the less invasive ventouse first, a record will be made at the hospital trust. It was suggested by others that this might also be pushing some doctors straight to forceps use even when they might not be necessary.

“Training is a really key part of everything here,” Posy Bidwell, deputy head of midwifery at South Warwickshire Foundation Trust, told MPs. “If we can train people, we can prevent these injuries happening. Many midwifery students wouldn’t know the impact that these injuries are having on women.”

Newly qualified midwives did not know enough about perineal damage, and yet they’re providing one-to-one care to women. Current training did not seem to see it as a priority: while several aspects of maternity care are mandatory each year, suturing and perineal protection are not.

Neither doctors nor midwives appear to be taught how to routinely examine women after they have given birth either. Where this was once part of mandatory medical training, doctors are no longer encouraged to do it, Raut explained.

England is short of as many as 2,500 midwives, the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) estimates, although people are wanting to train and join the profession. Donna Ockenden, who is reviewing maternity services at Nottingham and who previously did so at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospitals NHS Trust, cautions against being too optimistic, however. The focus needs to be on retention. “Two midwives don’t equal two midwives,” she told parliament, “of we are losing midwives with 20, 30, 35 years’ experience… and they’re then being replaced by a more junior workforce, who are not being supported in those early days of their career.”

In the past decade and a half, the UK has seen several NHS maternity scandals — in Morecambe Bay, Shrewsbury and Telford, and East Kent. In all these cases, some of the poor care provided to mothers and their babies was because of a push towards “normal” or “natural” birth and a desire to keep caesarean section rates low. The RCM ended its campaign for “normal births” in 2017, but its legacy persists. Some NHS trusts still talk about them today. A culture of cover-ups and a lack of care remains in others. Just last month, the Care Quality Commission found that staff at Great Western Hospital in Swindon had been downgrading third and fourth-degree tears, “which meant they were not investigated as thoroughly as they should” have been. The c-section target was only officially dropped in 2022. Does RCOG now accept that it was a mistake? “It’s difficult for me to say years later whether it was a mistake or not,” Thakar tells me. “I think there was a general trend at the time to put figures to caesarean section rates. But now we know that, we don’t do that.” It was now right that women were offered a choice; she insists she hasn’t seen an attitude against caesareans more recently.

Aside from any physical and psychological impact, traumatic births are costing the country billions. According to figures from NHS Resolution, the arm of the Department of Health and Social Care that handles litigation, 62 per cent of the total clinical negligence cost of harm in 2022-23 (£6.6 billion) related to maternity. Of the £2.6 billion spent on clinical negligence payments that year, £1.1 billion (41 per cent) related to maternity. (As the fact-checking service Full Fact explains, the cost of harm differs from the amount actually paid out in compensation: the former includes an estimate of claims expected in the future arising from incidents in that financial year.) The year before, maternity services accounted for 60 per cent of the total clinical negligence cost of harm (£13.6 billion). NHS England spends about £3 billion a year on maternity and neonatal services.

There is such a long way to go. The government is well behind on its long-term target of halving the rates of stillbirth and neonatal mortality by 2025; the death of mothers within 42 days of the end of pregnancy is at its highest rate in almost 20 years. And while only a handful of trusts have been subject to official investigations, there are signs that poor care is happening across the country. Only half of maternity units in England are rated good or outstanding; one in ten is inadequate. That is a damning indictment of the way so many women are cared for.

One crucial area of improvement does not cost money at all. It requires a shift in attitude to one where women are treated with respect, listened to and allowed to make informed decisions about their bodies and babies.

When I first heard of parliament’s inquiry into birth trauma, it was never my intention to share my experience. Doing so has been upsetting and uncomfortable. But as I sat listening to other women talk about how giving birth had affected them so profoundly, it felt dishonest to stay quiet. Difficult births are not something we should feel ashamed of — much as I know many women will have been, myself included.

[mjfsupremacy]

EXCHANGE PART TWO

It's been a hot minute since I dropped the first part of this, it's been written for months, I guess I just kinda forgot to post it! Oopsie. Thanks to the folks who read it recently and commented. Reminded me of this cute lil ficcy.

Part One

“Elle.”

Its Friday, an unusually quiet one at that and you decided to tackle Hemmingway, which means you were also simultaneously reading something by Austen and Roxanne Gay to numb the pain. You were leaning back in your chair; ankles crossed on the desk and books and post its strewn around them waiting out the final hour of your shift.

You glance up from your book with a frown. Maxwell leans against the glass with a proud smirk, arms crossed over his broad chest. “Why do you have a highlighter in your mouth? I know things are a little backwards this side of the pond but I think when it comes to holding stuff were in agreement on how its usually done.”

You snatch the pink marker from your teeth quickly offering him a mighty scowl. “Don’t call me ‘Elle’.”

“That chick from last weekend told me your name was ‘Elle’.” He retorts with a roll of his eyes.

“Her name is Lisa, you absolute tosser, and she didn’t tell you my name was ‘Elle,’ you eavesdropped on a conversation where she called me ‘Ellie.’” God you really hate this guy.

“Sorry, I assumed it was a cutesy version of Elle. What’s it short for?” He asks eyes flitting over the mess on her desk, trying to collect any information he can.

“Why?”

“Why does anyone want to know anything?”

“Impetuous nosiness?”

“Or so I know what name to save your number under when you call me. Speaking of which, when were you planning on doing that again, Sugar?”

“The day I tell you my name probably.” You reply bored, your eyes sliding back to A Farewell to Arms. “Wait,” You slide your feet of the desk and stand up suddenly. “How did you get in here? You can’t be in here without someone who lives here.”

Max grins, adjusting his Burberry scarf under his expensive looking coat. “Relax, Toots, my new...friend is outside talking to some girl from her class, she let me in. I’m not standing around in the cold like a poor person while she titters like half her brain was taken in a lobotomy.”

“Well, God forbid you go home with someone and like their personality.” You roll your eyes, relaxing slightly.

“I liked her personality just fine. Both of them.”

Your mouth pulls down in distaste and you all but throw the clipboard and pen at him. “Does the local clinic know about you? I assume the CDC alerted them to your arrival in the country.”

“Haha,” He responds dryly. “Does the local pub know about you? The comedy offerings on Thursday’s got nothing on you.”

You snort taking the clipboard and setting it down. You look him up and down, still leaning against the window in his expensive coat. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“I am grown, baby, if you’d let me take you out, I’d prove it.”

“How long can you hold your breath? Have you tried tripling it?” You shoot back. He laughs, surprising a small smile out of you. His laugh is brash and loud just like him but there is something genuine within it, like he’s picky with who gets to hear it.

“I’m a wrestler now and hopefully I’ll be one when I grow up too. I’m here on exchange for the year but I wrestle whenever I can. The UK has a strong scene.” He replies openly, his eyes alight as he talks about a subject he clearly adores. You suppose how built he is makes more sense with this information. “Plus, the ring rats out here are way better than the ones in the states.”

Your hesitant to ask but the question falls out anyway, “What’s a ring rat?”

“Wrestling groupies, girls who just come to the shows to fuck the wrestlers.” Maxwell smirks in reply.

“I knew I shouldn’t have asked but I still did. That’s completely on me.” You mutter to yourself, sitting back in your chair with a disgusted sigh and picking up Roxanne Gay’s bad feminist.

