The vagina cleans better than your oven does

Warning: there may be wallowing

Rose, you are wallowing.

Rose, you are being undignified.

Rose, you are humiliating yourself.

I’ve had these criticisms recently. About what I’ve been writing here and about other things I’ve written and sent to my ex when I should not have. I mostly disagree though I accept there are lines I have crossed and should not have. But I think it’s healthy to write what I feel. It’s what I do. I have always tried to be open about mental health and my health, I don’t see why I should stop now. But perhaps I will dial it down. People get bored of grief, don’t they? Of course they do. I’m bored of it.

“About mental health and my health.” Such a stupid distinction. I’ve had reason to examine that distinction because of what my body is currently doing. The correct medical term is “freaking out.” 18 months ago I was switched to continuous progesterone. This means I no longer have periods. After six months of bleeding, this is what transpired, and I put away all my reusable sanitary pads and tampons (not reusable) and thought, right, I’m done. Or maybe I thought THANK GOD I’M DONE.

Oh no I’m not. I’ve been bleeding for six weeks now and as I write this can feel my uterus cramping. I think it is because there is so much cortisol and adrenaline zooming around my system, they are knocking my other hormones out of whack. It’s far more likely to be that, given the timing, than coincidentally sudden-onset endometrial cancer. So is that a mental health or health issue? Hormones create moods; hormones create physical damage. There is no difference. It’s all physiology. Supposedly the human is this:

• the conscious mind

• the unconscious mind

• the physical body

But the mind is electricity and therefore part of the physical body. The unconscious mind must also be electricity. It’s not magic so what else can it be? Mind-body is a dumb dichotomy and down with it. This same dumb dichotomy enables the government of England to dismiss dementia as a “social disease” whatever the hell that is, rather than brain damage, which is inarguably physical. If it was physical, they would have to pay for lifetime care rather than bankrupting millions of familes who have to pay for care because the government slithers out of its responsibility. It’s a disgusting bad faith lie and I am ashamed of it.

Why is my body going haywire? Why have I had to buy sanitary pads again when I thought I had moved beyond that stage of my life? Why am I eating co-codamol at breakfast, lunch and dinner and once again experiencing cramps so severe that they make me gasp?

I don’t know yet. Investigations will be done. Tranexamic acid, a clotting medication, may help. But I wonder.

At high school, in my first year of sixth form, I was part of a group of friends. The core group was four : Joanne, Helen, Liz and me. Liz and I lived in the same town and travelled to school together; Joanne and Helen and I played hockey. We were close. I didn’t question the friendship and felt secure in it. Then they stopped talking to me. I have a vivid memory of standing at the lockers in the common room and looking over at the three of them, and they ignored me. They did this for a week and even now I don’t know why. It marked me so severely that I still ask Liz — with whom I am still friends, 50 years after we first met in our pushchairs — why they did it. She doesn’t know. She is deeply ashamed of it. And so I will never know. And I will never forget how horrific it felt to be ignored and not know why.

The silent treatment has also featured in my relationship breakdown, and I had no desire to rediscover the pain it causes, but I had no choice in the matter. Kipling Williams is an expert in social ostracism and the silent treatment. He has encountered horrors. All these quotes are from this Atlantic piece.

A grown woman whose father refused to speak with her for six months at a time as punishment throughout her life. “Her father died during one of those dreaded periods,” Williams told me. “When she visited him at the hospital shortly before his death, he turned away from her and wouldn’t break his silence even to say goodbye.”

A wife whose husband severed communication with her early in their marriage. “She endured four decades of silence that started with a minor disagreement and only ended when her husband died,” Williams said. Forty years of eating meals by herself, watching television by herself—40 years of being invisible. “When I asked her why she stayed with him for all that time,” Williams said, “she answered simply, ‘Because at least he kept a roof over my head.’”

Four decades! So I was lucky to only get months, on and off (if “off” is silence it was mostly off). This piece talks about how old the practice of ostracism is. Ostracism comes from ancient Greek:

From Ancient Greek ὀστρακίζω (ostrakízō, “to banish from a city by ostracism”), from ὄστρᾰκον (óstrakon, “earthenware vessel; fragment of such a vessel, potsherd”) (from the fact that when voting was held to decide whether to banish people, their names were inscribed on potsherds) + -ῐ́ζω (-ízō, suffix forming verbs)). The English word is cognate with French ostraciser.^[1]

All cultures have banished and shunned and ostracised. There is ex-communication and disconnection and other words. It all amounts to the same for the person being shunned : pain.

Sailors used the silent treatment at sea.

The silent treatment was, according to the writer Otis Ferguson in 1944, “a process so effective in the monotony of ship’s life as to make strong men weep.”

Shunning someone, refusing to communicate and avoiding contact for weeks on end: it activates the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex in the person being ignored. This is the same area of the brain that is activated when your arm is chopped off. See above about physical/mental: pain is pain and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is where it’s at. Also, yay, the pain caused by the silent treatment lasts longer than “physical” pain.

