Ladyparts Quotes

“They say money doesn’t buy happiness. That depends on how you define happiness. It sure does buy time, convenience, childcare, breast scans, and professional opportunity, all of which can lead to greater happiness. So I’d like to amend that saying, if I may: An excess of money doesn’t buy happiness, but having enough money does, and not having any money whatsoever buys nothing but fear, anxiety, and life-threatening heart palpitations.”
― Deborah Copaken, Ladyparts

“An American “epidemic of loneliness,” it’s being called, in research papers, the press, even on an official U.S. government website. Two in five Americans are unhappy with the relationships they do have. One in five Americans feel lonely and socially isolated. Loneliness, these researchers warn, is as lethal as smoking 15 cigarettes a day; can lead to suicide, Alzheimer’s disease, and other dementias; messes with our immune and cardiovascular systems, and more. Loneliness, in other words, is killing us.
So every night, like a bedtime prayer, I open my apps and swipe.”
― Deborah Copaken, Ladyparts

“Did you know that if you’re a middle-aged woman, you have only a small window of opportunity between the beginning of perimenopause and the start of menopause to start estrogen replacement therapy to protect not only your brain but also your bones and cardiovascular system? I did not, until I dug into the science, because as a woman who was diagnosed with a stage 0 breast lump, I was scared off like so many of us from the results of the Women’s Health Initiative, which got blasted out all over the news and initially showed a link between estrogen replacement therapy and breast cancer, but guess what? That study had so many flaws, its findings are little more than useless and possibly harmful. Worse, women like me without uteri show a decrease in breast cancer with estrogen replacement therapy. But this information never made it either into the headlines or into our gynecologists’ offices. I had to find it in scientific publications such as The Lancet online. In fact, get this: Our medical system barely trains gynecologists in menopausal medicine. A recent study found that only 20 percent of ob-gyn residency programs in the U.S. provide any menopause training. Yes, any. Which means that 80 percent of all gynecological residents in school today are getting no training whatsoever in post-reproductive women’s health. These are people whose job it is to know everything going on in our ladyparts, but they have not been taught the basic tenets of how to care for either us or our plumbing after we stop menstruating. And by “us” I mean 30 percent of all women alive on earth at any given moment. Half of my middle-aged female friends deal with chronic urinary tract infections. Oh, well, we think, throwing up our hands in defeat and consuming far too many antibiotics than are rational or safe or even good for the future safety of humanity. It took Dr. Rachel Rubin, a urologist in Washington, D.C., reaching out to me over Twitter to explain that UTIs in menopausal women do not have to be recurrent. They can be mitigated with, yes, vaginal estrogen. Not once was I ever”
― Deborah Copaken, Ladyparts

“Dear Medical Schools: Please teach your male doctors to listen to their female patients. We know a thing or two about what goes on inside us, even if we may not know why, how, or what to call it. We also definitely know which medications have worked and not worked on our bodies in the past, so please treat that information as valuable.”
― Deborah Copaken, Ladyparts

“Ken Kurson invited me to a professional lunch in 1999 and sent me an email about my breasts later. I was just starting out as a writer, in my 20s.”
― Deborah Copaken, Ladyparts

“I’m not used to asking for help. It feels wrong, even shameful to have to say, “I can’t do this on my own. Please help.”
― Deborah Copaken, Ladyparts

“But the NBC vice president whose job it was to formally approve this arrangement—a woman with children of her own—said a mother had to choose: You either worked ten to twelve hours a day, five days a week and on weekends, or you could go home and be a mommy.”
― Deborah Copaken, Ladyparts

“We don’t know?” I say. “We’ve landed men on the moon, but we don’t know the basic physiological roots of female pleasure? How is that even possible?”
― Deborah Copaken, Ladyparts

“We have known for a good ten years,” says Dr. Mosconi, “that taking out the ovaries or the uterus increases the risk of dementia in women.”
― Deborah Copaken, Ladyparts

“Hope is not a plan when a patient is actively dying. It’s a mutually agreed upon delusion”
― Deborah Copaken, Ladyparts

“For a country founded on the ideals of freedom, liberty, and justice for all, having affordable health insurance tied to full-time employment is an ironic and often fatal prison of our own making.”
― Deborah Copaken, Ladyparts

“Every woman has a creepy man meter in the basement of her soul.”
― Deborah Copaken, Ladyparts

“Seventy-one out of ninety-four women were criticized in these otherwise positive reviews for their tone, while only two of the eighty-three men were taken to task for it. That’s 76 percent of successful females versus 2 percent of successful males being told, in positive performance reviews, “Watch your tone.”
― Deborah Copaken, Ladyparts

“For a country founded on the ideals of freedom, liberty, and justice for all, having affordable health insurance tied to full-time employment is an ironic and often fatal prison of our own making. Not to mention an obvious hindrance to that other pillar of American pride, entrepreneurship.”
― Deborah Copaken, Ladyparts

“Women in an emergency room will wait an average of sixty-five minutes to be given pain medication, while men wait only forty-nine. Women who receive coronary bypass surgery are only half as likely to be given pain medication as men who’ve undergone the same surgery”
― Deborah Copaken, Ladyparts

“We are tired of modulating our “tone” when that word gets used as a weapon against us. We are tired of being paid less than men, interrupted when we speak, fired at will, and tossed aside the minute we hit our perimenopausal stride.”
― Deborah Copaken, Ladyparts

“My father’s death has left an empathy hole in my life where once he stood.”
― Deborah Copaken, Ladyparts

“Every artist, in whatever medium, is always communicating the same message, over and over again: This is how I see the world.”
― Deborah Copaken, Ladyparts

“Czesław Miłosz, recipient of the 1980 Nobel Prize in literature, once famously wrote, “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”
― Deborah Copaken, Ladyparts

“Meanwhile, breastfeeding was still frowned upon when I was born back in 1966, so I have no preconscious memories of the comfort of her breast either. I don’t blame her for not breastfeeding me or my sisters. At all. I blame the industrial revolution. I blame bad science. I blame a society that not only told women that breastfeeding was kind of icky, indecent, and strictly for those in the lower classes who couldn’t afford formula, but that also frowned upon a woman breastfeeding in public without providing any viable alternatives”
― Deborah Copaken, Ladyparts

“The risk of acute appendicitis in postpartum women over the age of thirty-five—otherwise known as a “geriatric pregnancy” or “advanced maternal age”—is 84 percent greater than the risk to the general public.”
― Deborah Copaken, Ladyparts

“COBRA, I was surprised to learn, stands for the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, not Crap Option Bewilderment of Ruinous Assholery.”
― Deborah Copaken, Ladyparts

“Parenting teenage boys has taught me much of what I know about patience and surrender.”
― Deborah Copaken, Ladyparts

“All caps with a red exclamation point. At 11:30 p.m. As if we were all doctors on call instead of tiny cogs in the giant wheel of the pharmaceutical industry. “It’s PR, not brain surgery,” goes the classic PR joke, but only because so many people in PR have to be reminded that a missing slide from an RFP—request for proposal—is not the same as a missing chunk of human skull.”
― Deborah Copaken, Ladyparts