“You were reading that book before,” Maxwell points to the red cover of Hemmingway. “Did you forget? I have been known to have that effect on women when I get them alone.”

“You don’t, How I wish I could forget you.” You reply, flicking through the pages. “Hemmingway makes me want to stab myself in the face. You need alternatives or you won’t make it through the book.” You wave bad feminist in his direction.

He gestures for you to pass him the book and you do with a raised eyebrow. He immediately starts flicking through, stopping at the pages filled with notes. “You can read?” You joke, watching his eyes devour the words.

“You write in your books, what, think your better than the greats or something?” He snarls back his eyes never leaving the page he’s settled on.

“Or something.”

He’s quiet for a moment while he flips the book carefully in different directions trying to break apart your loopy handwriting. You aren’t sure why he’s being so gentle with a book you’ve all but taped back together from how many times you’ve stuffed it into tiny bags or pockets but you find it a little bit endearing. “You know they make more sense once you’ve actually read the words that are supposed to be there.”

That gets Maxwell’s attention and he glances up at you, closing the book on his thumb. “Are you saying I can borrow it?”

You frown, that wasn’t anywhere near what you’d meant but you supposed it wouldn’t hurt to let him borrow it. It’s not like he wasn’t around pretty much every weekend. “Sure, you can borrow it. I don’t know if it’s your speed though.”

Maxwell grins, tucking it safely into the inner pocket of his coat before pushing off the glass. “Thanks, gorgeous, I’ll take good care of it. Promise.”

He steps toward the front door and offers you a little smirk and a wave, “Enjoy the rest of your night, Ellie.”

You roll your eyes but offer a wave of your own in the form of a shooing motion. “Until next time, Maxwell.”

His playful smirk evolves into a wide grin and he disappears out the way he came. You shake your head, grabbing your trusty sign I’m sheet.

MAXWELL JACOB FRIEDMAN

2133 361 6693

You have a post it on your shoe. Enjoy your noodles. Call me if you are ever up for real food. -Max

You snatch the orange post it from the bottom of your ugg boot with a groan, finding your shopping list for the week cramped into the small space.

Later when you put the folded-up sheet and the post it into your drawer for a moment you consider saving his number. You were desperate to know what he thought of the book and even more so to know what he was thinking while he read your notes and dissections.

You decide against it, you’d likely see him in a few days on the arm of another pretty girl from your building anyway. Besides, he was an ass and you didn’t want to give him what he wanted.

Your last thought before finally dozing off was the realisation that Max never came back tonight. And no one else did either.

*

The following Saturday is your weekend off and a few people from your class drag you out for a night on the town. Everyone knows you prefer to be home but they try to talk you into one night out and you can’t help but agree. You thrifted a pair of leather bell bottoms last term that still has the tags on them. It was time.

So, with a copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning rolled up tightly in your purse (just in case, you weren’t trying to be a pick-me, you’d just been caught out waiting for a lift home by yourself more times than you cared to admit.) you head out for drinks with your friends and end up in a nightclub not long after. You are swaying your hips to the beat and spinning around carefree. Your friends are chanting your name and you can’t help but laugh. You had to admit, it felt nice to let loose every now and again.

It wasn’t a change of pace, per se, you went out, you knew how to have typical university student fun. You even went on the occasional date, but, and you admitted it was probably a bit snobby to say, the late nights, the boys... well, they weren’t especially intellectually stimulating. Not in the way a book was or the tiny Zagreus inside her switch. Still you can admit you have fun, and stay out much later than you’d thought.

When you stumble tiredly into the dorms just before 1 am, you are surprised to see the girl who does alternate weekends asleep in your chair. You didn’t want to be left working every weekend so you know you aren’t going to dob her in but it still annoys you to see her being so careless. There was a reason the girls who lived here had to sign in their visitors, everyone living here deserved to feel safe.

You slap the lip of the counter, shocking the girl so much she nearly falls from her chair. “Ellie, Hi, sorry, I was doing my physics homework.” She explains and you feel a little bit of sympathy. “Oh! Here, some guy dropped this off.” She passes you the book you let Max borrow last week. “He also told me to give you this.” She hands you a folded sign in sheet. “He tried really hard to get your room number from me, but I swear I didn’t give it to him, he called me a ‘stupid whore’ and then left these here. American” She offered as explanation.

“Thanks, sorry.” You offer with a grimace heading down the corridor with a final nod.

MAXWELL JACOB FRIEDMAN

2133 361 6693

You went out? You can do that? Have fun? You’ll have more when you finally call me. I liked this Roxanne chick. I liked what you thought of her too. Maybe I’ll catch you next time and we can talk about it. What I don’t like is discount you at the front desk. Serious attitude. Snores like a truck too. Hope you had a good night, Gorgeous. -Max

You snort softly, tucking the note with the others and sliding the book back into its home on your bookshelf. This guy was unlike anyone you’d ever met, a total shit-stirring wanker and man-whore but for some reason, despite how much he annoyed you, you were beginning to find him entertaining and dare you say, endearing.

Suddenly you couldn’t wait for next week.

[killed-by-choice]

Alesha Thomas, 15 (UK 11 July 2007)

The abortion corporation Marie Stopes is very similar to Planned Parenthood. It was founded by a eugenicist and has killed far too many women — and young girls like 15-year-old Alesha— under the “safe and legal” lie.

Alesha Thomas was just over 15 weeks pregnant when her mother brought her in for an abortion at a Marie Stopes facility. Alesha’s mother reports that her daughter was healthy and fit before the legal abortion that took her life.

Marie Stopes was negligent with Alesha and failed to administer antibiotics. After Alesha’s painful death, an inquest revealed that negligent practices at the facility made it “not uncommon” for patients to leave without being given their prescribed medication.

The lethal negligence of Marie Stopes didn’t stop there. Three days after the operation, Alesha's concerned mother called the facility's helpline, a call centre based in Manchester, and told a nurse that her daughter was suffering abdominal pain and heavy bleeding. The nurse only advised she give her daughter Ibuprofen and did not address the blood loss.

Alesha’s mother spoke to a nurse at the facility again, who said her daughter's tests for the sexually transmitted disease chlamydia had come back positive. The nurse advised her to ring her GP for antibiotics. It does not appear that any of the nurses ever referred to Alesha's online notes, which would have highlighted the earlier failure to give Alesha her prescribed antibiotics.

Five days after the abortion and two days after the advice to just take an ibuprofen, Alesha could not move her legs, had glazed eyes and was unresponsive. Her mother tried to drive her to the hospital, but Alesha had a heart attack on the way. The coroner revealed that the heart attack was caused by Toxic Shock Syndrome (TSS) from Alesha’s abortion.

An inquest at the abortion facility revealed that the lack of care given to poor Alesha was far from an isolated incident. The Marie Stopes facility was found to regularly send clients home without critical antibiotics or other prescribed medications. The call center had neglected to address the root of the problem and had not addressed Alesha’s heavy bleeding or checked her online records to find the lack of antibiotics.

Alesha’s death was a preventable injustice. After the inquest, the coroner (Roger Whittaker) was so disgusted with the level of malpractice and negligence that he told the court he would be writing to Marie Stopes International to urge that they fix the practices endangering their clients.

