Legion of Angels News Archive

There are no pink ribbons to wear if you’ve had a miscarriage, no walkathons or T-shirts to encourage awareness and prevention. And to the extent that we have a language to talk about miscarriage, it’s full of airy platitudes: “Don’t worry, I had one once, too,” or “I had two, and then — poof — Davey was born, and he’s graduating from college this week.”

But until you belong to the imaginary club of Mothers Without Children, it is a secret planet of pain, all but invisible to the outside world.

I recently had my third miscarriage in a year. It happened early in the pregnancy, and it was dismissed as no big deal — “chemical pregnancy” seems to be the term of art. Let’s not overreact, no need for hysterics, keep moving. “We’ll treat it as though you’re just getting your period,” as my doctor put it.

But honestly, it is not just like getting your period. Psychologically, of course, it is nothing like it, but physically it is different, too. I had cramps for hours that left my ribs feeling bruised, and then four days later I was back at work and exhausted because I was still bleeding a lot — not an alarming amount, but enough to make me schedule meetings in rooms near bathrooms, and to send me home in the afternoon for a two-hour nap. I wonder how men would cope. All of the pain, mess, furtive tidying-up, shame and soldiering-on seem so fundamentally female to me.

People act as if a miscarriage were a locatable event on a calendar, with a beginning, a middle and an end. But in fact it starts when you feel that first unmistakable twinge that something is totally wrong. It continues through the rough days of sorrow and deep cramps, and then it meanders through every single day of the rest of your whole stupid life. I will probably mourn about this miscarriage in some outwardly unremarkable way until I either have a healthy baby or die.

Talking about miscarriages is so loaded and pitiful and hushed and fraught with meaning about age and usefulness. It feels as though having three miscarriages in a year means I did something wrong, when the reality is that most miscarriages take place for chromosomal reasons out of our control.

Yet a woman who has had a miscarriage has likely asked herself why. “God must not want me to have a kid,” she might think, or “I am too old.” There are moments when you can feel that the miscarriage and the calamities of the world are your own doing and you should have somehow known better.

Maybe we don’t talk about our miscarriages because we don’t want women with children looking at us with pity, or teenagers in their immortality-flushed way thinking, “That’ll never happen to me.” We do not want happy families to whisper, “Thank God that’s not us.” We don’t want to wonder if men are thinking, “If they can’t have kids, then why are they here, anyway?”

I cannot tell you, though, what you should say to women who have had miscarriages. While it can be touching to hear other women’s stories, it can also be irritating: it makes our moment of extraordinary sadness feel ordinary and unremarkable. Why would I want to hear about your miscarriage when I am lying on the floor trying to lift 500 pounds of failure, disappointment and crashing hormones off my chest?

I can tell you that I want people to know. I don’t want it to be a secret or a shadow or something that is endured only alone. I want people to know that I have been through something, that I am tired but optimistic, that I’ve been knocked down but don’t help me up because I can get up myself.

It’s fair, I think, to want witnesses for our suffering. But with the sorrow also comes hope. And after all, we are resilient creatures. A friend of mine said it well in an e-mail message after she heard my news. “I hope you don’t give up,” she wrote. “I want to take a picture of your child one day against the tallest sunflower.”

Source — The New York Times

A good-sized asteroid sailing past our planet right now turns out to be two giant rocks doing a celestial jig.

The setup, catalogued as 2008 BT18, was thought to be nearly a half-mile wide after its discovery by MIT’s LINEAR search program in January. Nothing else was known about it.

Now seen as two objects orbiting each other, the pair will be closest to Earth on today, at about 1.4 million miles (2 million kilometers) away. That’s nearly six times as far from us as the moon.

It will not strike the planet. But scientists want to learn more about binary asteroids because one day they might find one headed our way. Deflecting a binary off course could be considerably more challenging that altering the path of a single rock.

Radar observations from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico on July 6 and 7 “clearly show two objects,” said Lance Benner of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The objects are estimated to be 1,970 feet (600 meters) and 650 feet (200 meters) in diameter. The larger one rotates upon its axis in 3 hours or less.

Additional observations from NASA’s Goldstone radar in the Mojave Desert in California are expected to reveal more about the density, shapes and orbit of the pair.

Asteroids are often loose rubble piles rather than solid objects, and pairs are common. Scientists announced earlier this month that binaries can be created when energy from sunlight splits a loose asteroid in two.

While most asteroids roam in a belt between Mars and Jupiter, some are kicked or drawn inward and cross our path around the sun. Some 15 percent of these near-Earth asteroids are binaries. But few come so close.

Asteroid 2008 BT18 remains classified by NASA as “potentially hazardous” because its future orbits have not been fully determined.

Asteroids are known to change course over time, and in fact one big boulder, named Apophis, will alter course significantly during a close Earth flyby in 2029. Earth’s gravity will bend the rocks’ trajectory around the sun. Depending on how that interaction plays out, Apophis has a minor chance of hitting the planet in 2036. Scientists expect the odds of impact to diminish or evaporate after the first flyby, however.

Source — MSNBC

WASHINGTON (AP) – From climate change to volcanoes and earthquakes, the world’s growing challenges have leaders in earth science proposing a merger of agencies that study the planet.

Creation of a new Earth Systems Science Agency is urged in this week’s edition of the journal Science, by merging the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey.

Included in the group making the proposal are former heads of both agencies as well as others who have held science policy positions in government.

“The United States faces unprecedented environmental and economic challenges in the decades ahead.

Foremost among them will be climate change, sea-level rise, altered weather patterns, declines in freshwater availability and quality and loss of biodiversity,” the group warned.

D. James Baker, NOAA administrator from 1993 to 2001, said the group felt the divided responsibilities among agencies made it harder to get things done.

“We felt that laying this (idea) on the table would have a lot of positive aspects,” said Baker, who now works on deforestation concerns with the Clinton Foundation.

With a $4 billion budget and 12,000 employees, NOAA, a part of the Commerce Department, studies the atmosphere and oceans.

USGS, part of the Interior Department, with a $1 billion budget and 8,500 workers, focuses on fresh water and the Earth, including such threats as volcanoes and earthquakes, and has a biological arm.

The group proposing the new agency had long been concerned that science programs that are part of regulatory or management agencies tend to be downplayed at budget time, said Charles Groat, a former director of the Geological Survey and now interim dean of geosciences at the University of Texas.

“Given the challenges the country faces in the environment and energy,” he said, the two agencies could make a significant contribution to science, he said.

And the combined agency would provide a strong group on behalf of science, he said, working in collaboration with the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy and National Institutes of Health.

Creation of the new agency also would revive the name ESSA. Before 1970, NOAA was known as the Environmental Science Services Administration.

In addition to Groat and Baker, signing the proposal were Mark Schaefer, former acting director of the Geological Survey; former White House science adviser John H. Gibbons; Donald Kennedy, Food and Drug Administration commissioner from 1977 to 1979; Charles F. Kennel, former associate administrator of NASA and director of its Mission to Planet Earth, and David Rajeski, who formerly served in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Council on Environmental Quality.

Source — CNN