Women's Sexuality: A New Vision
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Thank you again everyone, for your generous support. You helped me to reach a milestone today: My Master of Public Health thesis about Infant Mortality - and its links to maternal health - in rural Mississippi was approved today. I passed! On to the presentation and graduation this fall. Your generosity made a real difference in my life, and I am so grateful.
Here's more on my research interests, which include Human Sexuality, Maternal-Child Health, and Evolutionary theory. The following paragraphs are from my original application essay to the University:
"Transforming the public conversation about women’s sexuality is the contribution I plan to make in the field of public health. My intended focus on health communications, with a specialty in women’s sexual health, was inspired by personal experience and is informed by more than a decade of professional experience.
Anyone who reads through my resume will see that I am a person of varied interests and accomplishments, with a career focus on health communications and fundraising. But over the years, when challenged to describe my passion, I couldn’t answer – until this past spring.
My epiphany came in a flash, during a talk with a gynecologist at a major medical center in Worcester, MA, who was treating me for what appeared to be an ovarian cyst. He said that I would, of course, have both the organ in question and the healthy ovary removed, as a “precaution”.
'I want to keep at least one ovary', I said.
'WHY?' he almost shouted back.
'Because I want to have orgasms!' I asserted.
He and his medical resident were shocked to silence. Perhaps the MPH@GW admissions committee reading my words will be, too. But consider that in doctor-patient talks about the treatment of prostate cancer, due care routinely is taken to address the preservation of a man’s sexual form and function. I had done my research.
I soon took my assertion, my MRI, and myself to an expert at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) on Fruit Street in Boston, MA, to get a second opinion. Six months and one minimally-invasive surgery later, we know I never had cancer. And I still have both ovaries.
There’s a Center for Women’s Sexuality at MGH that seems like Mecca to me now, for the doctors, nurses, and therapists there understand what I did not until now: that a woman’s sexuality – and her sexual organs – are the heart of her physical, spiritual, and mental health.
Heart health was my MGH surgeon’s first consideration. You need to keep at least one ovary, he said, because in women under 64, the hormones produced in the ovaries protect your heart. It turns out that they also continue to protect a woman’s bones, teeth, and skin – not to mention her libido – post-menopause, too. The published research on these revelations dates back to at least 2009, but it took an independent spirit and a 50-mile drive to attain an open discussion about it in 2015. Why?
In an era in which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that heart attack is the leading cause of death for women in the United States, hysterectomy, often with bi-lateral ovarian removal, continues to be “one of the most commonly performed surgical procedures in women”, according to a National Institutes of Health (NIH) peer-reviewed manuscript, published in 2014.
The NIH article also points out a 36.4% decline in the number of hysterectomies between 2002 and 2010, owing to new surgical techniques and treatments for gynecologic disorders. I wonder whether the number could have been even lower if information about the possible health consequences of elective hysterectomy and ovary removal were more widely disseminated.
How is that in all my years of attending doctor’s seminars about women’s health, researching medical journals for health-related grant applications, and working with doctors to translate medical white papers into standard-English prose, this critically important link between women’s heart health and ovarian removal never came up for discussion?
Further, why is that some of my gynecologic nurses have suggested that since I am past child-bearing years, I don’t need my uterus, cervix, and ovaries? Why do young women in the poor neighborhood in which I work see their teen pregnancies as a proud badge of womanhood? And, what’s at the heart of comments from so many of my peers, who tell me that a radical hysterectomy after 50 is a great way to 'get everything cleaned out'.
My radical assertion is this: Female sexual organs are not dirty. They are in fact the essential core at the very heart of every woman’s health, as I have stated above. Her vitality, physical and mental health, longevity, and joy of living depend on them. Reproduction is just one part of their healthy function, which goes far beyond the important, but by no means over-riding experience of child-bearing.
After half a lifetime of work in the field of public health, I have found my passion. It is to remove the secrecy and stigma regarding women’s sexual health and expression, and to encourage all women to take responsibility for their sexuality, and sexual health, throughout their lives. I think a new paradigm will prevent a wide variety of women’s health problems, including heart-related deaths, teen pregnancy, and sexually-transmitted disease.
I assert that women’s sexual health is a critically important issue in public health, and that open and unashamed public conversation about it not only will ensure that women live rich and rewarding lives, but in the end, will save women’s lives, too.
What Contributions I Plan to Make In the Field:
I wish to strategically use the oral and written communications, marketing, and fundraising skills I have developed during my career to make a tangible difference in women’s sexual health, throughout the world. Cloud-based learning and communications might be the most powerful means of making that difference.
The MPH@GW Program will help me to achieve my goals because it will help me to focus my many years of general and varied experience in health communications into creating a new vision for women's health, one which has the potential for global impact. The program will allow me to study with public health experts and peers, testing my thesis in an environment which encourages innovative thought, while I learn more about the broader subject of public health.
As a rigorous program of a highly-respected school of public health, the MPH@GW Program also will provide me the credentialing and credibility required to develop one or more of the creative communications platforms I envision to transform the conversation about women’s sexual health. These can include TED Talks, syndicated online and network radio and television programs, independent film documentaries, websites, articles in online and print media, blogs and books, legislative testimonials, online and in-person lectures, and classroom curricula."