[ingek73]

PRINCE HARRY EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

‘This is not about trying to collapse the monarchy, this is about trying to save them from themselves’

By BRYONY GORDON

Montecito is on mudslide alert, its residents nervously awaiting an evacuation order. I wake up on the morning of my meeting with Prince Harry to a media storm – his book, Spare, has found its way into Spanish shops almost a week before publication – and a meteorological storm, this normally bone dry part of southern California being battered by rain. Both squalls are doing a good job of reminding me that, while you might be able to run 5,000 miles from the source of your pain, you can rarely escape from it.

When I finally reach Montecito’s most famous resident – and possibly, right now, the world’s – he is nonplussed about the weather, which some have described as biblical, but I might describe as… well, British. Prince Harry tells me that the day before I arrived, he put on his waterproofs and headed down to the beach in the pouring rain with his dog, Pula, ignoring all offers of an umbrella from those around him. (I don’t tell him that I already know this, having seen pictures of said outing on a website that morning.)

And yet, even with the threat of mudslides, the Duke of Sussex clearly feels safer here in his Montecito home than he ever did in the royal palaces where he grew up. You could hardly blame him. The house is a sanctuary, surrounded by acres of greenery, complete with chickens, a play area and a teepee so lovely that I find myself jokingly asking if I can move into it. I am taken to a finca-style guest house where I find a generous spread of crudités alongside umpteen types of tea, served, of course, in the finest china. Soft music tinkles in the background. Candles flicker. It would all feel very relaxing, were it not for the fact it is only a matter of hours since the book somehow leaked to The Guardian newspaper and went on sale early at a chain of Spanish book shops.

There is some amusement from Harry about how the passages on his “frost-nipped penis” might have come out in translation, but mostly he is sad and disappointed that the general public’s first encounter with the contents of Spare will come not through reading the book itself, but via newspaper headlines.

In the book, he describes those who work on Fleet Street as a “dreadful mob of dweebs and crones and cut-rate criminals and clinically diagnosable sadists”, and that’s the more polite stuff. Am I mad to be speaking to him on the day that many of my colleagues are ripping him to shreds, especially knowing, as I do, that he has killed 25 members of the Taliban while on a tour of duty in Afghanistan? But the moment he walks through the door, a trail of dogs in his wake, I am reminded of his warmth and down-to-earth humour.

Today he is dressed in the TK Maxx uniform of T-shirt and jeans that he writes about in Spare. He welcomes me with a hug and rushes to make the tea. He is bright-eyed, looking far happier and healthier than when I last saw him at Buckingham Palace in early 2020, on his final day as a working member of the Royal family. He seems relaxed, more free – the nerves he had during our first interview, back in 2017, are gone, replaced with the quiet confidence of someone far more at ease with himself.

We sit on enormous cream sofas in front of a roaring fire, overlooked by a watercolour painting of a beach. I apologise for bringing my jet lag with me. He looks at his watch. “Think of it this way – it’s 11.10pm in the UK. You’re in the pub.” He quickly remembers that I don’t drink. “Or you’re not in the pub, but you’re OK. You can do this!” And so I switch on my tape recorder, and we begin.

He tells me that he is “someone who likes to fix things”. “If I see wrongdoing and a pattern of behaviour that is harming people, I will do everything I can to try and change it.” He worries about the other “spares” in the family. “As I know full well, within my family, if it’s not us,” and at this he points at his chest, “it’s going to be someone else. And though William and I have talked about it once or twice, and he has made it very clear to me that his kids are not my responsibility, I still feel a responsibility knowing that out of those three children, at least one will end up like me, the spare. And that hurts, that worries me.”

I first met Harry in 2016, when I began working with him and his brother and sister-in-law on their mental-health campaign, Heads Together. Right from the get-go, he seemed to grasp the issue of mental illness in a way that seemed quite unexpected from a member of the traditionally buttoned-up British Royal family.

I have only wonderful, warm memories of that period, which culminated in Harry coming on my podcast, Mad World, and speaking for the first time about the anguish he experienced trying to process the death of his mother. We developed what I would call a working friendship, which saw me get involved with various Heads Together and Royal Foundation events, and we have stayed in touch over the years.

The Harry I have come to know is perhaps best summed up via an anecdote in Spare, where he develops trench foot while out on an army exercise in Wales. He has been yomping through the countryside for several days, with equipment equivalent to the weight of a young teenager strapped to his back, during a heatwave. Halfway through, the heatwave breaks with a storm of torrential rain. They continue marching. Eventually, he realises that his foot is burning. At a checkpoint, Harry takes off his boots and socks, and the bottom of his right foot peels away. Medics inform him that the exercise is over for him, but when a staff sergeant tells him that there are “only” eight miles left, he resolves to tape his feet in zinc oxide and get the hell on with it.

“The last four miles were among the most difficult steps I’ve ever taken on this planet,” he explains. “As we crossed the finish line I began to hyperventilate with relief.” He hobbled about like an old man for the next few days, proud as punch that he pushed on through.

Here we have Harry – or Harold or Haz or H, depending on who you are – to a tee. You can say what you like about him (you probably have), and throw what you like at him (you may wish you could), but when he feels he is on the right path, he keeps going, through thick and thin and trench foot. What you see with Harry is what you get – a quality that made us love him until relatively recently, when it suddenly became the reason he has come in for so much hate.

He has been called a “cycle-breaker”, which is a term that refers to a person who changes decades – nay, centuries-old family patterns. There are some who cringe at all this “therapy speak”, dismissing it as “woke” Californian psycho-babble. That might have been the case way back in the 80s, but it isn’t now. The truth is that when Harry speaks about his feelings, about his escape from dysfunction, he doesn’t sound that different from any other person in their 30s who has been forced to confront issues with their mental health.The only real difference is a claim to the throne dating back to William the Conqueror. He speaks the language of recovery. And like most languages, being forced to learn it is painful. It is often messy, and mistakes are made. But boy is there a tremendous sense of reward when you start to be proficient in it.

Harry is matter-of-fact about this process. He accepts that any chance of reconciliation is unlikely at the moment. “What I’ve realised is that you don’t make any friends, especially within your family, because everyone has learned to accept that trauma [as] part of life. How dare you, as an individual, talk about it, because that makes us all feel really uncomfortable? So right, you may not like me in the moment, but maybe you’ll thank me in five or 10 years time.”

As someone who writes about mental health, I am far more interested in the detrimental effects of what Harry describes as living in “fancy captivity” than I am in the minutiae of who said what and to whom. To me, the most shocking thing about Spare is that he kept all of this inside him for so long, with only the one altercation with paparazzi. For all the side swipes about his privilege, trauma is trauma is trauma – whether it takes place in a damp bedsit or in front of a worldwide audience of billions as you walk behind your mother’s coffin. In Spare, Harry reveals that for 10 years after Diana’s death in 1997, his brain went into a state of complete shock, refusing to believe that she was actually dead, instead engaging in the kind of magical thinking that is most often seen in people with severe obsessive compulsive disorder or psychosis.

For an entire decade, Harry’s grief was buried so deep that he believed his mother had gone into hiding, that she would return to him and his brother at any moment. He refers to it throughout as “the disappearance”, a detail so heartbreaking that you would have to be cold-blooded not to be moved by it. At Eton, his brother shuns him – an occurrence relatable to most younger siblings, but one that nevertheless blows apart the narrative that Willy and Harold had been attached at the hip until Meghan came along. At 15 he has his head shoved in a deer carcass, an act that is seen as an aristocratic rite of passage at Balmoral, but that would be seen as child abuse anywhere else in the world. At 16, he is splashed across the front pages of the papers and frogmarched by his father to spend a day at a rehab in Peckham, because he has indulged in a spot of adolescent experimentation with cannabis (it’s hard to see how this story would be justified today). All credit to him, really: I think, had all of this happened to me, that I would have been on even harder drugs by the time I turned 13.

