Having the worst cramps and back pains since I started periods during this peri stage.
Sucks.
Positive note: HRT has helped my extremely low mood and I feel like myself again!
Countdown to the short sightgetting worse...
#peri#middleagedwoman
This is possibly the saddest thing I've seen in a long time..an immigrant nurse talking about fleeing her home..she saved her UNIFORM. So she could still WORK for our communities.
I'd fill this country with a thousand of this woman than one of those good for nothing thugs.
God help this poor woman.
I'm a cardiologist. A 42-year-old mother of two came to my office complaining of jaw pain and crushing fatigue. She ran half-marathons. Her EKG was normal. Another doctor had sent her home with anxiety medication.
When I got her into the cath lab, I found severe microvascular disease — plaque choking the tiniest vessels of her heart, the ones standard angiograms routinely miss.
Her heart had been starving in silence while everyone told her she was stressed.
She is alive today. Too many women like her are not.
Heart disease kills more women than every cancer combined. And medicine is still diagnosing it through a male lens.
84% of cardiologists report having patients in the past year whose heart disease was misdiagnosed by another physician. Women with a STEMI heart attack have a 59% greater chance of being misdiagnosed compared to men. Women with an NSTEMI — 41% greater chance.
The reason is structural. For decades, we screened, tested, and treated women using a template built for men.
Men's heart attacks announce themselves — the crushing chest pain, the clutched fist, the Hollywood collapse. Women's hearts whisper. Crushing fatigue that feels like wearing a lead vest. Jaw pain written off as TMJ. Nausea blamed on a stomach bug. An ache between the shoulder blades blamed on a long week. Shortness of breath blamed on being out of shape.
For years, medicine called these "atypical" symptoms. They are not atypical. They are female-typical. Half of humanity is not a variant.
And the biology runs deeper than symptoms.
Women have smaller hearts and narrower coronary arteries. Plaque doesn't only clog the big highway vessels — it hides in the microvasculature, the tiny branches feeding the heart muscle itself. A woman can have a heart attack with a completely "clean" standard angiogram.
SCAD — spontaneous coronary artery dissection — occurs 90% of the time in women. Often young, fit women with zero traditional risk factors. It's the leading cause of heart attack in women under 50, accounting for roughly one quarter of all cases in that age group. Most doctors have never diagnosed one.
And some of the most dangerous cardiac risk factors are hidden in women's medical histories where no one thinks to look:
Preeclampsia or gestational hypertension doubles to quadruples lifetime heart disease and stroke risk. Pregnancy is the body's first cardiac stress test — and these complications are early warning sirens, not closed chapters.
Autoimmune disease — lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis — far more common in women, turbocharges inflammation and plaque formation at any age.
Cardiovascular disease in women aged 20-44 is projected to surge nearly 50% by 2050.
The youngest patients in my practice keep getting younger.
What every woman should ask her doctor — and what every doctor should be asking:
"Given my pregnancy history, autoimmune status, and family history — what is my full cardiovascular risk?" If they don't ask about preeclampsia or gestational diabetes, volunteer it.
"Should I have an Lp(a) test and a coronary calcium score?" Standard cholesterol panels miss too much. Lp(a) is genetic, one-time, and most women have never been tested.
"My tests came back normal but my symptoms haven't stopped — what's next?" Normal stress tests and angiograms can miss microvascular disease, spasm, and SCAD. Persistent symptoms warrant coronary CT angiography or cardiac MRI.
And if something feels wrong — say these exact words to your doctor: "I am concerned this could be my heart."
That single sentence changes the workup. Do not soften it. Do not apologize for it.
80% of heart disease is preventable. But the playbook has to be built for female biology.
Two decades ago, I wrote one of the first books warning that heart disease was the number one killer of women and that medicine was diagnosing it through a male lens. It was recognized by First Lady Laura Bush at the White House during the early years of the national conversation about women's heart health.
I'm haunted by how much of that book I could republish today unchanged.
The science has advanced. The awareness has grown. But the gap between what we know and what happens in the exam room is still costing women their lives.
Share this with every woman you love — and every doctor who treats them. READ MORE: https://t.co/4LRugiY8q2
“can i start you off with an appetizer, maybe 30 tortillas?”
“god no, i can’t eat that many tortillas!”
“how about if cut them up into triangles, fry them in seed oil, & serve them with some salsa?”
“omg that sounds delightful”.
50 light-years from here is a dead star made mostly of diamond. Two-thirds the size of Earth. As heavy as the Sun. The biggest diamond ever found on our planet was 3,100 carats. This one is 10 billion trillion trillion carats.
Diamonds are absurdly common in space. Wood is the cosmic miracle.
Carbon is the 4th most common element in the universe, after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen. Squeeze it hard enough and it turns into diamond. Inside Neptune and Uranus, the pressure is so extreme that methane in their atmospheres comes apart, and the carbon falls as diamond rain. Some of these diamonds could grow up to a meter wide. Lab experiments confirmed it in 2017, and a 2024 follow-up showed it can happen on smaller, Neptune-like planets too. Those are among the most common types of planet astronomers find outside our solar system.
Take PSR J1719-1438 b. A planet 4,000 light-years from here, twice as dense as lead. As heavy as Jupiter, but less than half its size. Probably mostly crystalline carbon. A diamond planet, orbiting a tiny dead star that spins 10,000 times a minute.
And nanodiamonds are everywhere, even in meteorites that land on Earth. They make up about 3% of the carbon in those rocks.
Wood is harder. It needs lignin, a natural compound that turns soft plant tissue into hard wood. Lignin first appeared on Earth about 385 million years ago. Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Trees have only existed for 8.5% of our planet's history.
For tens of millions of years after lignin appeared, plant matter built up in Earth's swamps faster than it could fully break down. Most of the coal humans have ever burned was once those plants.
Wood needs everything: water, photosynthesis, an oxygen atmosphere, complex life, plants with veins, and finally the chemistry to build lignin. Diamonds need just two things: carbon and pressure.
So far, every place we have looked in the universe has carbon and pressure. Only one place we know of has trees.