Thank you, in advance and from the bottom of my heart, for supporting me in pursuing this dream of tranforming the conversation about women's sexual health, and creating a world in which women are happy, healthy, and loved to the end of their lives on earth.
copyright, 2016-2018
Johanna Lolax
Here's more on my research interests, which include Human Sexuality, Maternal-Child Health, and Evolutionary theory. The following paragraphs are from my original application essay to the University:
"Transforming the public conversation about women’s sexuality is the contribution I plan to make in the field of public health. My intended focus on health communications, with a specialty in women’s sexual health, was inspired by personal experience and is informed by more than a decade of professional experience.
Anyone who reads through my resume will see that I am a person of varied interests and accomplishments, with a career focus on health communications and fundraising. But over the years, when challenged to describe my passion, I couldn’t answer – until this past spring.
My epiphany came in a flash, during a talk with a gynecologist at a major medical center in Worcester, MA, who was treating me for what appeared to be an ovarian cyst. He said that I would, of course, have both the organ in question and the healthy ovary removed, as a “precaution”.
'I want to keep at least one ovary', I said.
'WHY?' he almost shouted back.
'Because I want to have orgasms!' I asserted.
He and his medical resident were shocked to silence. Perhaps the MPH@GW admissions committee reading my words will be, too. But consider that in doctor-patient talks about the treatment of prostate cancer, due care routinely is taken to address the preservation of a man’s sexual form and function. I had done my research.
I soon took my assertion, my MRI, and myself to an expert at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) on Fruit Street in Boston, MA, to get a second opinion. Six months and one minimally-invasive surgery later, we know I never had cancer. And I still have both ovaries.
There’s a Center for Women’s Sexuality at MGH that seems like Mecca to me now, for the doctors, nurses, and therapists there understand what I did not until now: that a woman’s sexuality – and her sexual organs – are the heart of her physical, spiritual, and mental health.
Heart health was my MGH surgeon’s first consideration. You need to keep at least one ovary, he said, because in women under 64, the hormones produced in the ovaries protect your heart. It turns out that they also continue to protect a woman’s bones, teeth, and skin – not to mention her libido – post-menopause, too. The published research on these revelations dates back to at least 2009, but it took an independent spirit and a 50-mile drive to attain an open discussion about it in 2015. Why?
In an era in which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that heart attack is the leading cause of death for women in the United States, hysterectomy, often with bi-lateral ovarian removal, continues to be “one of the most commonly performed surgical procedures in women”, according to a National Institutes of Health (NIH) peer-reviewed manuscript, published in 2014.
The NIH article also points out a 36.4% decline in the number of hysterectomies between 2002 and 2010, owing to new surgical techniques and treatments for gynecologic disorders. I wonder whether the number could have been even lower if information about the possible health consequences of elective hysterectomy and ovary removal were more widely disseminated.
How is that in all my years of attending doctor’s seminars about women’s health, researching medical journals for health-related grant applications, and working with doctors to translate medical white papers into standard-English prose, this critically important link between women’s heart health and ovarian removal never came up for discussion?
Further, why is that some of my gynecologic nurses have suggested that since I am past child-bearing years, I don’t need my uterus, cervix, and ovaries? Why do young women in the poor neighborhood in which I work see their teen pregnancies as a proud badge of womanhood? And, what’s at the heart of comments from so many of my peers, who tell me that a radical hysterectomy after 50 is a great way to 'get everything cleaned out'.
My radical assertion is this: Female sexual organs are not dirty. They are in fact the essential core at the very heart of every woman’s health, as I have stated above. Her vitality, physical and mental health, longevity, and joy of living depend on them. Reproduction is just one part of their healthy function, which goes far beyond the important, but by no means over-riding experience of child-bearing.
After half a lifetime of work in the field of public health, I have found my passion. It is to remove the secrecy and stigma regarding women’s sexual health and expression, and to encourage all women to take responsibility for their sexuality, and sexual health, throughout their lives. I think a new paradigm will prevent a wide variety of women’s health problems, including heart-related deaths, teen pregnancy, and sexually-transmitted disease.
I assert that women’s sexual health is a critically important issue in public health, and that open and unashamed public conversation about it not only will ensure that women live rich and rewarding lives, but in the end, will save women’s lives, too.
What Contributions I Plan to Make In the Field:
I wish to strategically use the oral and written communications, marketing, and fundraising skills I have developed during my career to make a tangible difference in women’s sexual health, throughout the world. Cloud-based learning and communications might be the most powerful means of making that difference.
The MPH@GW Program will help me to achieve my goals because it will help me to focus my many years of general and varied experience in health communications into creating a new vision for women's health, one which has the potential for global impact. The program will allow me to study with public health experts and peers, testing my thesis in an environment which encourages innovative thought, while I learn more about the broader subject of public health.
As a rigorous program of a highly-respected school of public health, the MPH@GW Program also will provide me the credentialing and credibility required to develop one or more of the creative communications platforms I envision to transform the conversation about women’s sexual health. These can include TED Talks, syndicated online and network radio and television programs, independent film documentaries, websites, articles in online and print media, blogs and books, legislative testimonials, online and in-person lectures, and classroom curricula."
Thank you, in advance and from the bottom of my heart, for supporting me in pursuing this dream of tranforming the conversation about women's sexual health, and creating a world in which women are happy, healthy, and loved to the end of their lives on earth.
copyright, 2016-2018
Johanna Lolax
Organizer
Johanna Lolax
Organizer
Holden, MA