“Lots of people go through lots of s--t,” he shrugs, when I express sympathy for the litany of misfortune he has gone through. His critics have accused him of playing the victim, and yet I find a man who is anything but. “It’s interesting because so many of those moments have made me the man I am today. Would I encourage Archie to stick his head inside a carcass? Probably not. But people who’ve experienced trauma deal with it in different ways. I think when it comes to me and William, the fascinating part is that we both experienced a similar traumatic experience.

“He wanted to talk about it when [we were] younger, which built up a little bit of resentment. It wasn’t anything against him, I just didn’t want to talk about it. And then as we got older, I started to go slightly off the rails, and deal with it through drinking and drugs, and he went completely silent and completely shut down. And then my life started to alter and completely change, because I wanted, or had no other choice, than to confront the very thing that I had been running from, or scared of, for all those years.”

He tells me that he wasn’t walking around thinking of his mother the whole time. “I was doing everything humanly possible not to think about her.” Therapy, at first suggested by his brother, but properly engaged with once he got together with Meghan, changed everything. “It was like clearing the windscreen, clearing away all the Instagram filters, all of life’s filters.”

It allowed him to deal with the guilt he felt about his inability to cry (in the years after his mother’s death, before therapy, he shed tears only twice – once at the burial at Althorp, and then years later on a skiing holiday with his girlfriend at the time, Cressida Bonas). “I started to confront the idea that mummy wanted me to cry,” he tells me. “I convinced myself that she must have wanted me to cry, that that was the only way I could prove to her that I still miss her.”

He took ayahuasca, a psychedelic, with a professional – there is some research that the plant has positive effects on mental wellbeing. “After taking ayahuasca with the proper people,” he says, sipping his entirely non-mind altering chamomile tea, “I suddenly realised – wow! – it’s not about the crying. She [Diana] wants me to be happy. So this weight off my chest was not the need to cry, it was the acceptance and realisation that she has gone, but that she wants me to be happy and that she’s very much present in my life. And now, as two brothers, if one of you goes through that experience and the other one doesn’t, it naturally creates a further divide between you. Which is really sad. But as much as William was the first person to even suggest therapy, I just wish that he would be able to feel the same benefits of that as opposed to believing what he doesn’t need to.” (Harry claims that William thinks therapy has made him delusional.)

Maybe if the brothers had taken an ayahuasca trip together, none of this would have happened. As it is, Harry concedes that “it couldn’t be worse”. But he sees Spare as a last resort – not as a reconciliation, but an attempt to get his side of the story out (he doesn’t know the exact number of unofficial books that have been written about him, but believes it to be in “three figures”). He has been accused of airing his family’s dirty laundry. “But I always say: ‘What’s the difference between airing lies about your family through the British press, or airing truth through a book?’ In my case, this is all contained in one place where I hold myself entirely accountable and responsible for what I am saying.

‘William was the first person to suggest therapy – I just wish he could feel the same benefits’

“I don’t see why it’s so ingrained [in society] that whatever happens in your family, you should never talk about it. That no matter what’s happened, I can’t do this. But they [the Royal family] can? Because of who they are and what they represent? The way I was brought up is that, as a member of the Royal family, you lead by example. So you shouldn’t be able to use that privilege to get away with more things. No institution is immune to criticism and scrutiny, and if only 10 per cent of the scrutiny that was put on me and M was put on this institution, we wouldn’t be in this mess right now.”

“It’s so…” he shudders, and makes a guttural “urggh” sound. “It’s so dirty. It’s so dark. And it will continue and it will carry on and I look forward to the day when we are no longer part of it, but I worry about who’s next.”

He says he knows that the press “have got a s--t-tonne of dirt about my family. I know they have, and they sweep it under the carpet for juicy stories about someone else.” He tells me about some of the darkest moments in 2019. “I was coming back to Frogmore after Archie was born, and I would walk into the nursery and there she [Meghan] was in floods of tears, tears dripping on Archie while she was breast-feeding him. That was a breaking point for me. And she is someone who doesn’t read the stories. She would be dead if she was reading the stories.”

We talk about his reasons for doing this. “This is not about trying to collapse the monarchy, this is about trying to save them from themselves. And I know that I will get crucified by numerous people for saying that.”

The question so many have put to him is: is it worth it? His response is simple. “I feel like this is my life’s mission, to right the wrongs of the very thing that drove us out. Because it took my mum, it took Caroline Flack, who was my girlfriend, and it nearly took my wife. And if that isn’t a good enough reason to use the pain and turn it into purpose, I don’t know what it is.”

I tell him that from reading Spare, it seems clear that it nearly took him, too. “Yeah.” I get the impression that he didn’t want to exist, and then he met Meghan, and he had an experience of… “I want to live. I was never aware of how unhappy I was. I didn’t allow myself to think about it.”

I put it to him that even if Meghan is difficult – and I don’t think she is – it is unlikely that the monarchy have never encountered a difficult member of the family before. “But that’s the thing,” he nods, “that’s the unconscious bias. But they always tell on themselves. The press will tell on themselves and the family will tell on themselves as well. You look back on the history of how many members of my family have shouted at staff, [and] that is apparently all forgotten about and Meghan’s the bully.” He shakes his head. “It’s like, what? No, no, no. The members of this family that are literally brought up within this construct, have some issues to deal with.”

I talk to him a bit about the process of writing the book with the ghost-writer J R Moehringer. “It was definitely cathartic. It was painful at times. It was eye-opening.” In the book, he talks about “The Wall”, a mental block in his brain that divides his life before and after his mother died. “There were memories that I managed to pull up and over The Wall that I had forgotten about, that I didn’t even know existed. And there were times when I scared the s--t out of myself as well.”

In what way? “For example, Afghanistan. There were moments there that took me back. I would close my eyes and put myself back in the cockpit and fly those missions again. And JR was amazed by the level of detail that I could remember.” He tells me that the first draft was 800 pages, whereas the finished manuscript is just over 400. “It could have been two books, put it that way.” Some stuff, such as his life-changing trip to Nepal in 2016, had to be removed because of space issues. “And there were other bits that I shared with JR, that I said: ‘Look, I’m telling you this for context but there’s absolutely no way I’m putting it in there.’”

And why wouldn’t he put those bits in? “Because…” he pauses. “Because on the scale of things I could include for family members, there were certain things that – look, anything I’m going to include about any of my family members, I’m going to get trashed for. I knew that walking into it. But it’s impossible to tell my story without them in it, because they play such a crucial part in it. And also because you need to understand the characters and personalities of everyone within the book. But there are some things that have happened, especially between me and my brother, and to some extent between me and my father, that I just don’t want the world to know. Because I don’t think they would ever forgive me. Now you could argue that some of the stuff I’ve put in there, well, they will never forgive me anyway. But the way I see it is, I’m willing to forgive you for everything you’ve done, and I wish you’d actually sat down with me, properly, and instead of saying I’m delusional and paranoid, actually sit down and have a proper conversation about this, because what I’d really like is some accountability. And an apology to my wife.”

