Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Wisdom Defined: knowledge of what is true or right coupled with just judgment as to action (Dictionary.com).
For far too long, women’s health issues have been ignored and dismissed. We have all suffered long enough. This episode brings us a dose of women’s health wisdom.
What is women’s health wisdom? First, it’s a bold voice standing up for women’s health. Second, it’s when a woman knows what compassionate, attentive healthcare looks like, and then takes action to call out healthcare that isn’t delivering on that promise.
Thankfully, there are people like Deborah Copaken. She is a force for good in so many ways, and encouraging more space for women’s health wisdom is only one of them. A NYT Bestselling author, she recently wrote, Lady Parts. It’s a memoir of her physical health challenges coupled with relationship, work, and child care struggles…aka life as a woman.
She brings such a passionate and comedic lens to an otherwise tragic tale and is able to highlight commonalities that women across the country are either going through now, or have already experienced. If you haven’t had a chance to read the book, we highly recommend it.
If you want to get an idea of who Deborah Copaken is, and why her story and her work is such a gift to this world, check out our latest podcast/interview.
You can watch or listen!
Deborah Copaken is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including Shutterbabe, The Red Book, Between Here and April, and Ladyparts, her most recent memoir of bodily destruction and resurrection during marital rupture (Random House, 2021, coming out in paperback on October 24, 2023.). A contributing writer at The Atlantic, she was also a writer on the Emmy/Golden Globe-nominated Netflix hit, Emily in Paris, a performer (The Moth, etc.), and an Emmy Award–winning news producer and photojournalist. Her photographs have appeared in Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Observer, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, Slate, O, the Oprah Magazine, Air Mail, and Paris Match, among others. Her column “When Cupid Is a Prying Journalist” was adapted for the Modern Love streaming series. She is the writer, producer, CEO, and publisher of the Substack Ladyparts.
0:00 Dr. Ginger Garner: Hi everyone and welcome back. We are here today with Deb Copaken and I told her as soon as I like, you know, hit the press play on the Zoom that I was having a fangirl moment and I’m serious about that on so many levels. So I wanna welcome Deb to the podcast today.
0:24 Deborah Copaken: Hi, nice to meet you finally.
0:26 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah, thank you.
0:27 Deborah Copaken: Internet friends for a while. Yeah. Not even in person. Online.
Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I’ve had that happen with people for a decade. I mean, “thanks internet,” but it also makes things…there’s good and bad, but it’s really good to meet you in this format.
Before we get started, I need to read through your fantastic things that you’ve been doing. So you guys listen to all of this. Deborah Copaken is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including Shutter Babe, The Red Book, Between Here and April, and Lady Parts.
Her most recent memoir, of this is so appropriate bodily destruction and resurrection during marital rupture, a contributing writer at the Atlantic. She’s also a writer on the Emmy Golden Globe nominated Netflix hit Emily in Paris, a performer and Emmy winning news producer and photojournalist. And her photographs have appeared in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Observer, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, Slate, O, Oprah Magazine, Airmail, and Paris Match, among others. And her column, When Cupid is a Prying Journalist, was adapted for the Modern Love streaming series. She’s the writer, producer, CEO, and publisher of the substack, Lady Parts. Welcome, Deb.
01:58 Deborah Copaken: Nice to meet you. Thank you.
Dr. Ginger Garner: Okay. I want to, I have so many questions and I just want to dive right in to your courageous story in your book, Lady Parts. It is courageous on so many levels from my perspective as a human being, but also as a woman, as a mother, as a pelvic health therapist who sees women gaslit every day in my clinical practice. So, just on multiple levels, and as a partner, as a spouse.
So I wanted to start with like my wheelhouse of conversation that I have all the time. And that is with dysmenorrhea, PMDD, etc. Like women struggling with cycles, like hardcore struggling, like with anemia, things that are overlooked every day. It’s a problem that I actually had. And I’m a pelvic PT, right? So if I’m a pelvic PT, and this stuff is happening to me, then I just want to, from the get-go, tell everyone, hey, it’s not your fault when you go through these issues, and someone’s not listening to you, because you can be an expert in the field and still get gaslit.
So tell me a little bit about that story. I mean, you went through a lot, but you were talking about, you know, bleeding heavily, which is very common, very common, but not normal symptom that, you know, from my perspective is driven by things like estrogen dominance, but on that we can fix, but then it’s also becomes a surgical issue, like with fibroids and other things.
So, tell me about your story. I want to mention the other thing too about, you mentioned the Viagra study and eliminating pain, and that’s just like a kick, you know, like a punch in the throat to women everywhere when studies like that aren’t followed through with because they’d say, you know, it’s not a public health priority to, you know, address what 100% of half the population actually experiences. So tell me a little bit about that.
