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Kallman's Syndrome: The Secret Best Kept

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I went to my cardiologist yesterday.   Every year I have to wear a Holter monitor for a day because of a heart ablation I had in 2007.   If you don’t know what a Holter monitor is, it’s a 24-hour mobile, wires-hanging-off-your-body EKG.   The nurse practitioner saw me, (not the doctor, which is ok because his voice puts me to sleep).   She was very sweet.   She asked me if I was still taking Estradiol and Progesterin.   “No,” I said. “I’ve totally gone off those.   I was on them for a very long time and I wanted to be sure to stop.” What I didn’t tell her is how long I actually had taken those hormones.   37 years.   I started with HRT when I was 17 because I have Kallman’s Syndrome.   You may never meet a person who has this condition.   It only affects 1 in 10,000 people (or 1 in 86,000, according to one source) so that’s quite a range and far more males have it than females (as do most neg...
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Reading Recommendation

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Last night I finished--in one day, really--the book "Jim and Caspar Go to Church." Jim, a Pentecostal who has pastored, run businesses, and studied and written books about evangelism and marketing, hired an atheist, Caspar (his last name) to go to churches with him and critique/discuss what he saw and experienced. He goes to a good mix of megachurches, traditional churches, emerging/emergent churches (two different things, although many people use the words interchangeably), a house church, inner city churches, all-white, all-black, etc. Everything from Mark Driscoll to Joel Osteen (who gets the worst rating, no surprise; I would give him the worst as well). It was fascinating reading, and anybody who does church work should read it. Not that I agreed with everything in the book, but that's not the point. If you only read books you agree with, why read? It helped me define some issues I've been struggling with for a long time, such as how we do church, why is eva...
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The End of the World as We Know It

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I heard this rather upbeat song, considering the words, the other day on NPR (the home of eclectic music choices in Chattanooga). It's by REM, and most have heard it. After repeating that line three times to a bumpy, driving tune, the vocalist says, "And I feel fine." I assume it's all supposed to be ironic; I never know what to take as sincere or at face value anymore. But the phrase has got me thinking. I've been reading editorials about "the end of the decade" and "what should be call this decade" (the "ohs"? the "uh-ohs"?) and all the bad things that have happened in the first ten years of the new millennium (without anyone really noticing that the millennium is based on the medieval notion of when Christ was born and is really wrong and arbitrary anyway, and also no one noticing that the decade doesn't really end until Dec. 31, 2010. We've had a disputed election, 9/11, two wars, the tsunami, Katrina, an ...
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