His wife is up in the main house, with the kids. We go there after the interview, with a smiling Meghan greeting me at the door. We spend some time together, drink turmeric lattes, and I get to see Harry in his element – Husband Harry, Dad Harry, the normal bloke in thoroughly abnormal circumstances. The children run around, the dogs jump on the cream sofas with muddy paws, and all is much as you would find it in any other home, during the witching hour just before the kids tea.

Before I go, Harry is keen to show me another wall, one he feels a little bit more positive about than the screen that sprung up in his head after his mother died. It’s a picture wall on a staircase, the kind found in homes all over the world. It features scores of framed photographs of his wife and children, alongside lovely hand-written cards from his grandparents. He has just finished putting it together, and as we admire it, I recognise that familiar look of pride I have seen on the face of my own husband – the look of a dad who has just completed a DIY task without destroying the plaster.

It’s tea time for the kids, and the early hours of the morning for my jet-lagged brain, so I say my goodbyes to Harry and Meghan, who pack me off with hugs and homemade jam. But I think about that wall for the whole of the drive back to Los Angeles, and then, on the plane, all of the way back to London. I think about the glee Harry found in it, the smile on his face as he showed me it. But mostly I think about how nice it would be for Harry’s brother and father to see the wall, and one day maybe even have some of their own carefree photographs included on it.

Lead picture credit: Bryony Gordon

[game-of-style]

So I’ve been in and out of hospitals as my condition is getting bad to worse

I am a 29 years old woman living in Hungary, possibly the worst political and economically set back EU country. Our healthcare among with many other things like public education, wellfare or transport is crumbling under Orbán’s shitty policies 

This year in February I was diagnosed with MNGIE (Mitochondrial neurogastrointestinal encephalopathy) a condition that affects several parts of the body, particularly the digestive system and nervous system. Currently I am entirely deaf, underweight and in chronic pain. I am doing CAPD at home (peritoneal dialysis) and on the liver transplant list. . 

Yet my condition is worsening as I am suffering from gastrointestinal pain, vomiting and hypokalaemia. 

My doctors pretty much gave up on me. Theyre not treating my pain or my surfacing symptons or even expalining it to me. I have reached out to several clinics (one in Germany and one in the UK), but so far I haven’t even got a reply. I am without any help in this and I feel like its consuming me. 

I am without a job and my monthly income is around 80k HUF = 195 EUR = 195 USD. With current horrible inflation, that is not enough to last me through meds, the dialysis attachements, monthly trips to Budapest and my special diet. 

Please donate to my paypal if you can  paypal.me/gameofstyle

Reblogs help as well

Thank you so much!!!

/some pictures after the cut

this is me on the transplant clinic 

me in the local hospital after a seizure

this is my cat who lives w my Grandparents bcause I cant have him in my place bcause of the dialysis (everything has to be sterile). I miss him very much

me in june with the feeeding tube what i ended up throwing up

my neck after emergency hemodialysis

me after surgery (one of the many)

[coochiequeens]

It is reasonable to think a man saying he wants to be a single father because he doesn’t want a relationship should prompt some investigation by someone expert in child welfare about his emotional capability to parent alone.“

Infertility can be deeply painful. There is a lot a compassionate society can – and should – do to make fertility treatment available to those who can be assisted to have a child with medical intervention. Few would disagree though that there are ethical boundaries to this, shaped by children’s interests, not just adult desires.

Last week, the Law Commission drove a coach and horses through that moral frontier – which it framed as an overdue modernisation of the law – by publishing draft proposals to reform the UK’s surrogacy framework. Implicit in them is the, I suspect controversial, assumption that a single man seeking to have a child alone through surrogacy, because he doesn’t want or can’t maintain a committed relationship, presents no greater moral quandary than a couple seeking IVF. How controversial is anyone’s guess: the Law Commission hasn’t canvassed public attitudes.

Surrogacy is the practice of a woman conceiving, gestating and giving birth to a baby – using her own or donor eggs – for another couple or individual who can’t do so themselves. The UK is one of few countries in which it is lawful. There are important safeguards intended to guard against exploitation: surrogates can only be compensated for reasonable expenses, to try to ensure their motivations are altruistic, not financial. The surrogate is legally the child’s mother until the intended parents are granted a parenting order by the family courts, if and only if they deem it is in the child’s best interests.

Surrogacy remains small-scale in the UK: just 300-400 orders are granted a year, limited by the number of women who want to become surrogates. But in countries like the US and Georgia, where commercial surrogacy is legal – where economically vulnerable women can be paid to carry a baby and surrogacy is governed by legally enforceable contracts that the UN special rapporteur on child exploitation says constitute the sale of children – it is bigger business. In contrast, the UK legal framework tolerates surrogacy but does not actively encourage it.

The Law Commission has recommended wholesale reform that makes the surrogacy process more akin to IVF. It proposes a new “pre-conception” pathway, governed by a surrogacy agreement, in which the intended parents automatically become the legal parents of the child at birth unless the surrogate withdraws consent before birth. The family courts will no longer oversee these arrangements unless the surrogate applies for a parental order in the first six weeks after birth. Instead, surrogacy will be pre-approved by surrogacy agencies, in the same way fertility clinics sign off on IVF. The commission makes sweeping – but unevidenced – claims that this is in the best interests of children and that because it reduces uncertainty, it will increase the amount of surrogacy that happens in the UK by discouraging people from making use of more exploitative regimes abroad.

There are some positive aspects to the proposals: tighter regulation of expense payments to avoid surrogacy being commercialised through the back door; everyone involved would have to undergo counselling. Children would have the right to access information about their surrogate in the same way as those conceived using donor sperm or eggs.

But in adopting a starting point that surrogacy is just another form of assisted conception, the Law Commission has gone beyond its remit. It reduces pregnancy to a process, a transactional exchange of body fluid between a woman and a foetus rather than a relationship between a mother and the life she is nurturing physically and emotionally, that there are ethical considerations involved in breaking at birth, regardless of the desires of the individual adults involved. It is for us as a society to decide whether we want the law to actively encourage rather than tolerate this, not for the Law Commission to make recommendations without even exploring public attitudes.

The Law Commission report is peppered with imagined case studies that invoke sympathy: straight couples where a woman can’t carry a pregnancy and gay male couples who see surrogacy as their only way to have a biological child. But a better ethical test is the men who openly say they want to become fathers through surrogacy because they would rather be single parents. There would be few barriers to them doing so.

This encapsulates the extent to which the Law Commission proposals are catering to the desires of adults with a vested interest in surrogacy – however valid their reasons – over and above child welfare. It proposes a light-touch welfare check as part of the pre-conception pathway, but this would rely in the main on potential parents self-declaring issues of concern and would be carried out by surrogacy agencies that though not-for-profit would still have an interest in making surrogacy happen; the Law Commission itself suggeststhat private fertility clinics can set up not-for-profit “arms” to act as surrogacy agencies. It explicitly declines to say that the person legally responsible for these checks should have knowledge or experience of child safeguarding. These surrogacy agencies would supposedly be regulated by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, which lacks meaningful expertise in child welfare. It is all jaw-droppingly naive.

The counter is that there are only light checks for women and couples conceiving through IVF and nothing for people who become parents naturally. But surrogacy is the only route through which a single man as a sole parent can create a biological child.