“Because we humans require social contact for our mental health, the ramifications of isolation can be severe,” Joel Cooper, a psychology professor at Princeton, told me. “In the short term, the silent treatment causes stress. In the long term, the stress can be considered abuse.”

The silent treatment might be employed by passive personality types to avoid conflict and confrontation, while strong personality types use it to punish or control. Some people may not even consciously choose it at all. “A person may be flooded with feelings they can’t put into words, so they just shut down,” Anne Fishel, the director of the Family and Couples Therapy Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, told me.

I think shut-down is what happened but I don’t know and I think I will never know. Williams says that the person being shunned or ostracised reacts in three stages.

1. The initial acts of being ignored or excluded

2. Coping

3. Resignation

I would also add:

1. going mad

2. going madder

3. having a breakdown

4. getting better

I don’t know yet what has been unleashed in my body. I will find out. And I will heal, body, mind and everything inbetween, eventually. But please : don’t ever give someone the silent treatment no matter how bad you feel. I can think of a few people who deserve it — one whose name begins with Donald — but most people do not. Don’t do it, ever.

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Read all about it

• I know I have been remiss in not commenting on our sewage crisis. I just, dunno, think there are plenty of people commenting on it. But this interview with someone who finds drugs in our wastewater — and in shrimp — was nice.

• In “what, the sky is blue?” revelations, here is UCL discovering that perimenopausal women are 40 percent more likely to experience depression. NO SHIT. I’m grateful for this research but really all you had to do was ten years ago head to an office car park at lunchtime and interview all the women crying in their cars.

• Five years ago I wrote a piece for the Guardian about the idiocy that is douches and why the vagina doesn’t need any flummery because it’s a better self-cleaner than your oven. I mentioned that talc had been implicated in ovarian cancer cases because of its (alleged) asbestos content and that class action lawsuits were ongoing. Johnson & Johnson will now pay $6.48 billion in settlements after denying any responsibility for years. Also, it turns out I get discussed on Mumsnet. Also, your vagina doesn’t need talc or douches or fragrances. Leave the damn thing alone.

• The mice are rising.

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Animal hero of the week : Fred the Undercover Cat

Fred Wheezy had half a working lung. He was a black-striped tabby, a young cat who became a celebrity. The New York Post’s headline reads “HERO DA CAT” which I first read as a kind of rap. But no, the DA here is the District Attorney.

Animal Care and Control pulled him nameless and rank from the Brooklyn alleys in September, estimating his age at 4 months. He had severe pneumonia, a collapsed lung and a second lung partly filled with fluid. He was cribbing like a lame horse, desperate to breathe. Treatment failed; his death was scheduled. Then [Carol] Moran, a Brooklyn deputy district attorney who oversees animal cruelty cases, adopted him and a litter mate from a shelter. She named them Fred and George for the Weasley twins, the practical jokers of the Harry Potter books. There were antibiotics, steam showers and chest poundings, and Fred thrived. He chased her other two cats. He chased her dogs, too.

In February, this New York Times piece says, Fred “served as the come-on in a sting operation against an unlicensed veterinarian.” That’s it. Sorry, what? Let’s head to the New York Post.

Fred’s rise to fame began with his role in catching Steven Vassall, 29, who was allegedly treating animals without a vet’s degree or license.

The DA’s office had set up a sting, “hiring” Vassall to neuter Fred for $135.

Unaware that hidden cameras were rolling, Vassall allegedly told an undercover detective he could perform the operation, negotiated the price and took Fred away in a box. But the whiskered detective was in safe hands seconds later, after authorities slapped the cuffs on Vassall.

The whiskered detective! Happy the journalist or sub-editor who wrote that line.

His post-detective career was brief but bright. He was given a Law Enforcement Award alongside regular human detectives. He appeared on TV to promote animal adoption. At home, he chased his sister off beds and argued with the dogs. Until one day, Carol and her husband opened the door to carry out their two elderly dogs. The cats escaped; Fred ran into the street and was immediately hit by a car.

“Usually we can catch them right in the yard, or somebody will go out under the deck and come out with cobwebs on his whiskers,” Ms. Moran said. “I don’t know what he saw, or what struck him, or what possessed him.”

Farewell, whiskered detective. His death was publicly mourned, but it was of no matter to the dodgy vet’s lawyer.

Yesterday, Vassall’s lawyer, Royce Russell, said he was saddened by the news.

“I love animals,” he said. “I’m upset to hear that a witness has passed. It will not have any legal bearing because the undercover agents will testify as to the alleged incident.”

There is a whole five-minute video about Fred, voiced by a woman who possibly has the most annoying voice on Youtube. Also I think she is pretending to be her cat.

Fill your boots.

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This is the bit where I politely urge you with Yorkshire grit to a) subscribe or b) upgrade to a paid subscription or c) click on the like button so I know you’ve read and maybe liked this. Needy? Yes. Wallowing? Probably. And?