Gestation is a natural if not fail-safe form of safeguarding in a world where a minority of men are responsible for almost all physical and sexual violence and men on average pose a different risk to children than women. This isn’t to say some single men who want to go it alone might not make good fathers – single men can and do adopt successfully after robust welfare checks – but that it should be harder than getting signed off for IVF.

It is reasonable to think a man saying he wants to be a single father because he doesn’t want a relationship should prompt some investigation by someone expert in child welfare about his emotional capability to parent alone.

At the heart of the Law Commission proposals is the assumption that surrogacy should be made cleaner to the benefit of the adults involved. But surrogacy is inherently messy, uncertain and ethically complex, because no one has a claim to a baby they haven’t given birth to purely on the basis of genetics and pregnancy cannot be reduced to a transaction.

The Law Commission loftily calls for the government to “endorse these essential reforms”. But on an ethical issue such as this it is vital that politicians consult the public rather than taking direction from a legal body that has grossly overstepped its remit.

 Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist

 This article was amended on 5 April 2023. In an earlier version the writer commented that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) “has no expertise in child welfare”. This has been amended to “lacks meaningful expertise” to make clearer that, while the HFEA has a statutory function in overseeing “welfare of the child” assessments required of fertility clinics, this is the writer’s assessment of the agency’s overall expertise in child welfare and safeguarding. The name of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has also been corrected.

[reasoningdaily]

There is growing evidence that simple, everyday changes to our lives can alter our brains and change how they work. Melissa Hogenboom put herself into a scanner to find out.

"It's surprisingly hard to think of nothing at all", is one of my first thoughts as I'm lying in the maw of a machine that is scanning my brain. I was told to focus on a black cross while the functional Magnetic Resonance Imagine (fMRI) machine does its noisy work. It also feels impossible to keep my eyes open. The hum of the scanner is somewhat hypnotic, and I worry a little bit that drifting off will affect how my brain appears on the resulting images.

As a science journalist I've always been fascinated by the workings of the mind, which is how I found myself inside a scanner at Royal Holloway, University of London, to have my brain examined before embarking on a six-week brain-altering course.

Simple mindfulness exercises can help keep our minds healthy, research shows (Credit: BBC)

Our brain has an incredible ability to adapt, learn and grow because by its nature, it is plastic – that is, it changes. This is called neuroplasticity, which simply means the brain's ability to adapt and evolve over time in structure and function. It was once thought to be limited to youth but we now know it's a constant force in shaping who we are. Every time we learn a new skill, our brain adapts.

Neuroscientists and psychologists are now finding that we have the power to control that to some extent.  And there's good reason to want to boost our brain – an increasing number of studies suggest it can play a role in delaying or preventing degenerative brain diseases.

So, with the help of Thorsten Barnhofer, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Surrey in the UK, that's what I set out to do. He's currently running a study on the effects of mindfulness in managing stress and difficult emotions, with a special focus on individuals with severe depression.

I was surprised that something as simple as mindfulness can play such a crucial role in keeping our minds healthy. Research has shown that mindfulness is a simple but powerful way to enhance several cognitive functions. It can improve attention, relieve pain and reduce stress. Research has found that after only a few months of mindfulness training, certain depression and anxiety symptoms can ease – though as with any complex mental health problem, this may of course vary depending on individual circumstances.

There's more to it. Mindfulness can change the brain. That's because when the stress hormone cortisol increases and remains high, "it can become toxic for your brain", says Barnhofer. Stress can also directly inhibit neuroplasticity, so managing it allows the brain to remain more plastic.

The question is, would this work in my brain? Over six weeks, Barnhofer modified a mindfulness research course for me to try out. For 30 minutes a day, either as one single session or two 15-minute sessions, I practiced a guided mindfulness meditation by listening to a recording. In addition, I had one weekly meditation session with Barnhofer, who guided me over Zoom. The full mindfulness course can be accessed online for free.

My instructions were to be as aware as possible to the present moment – and pay attention to things I might usually ignore, such as where my thoughts go, and what occupies my mind from moment to moment. He also encouraged me to be more mindful in daily life – say when cooking or running, to really focus on the moment, bringing my mind back to what I was doing, as well as noticing how often it wanders.

One simple mindfulness technique involves focusing on one's breath

What's fascinating about this area of research is that mindfulness, which appears to be such a simple process, can have a measurable effect. "What mindfulness does is it can buffer stress, you become aware of challenges and those more ruminative responses, a tendency to worry," explains Barnhofer.

While I'm perhaps not an ideal candidate – my stress levels, which were measured before and after the process, are generally low – I still felt a benefit. As soon as I started a session, it felt like the first minute or two were easy. I would focus on my breath, or parts of my body as instructed. But at any moment of silence I would find my mind going on time-travelling journeys. I'd think about a conversation with a friend from weeks ago, then flit within seconds to thinking about scheduling a dentist appointment, then next about an upcoming work deadline… and so on. In quick succession, I could see just how rapidly my mind shifted from thought to thought. Speed this up and it can become extremely exhausting.

"Mind wandering is something that of course might be helpful in many ways," says Barnhofer. "It might help us with creativity, but it's also something that can go awry. And this is where repetitive thinking comes in, where ruminative thinking comes in, where worry comes in. And those are the factors which increase stress once it's there."

When I started to notice this, it made more sense that this brilliant ability we all have to think ahead, to plan, to worry, can be debilitating if it goes into overdrive. In other words, revealing the workings of our own mind is a crucial first step of letting go of some of that busyness.

Thorsten Barnhofer, a professor of clinical psychology, explains how mindfulness can shape the brain (Credit: BBC)

For instance, evidence shows that both meditation and exercise boost plasticity. I didn't increase my normal levels of exercise, but I did to push myself to run faster – regularly running a 5k in my hilly local park in about 21 minutes. Knowing that this might help boost my brain too, kept me motivated. "Physical activity facilitates the procedure of plasticity," says Ori Ossmy, a lecturer in brain and cognitive development at Birkbeck, University of London in the UK. "If you combine it with cognitive tasks to improve skills you are interested in, you probably will be able to do this in an enhanced way."

This makes sense given how closely the health of our bodies and our brains are tied together, agrees Gillian Forrester, professor of comparative cognition at the University of Sussex in the UK. "Our physical health and mental health are absolutely tangled up together to create a quality of life," she says.

Physical health is tied to cognitive health, too. It's by studying infants that scientists like Forrester are learning to see the brain/body link in action.

In Birkbeck University's brand-new Baby Lab, Forrester showed me her latest project called Baby Grow. The study will monitor babies' development in their first 18 months, with the aim of spotting signs of cognitive disorders before they become apparent. And the reason it's crucial to do it so early? It's tied to neuroplasticity too. A child's brain is especially plastic in its early years of development – new neurological connections and networks are being created at a frenetic pace as they grow and learn about their environment. This means it's potentially much easier to apply interventions for those who need it during this highly plastic state. This is one of the reasons why Forrester believes it is so important to learn more about everyday processes that help mould the brain.

The same idea also comes into play when patients are recovering from serious brain injuries. I met with Angelo Quartarone, the scientific director of the Centro Neurolesi Bonino Pulejo, a centre for brain injuries in Sicily. He witnesses plasticity in action every day. "Even in the worst conditions the brain helps to repair itself in some way… With neurorehabilitation we can accelerate recovery," he says. His team uses varied methods of assisting rehabilitation, including robotics, virtual reality, and placing electrical currents on the brain. "A tiny amount of currents can interact with the same mechanisms which are engaged by neurorehabilitation techniques," he says. "So you have a double hit."

I was amazed to learn that one of his patients, who had lost power in their right limbs, was able to forge new neural connections by playing simulated computer games. This helped them to regain lost motor skills.

Learning a new skill – in this case, how to play a tambourine – is fun and helps the brain to continue to grow (Credit: BBC)

At the end of the six weeks, I was extremely curious to see if all this work had any effect on my brain. After another brain scan, and some trepidation about what might have happened inside my head in the intervening weeks, I visited Barnhofer at the University of Surrey to find out. He had been analysing and comparing my two brain scans long into the night.

There was a result: the structure of my brain had in fact changed. And there were a few measurable changes to be seen.

One half of my amygdala – an almond-shaped structure important for emotional processing – had reduced in volume on the right side. The change was minute but measurable. However, what's exciting is that this aligns with the scientific literature that shows mindfulness can reduce its size because it buffers stress seen in the amygdala. When we experience increased stress, the amygdala grows. I didn't feel particularly stressed to begin with, but even so, it was exciting to still see a change.

The other change was to my cingulate cortex, part of the limbic system that is involved in our behavioural and emotional resonses. It is also important for the default mode network, a region that becomes active when the mind wanders and ruminates. In my brain, it had slightly increased in size over the six weeks, indicating increased control of that area. Again, this chimes with published studies in the scientific literature.

It also resonates with what I had noticed during my sessions. Over time I found I was able to keep my mind more restful – I was better able to zone out busy thoughts.

It was quite, if you will excuse the pun, mind-bending to see these results to my brain on a big screen in front of me. Just by being mindful, I had managed to increase a part of my brain that prevents my mind wandering too much.

A final note of caution – it is important to acknowledge that any brain changes we had seen could also be random. The brain is constantly changing anyway. But nevertheless, the studies suggest that the whole experience was a worthwhile challenge – and a process many people could easily benefit from.

Of course, for the changes to be long lasting, it's clear I should keep pushing myself to do some of these "hacks".

Am I going to continue meditate every day? I'd really love to say: "Yes of course." That is, if life doesn't get in the way

[skippyv20]

Our Prayer List🙏🏻❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend who is mourning the loss of her dear friend, who passed away suddenly.  Prayers for her friend, and her family as well. Prayers and good thoughts for our friend and her daughter who are struggling right now.  

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend whose family member has just been diagnosed with cancer. Prayers and good thoughts for our friend’s sister who is having bone marrow test in a couple of weeks.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend and her family.  Her father has passed away from Parkinson’s.  He had been on our prayer list for quite sometime.

Prayers and good thought for our friend’s friend’s daughter after an aneurysm. Dwindling hope. Please pray for her.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend who is settling into her new home.  Also prayers for her daughter.

Prayers and good thoughts for our dear friend PG who is making great progress in the hospital.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend who is seeking employment as a staff writer, and a new home as she has to move out of apt she shares with her mother and sister.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend who wants to conceive.

Prayers and good thought for our friend’s husband.  A deck collapsed on him.  He is in much pain, and has a long road ahead of recovery.  

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend who is facing many trials, and has now for quite some time.  Also, for her daughter that struggles.  

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend’s brother Rob a hard worker who was hurt while working and had to have surgery on his knee.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend, she has 2 things she is facing.  One is called fibromuscular dysplasia. Basically, her arteries are twisting instead of being nice and smooth like normal ones. Number two is vasculitis.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend’s brother Stoppa (Chris). He’s just joined a clinical trial but his cancer is spreading. Prayers and good thoughts for our friend who is having family issues, and it is affecting her marriage.  

Prayers and good thoughts for Suzie, our friend’s SIL.   She works 50 hours a week, is taking care of her husband who is recovering from surgery.  She also cares for her elderly mother.  She is feeling very overwhelmed and stressed.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend’s 23 yo granddaughter who has legal guardianship of her 2 younger siblings, along with her own little family, 5 fur babies, full time university studies &  part time job.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend’s daughter who was a whistleblower at school.  Praying for Justice.

Prayers and good thoughts for little Cooper Roberts.  Cooper is 8 yrs old. He was a victim of shooting in Illinois.  Cooper is back at school, and he is doing well, although he still has a very long hard road ahead of him.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend who is feeling very overwhelmed.  She is in pain because of her father has passed away, and his wife filled our friend’s mind with hateful and hurtful words.  She is seeking peace and comfort.  Also, her dear fur baby has bladder cancer and has had a bad reaction to treatment.  Our friend is very sad, very anxious, and having  difficult time holding her life together.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend’s family.  Her 3yr old grandson has passed from a horrible accident.  Prayers for her son and daughter in law who have lost their son, as well as my three other grandchildren who have lost their brother.  Our friend’s son is really having a hard time and needs extra prayers.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend’s (in the UK) dear sister in Australia who is very poorly with heart issues, and nothing more can be done for her.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend’s friend Barbara.  Barbara’s partner has passed.  Barbara needs prayers for strength during this time.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend whose husband has left her.  She is starting over and is losing hope.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend’s husband who is going for chemo.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend who is mourning the loss of her father.  Prayers and good thoughts for her family.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend who is having dealing with challenging pain in both hips and walking is difficult.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend who is very worried about her senior aged parents.  The relationship between her and her parents is somewhat distant.  She has been praying for them to all be closer.

Prayers and good thoughts for our dear friend whose father has just passed away.  Prayers for the family.

——-Little Babies Heart Club (thank you for the name @sandiedog3——-

Prayers and good thoughts for our Novenas Baby James,  James is doing very well.  Starting to talk and walk.  He does have surgeries and tests coming up.

Prayers and good thoughts for Baby James’ “heart” brother William.  He has had surgery and is now recovering, we pray for him to stay strong. He is doing well. We pray for his family.

Prayers and good thoughts for (baby) James and William’s heart brother Hudson.   Hudson has just had another surgery, praying for no complications and a good prognosis, and a quick recovery.  Prayers for his family too.

———————————————————————————————————

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend and her family.  We pray for her daughter who is an alcoholic.  We pray for her children.  We pray for her oldest son who is trying to get his life back on track.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend and her two cats.  She is very overwhelmed.  Her mother is entering last stage of life’s she is now facing   bankruptcy (daycare and hospital invoices have caused her, since Sept 2021 enormous financial problems) and she is totally alone. Physically and mentally exhausted.

Prayers and good thoughts for our dear friend who is in horrible pain caused by a pinched nerve in her shoulder, and extreme pain in her hip.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend’s daughter and grandchildren age 3 yrs and 18 months.  Her daughter makes too much money for government assistance.  She can’t afford therapy for both.  Our friend helps her as much as she can, but they need help.  They need a miracle.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend who is suffering from heart failure, and feeling so poorly.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend who suffers from bouts of depression, and is feeling alone.

Prayers and good thoughts for our little 9 yr old Novenas boy who has had a bone marrow transplant and is having some complications.  He is a fighter, but he and his family could really use prayers to help them through the tougher days.

Prayers and good thoughts for Richard, who is recovering well, but still struggles with speech.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend who had Covid a few weeks ago & haven’t felt right since. Her doctors say she has Long Covid Symptoms! She suffers from anxiety, depression, insomnia and panic attacks. Prayers and good thoughts for our friend’s 18 month old granddaughter Allie, who is very, very sick fighting a skin disease in the hospital. Dr’s have put her on some type of cancer medicine to see if that will give her some relief

Prayers and good thoughts for our 8 month old Novenas boy who has had a bone marrow transplant.  Praying for his complete healing and quick recovery.  Praying for him to have a long, healthy, happy life.  Prayers for his family.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend who is estranged from her daughter.  Our friend is overwhelmed with worry.  Praying they will reconcile.  Prayers for her daughter to be safe and kept out of harm’s way.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend whose mother has pancreatic cancer once again.  It is terminal.  Praying for peace, comfort and for all the family to feel God’s loving presence.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend’s husband from our Novenas, who is battling pancreatic cancer.  He is just out of the hospital.  He is not worse, so that is a blessing.    His 7yr old son is having a hard time.  

Prayers and good thoughts for our dear friend little m who is mourning the loss of her beloved husband, and she is feeling weak & quite tired.  He was her caregiver as well.  We pray for God to place earth angels on her path, to ease her burdens as she moves forward.  

Prayer and good thoughts for our friend’s friend.  Surgeries for cancer have been successful and she is still undergoing radiotherapy.   She has underlying health conditions and her husband has Alzheimers.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend’s 5 yr old son who has speech delay/echolalia.  Our friend is quite sure he has ADHD , but am now worried that the echolalia means she needs to consider ASD as well.  Also, please pray for our friend as she is so stressed.

If I left anyone out, please let me know…if there are updates or corrections required…please let me know….

God Bless you and thank you for joining us in prayers and good thoughts…🙏🏻❤️❤️❤️❤️

[capt-blondebeard]

I'm openly nonbinary, and have been for several years, but I always get misgendered because I have curves and rather stupidly large chesticles.

I'm not taken seriously, only one of my family members' uses the correct pronouns for me and I'm so very tired of all the negativity from it. I've tried various types of trans tape and binders but nothing has really helped. Whenever I wear a bra I'm left with this disgusting wrong, wrong, wrong feeling screaming in my head, I hate it so much.

I have no issues with the downstairs, apart from the once a month thing but that's more about the pain and discomfort. But anyway, I just feel like if I was flat chested then things would be better. I'd be more comfortable in my body and I could work out and be muscular.

I'm going to Paris in about 10 days for a holiday, but after I come back I think I might ask my GP to refer me to the Gender Clinic services here in the UK. I think it's time to sort things out, I'm not getting any younger and I want my body to be the reflection I have in my head.

[ewan-mo]

Back with the boda-bodas, criss-crossing Kampala

8th—9th March 2023

8th—9th March 2023

Our journey from the east back to the centre was relatively straightforward and only took about 4 ½ hours. On arrival at a familiar hotel, the Duomo, we could get straight to work on the daily tasks of the report for JF, and thinking about the blog and whether we had the energy to write it at that moment!

Clear roads 😃

Thursday 9th

The Kampala traffic is a wonder to behold. How is it, we ask ourselves, that so many vehicles of almost every kind, can drive so close to each other and not crash? Sometimes even coming the wrong way up a dual carriageway. Much of the driving is extraordinarily skilful in its own way.

We criss-crossed the city a few times in search of education, hospitalisation, coordination and accommodation. 

First stop of the day we were with Mathias, head of the Psychiatric Clinical Officer (PCO) Training School. You met our first graduate this week – Amuron – and we have five more coming through the school to graduate in due course. 

This is a strategic education initiative on our part, investing for the future leadership of mental health teams. If you have made a donation to Jamie’s Fund, you are part of this investment, and we thank you. 

Sponsors of these young people are important. Mathias and his colleagues like JF because our treasurer John is meticulous in paying the bills. Not all sponsors and families have been able to do that in these times of economic stringency. There are big debts on the books. 

Our students are doing well. When they move out to the world of clinical work, they will be key leaders in developing mental health services across Uganda. They are likely to stay in-country as PCO is a local qualification, not recognised elsewhere. The PCOs we already work with are a joy, with their enthusiasm and commitment. We think the group coming through are going to be good too. 

Occasionally as we crawl though the city we dip into a mall for a bit of shopping (water, nuts. lunch). On one such foray at the entry checkpoint, the stern looking female security guard approached Ewan and asked “ And, sir, did you cook for your wife last night?” then dissolved into giggles. This week we all celebrated International Women’s Day.

Boda boda drivers waiting for a passenger or five.

Our ‘hospitalisation’ stop was partly my visit to Dr Juliet, Executive Director of Butabika, the big mental hospital which is the key referral  centre for challenging or difficult-to-diagnose patients (adults and children) with mental illness, personality disorder, intellectual disability, and conditions which may have led to trouble with the law.

We had a good chat – she is always very kind to us. It’s important that we in JF keep up with trends and challenges in the mental health scene in Uganda. 

How many jerry cans can you get on the back of a motor bike? 78 I think.

This year there are undoubtedly more attempted and completed suicides, we hear that from all our partners. JF recently sponsored a workshop on the subject of suicide, which was well received by the delegates. 

We are also hearing about a worrying increase in drug abuse using prescribed medicines such as pethidine and tramadol, another strong pain reliever, even in poor rural areas surprisingly. In response to this there are a number of rehabilitation centres springing up around the country. We have no idea about the qualifications and experiences of the proprietors. 

As we parted, I mentioned that I am secretly very fond of the old asylums in UK because I learnt so much from my time there as a young trainee and when I was first a consultant.  Dr Juliet suggested I come back as a volunteer consultant at Butabika and spend a month with them. Oh! That would be interesting….

And Dr Juliet’s final comment as I told her there was snow and ice in UK, was “Well, make sure you have some fun in the sun here!”

Off for some fun in the sun?

Meanwhile Ewan was visiting another, small, hospital, Benedict Medical Centre. Our second graduated PCO is now finding his place there. They are quite near Butabika so many patients go straight to the asylum. The Benedict team are working out how best to serve the mental health needs of a poorer urban sprawl centre population.

The ‘coordination’ aspect of our day was to join Dr Ronald, medical Director of the Uganda Catholic Medical Bureau. This body coordinates the work of all the Catholic hospitals in Uganda, providing strategic direction, continuing education (for all staff, not just the clinical people) and representation at national level. We have a high regard for Dr Ronald and his team, and it’s always a pleasure to talk with him. It’s also quite stimulating, too, so talk tends to go on for some time!

JF plans to hold a 4 day Continuing Professional Development workshop for some of our partners in the autumn. The last one, pre- covid in 2019, was very enthusiastically received, some delegates enjoying their first postgraduate training in the ten years after qualifying. They also love getting together.

Where to hold it? Somewhere clean and comfortable with good facilities, appropriate and tasty food, economically priced and near the centre of town. We didn’t get it quite right last time.

Dr Ronald recommended a Catholic centre run by nuns, and duly sent us off to see it. At the ARU, the Association of the Religious in Uganda, we found Sister Lydia and her colleagues who gave us both a characteristically gracious and cheerful welcome and a conducted tour. We think this centre will suit us very well as the price is also very reasonable for such a central location.

We then wove our way back to the hotel through the traffic. It can take a while.

Dr Africa seems to offer a variety of services, with the golf course behind.