04:10 Deborah Copaken: So I think we should start from the idea that my dysmenorrhea, I didn’t understand as dysmenorrhea. I just thought it was my period, right? Because I’ve had bad periods since before the internet. And it’s not like I could sort of research it easily or, or even understand that something was wrong with me. And in fact, I didn’t understand that something was wrong with me until I got this hemoglobin reading of seven.
So my GP at a regular, you know, annual physical took my blood and he got back the number seven and he’s like, this can’t be right. I’m going to have it redone. So he had his nurse recheck and then she came back and it was a seven. And he said, how are you even standing? I said, I’m so tired all the time, but I have three kids and I’m working and I’m writing. And I just thought that that was what life was.
And then he started asking further questions. He’s like, “how are your periods?”
And I said, “I mean, pretty heavy, I guess.”
And he’s like, “what does pretty heavy mean?”
I was like, “well, I can’t even use super tampons anymore. I’m using a diva cup and I’m entering it. I’m sorry. I am. The voiding it every half hour.”
And he’s like, “what do you mean?”
I said, “I’m creating an ounce of blood every half hour during my periods.”
And he’s like, “and how long did those periods last?”
I’m like, “Oh, you know, 10 days or so.”
And he, he was like, “that’s not normal.”
So the question then becomes is why aren’t we teaching girls what is normal and not normal? Why aren’t we teaching girls when they first get their periods to measure their blood flow, to understand what’s normal? That actually a full period is supposed to be what, like one ounce over the course of seven days, not every half hour. So I was essentially hemorrhaging seriously and severely for 16 years.
And especially after my third child was born in 2006, and I had a really difficult pregnancy, and I’m sure that those two are related. Like he tried to come out at 30 weeks. They give me tributylene, they kept him in. I was on bed rest for six weeks. He finally came out at 36 and a half weeks, something like that. But, you know, after he was born when I was 40, It just got worse and worse and worse and worse.
And again, I just chalked it up to, well, I guess I’m middle-aged and I’ve had three kids and this is just what women put up with.*6:50** {And then when we finally, my doctor sent me for, I don’t even remember what the test was. How do you test for adenomyosis? It must’ve been an MRI or.
07:01 Dr. Ginger Garner: Well, adenomyosis, the treatment is hysterectomy and usually it’s…I don’t know how I tested for it.
Deborah Copaken: I don’t remember. It was so long ago, but we tested for adenomyosis, came back seriously bad adenomyosis, or they tested for endometriosis. I didn’t have endometriosis.] *7:20** I had adenomyosis. And I remember my gynecologist, when she took the uterus out, she was like, it was enormous. I cannot believe you’ve been living with this.
And the relief I felt after that was intense. I kept thinking, oh, I don’t want to get rid of my uterus. The uterus makes me a woman. Why would I want to do that? And then it took my friend Nora saying to me, “what do you need a uterus for? All it does is get sick and ill after you have your kid. Get rid of it. If your doctor says get rid of it, get rid of it.”
And she was right. I mean, I can’t believe I ever thought to myself, oh, I need this organ once it’s done its duty. And I would urge anyone listening to this, if you have endometriosis or adenomyosis or any of the diseases of the uterus that, and you’ve had the kids you want to have by all means. “be gone.”
08:23 Dr. Ginger Garner: I think that’s so important to hear. There are so many women struggling with that with the one in 10 of just women who have endometriosis, you know. One out of 10 women are walking around and the diagnosis can take an upwards of five plus years because of stories like yours, where it wasn’t, you know, endometriosis, but it was adenomyosis, which That is the treatment for it, you know, is a hysterectomy.
And we have been, whether it’s social, cultural conditioning to symbolize that as, you know, the status of femininity or whatever. And I think it’s really important to hear that. That was actually the next thing I was going to ask you about. Was that when Nora says in chapter two, she talks about the hysterectomy, not being so attached to its symbolism and many women facing this decision My question was like, what would you tell them about? Was there a grief process or did you just feel immediately, you know, relief?
09:19 Deborah Copaken: immediate relief and, and sort of angry at myself for not having understood what that relief would feel like and how that would affect all the other forces in my body. I mean, it was, it was so necessary.
And I remember my doctor saying to me, “look, we can keep your uterus in and then just hospitalize you for anemia every month. or you can get rid of your uterus.” And I remember thinking, well, that’s not even a choice. Like, of course I’m going to have to get rid of the uterus, but thinking like, but I don’t want to, you know, we get so caught up in the symbolism of who we are as women.
I will tell you, you know, that I got that uterus out in 2012. It’s now 2023. I don’t miss it one day. Not a single day. Only thing that I think it would have been useful to keep a uterus, I’ll have to say, is to know when I went through menopause because I don’t know when I went through menopause. And I do know that had I been on, had somebody told me to go on hormone, menopause hormone therapy in my forties, I might have avoided the osteoporosis I was just diagnosed with today.
10:36 Dr. Ginger Garner: Was it today?
10:37 Deborah Copaken: Not today, but I mean, this past two months, I don’t remember, it was like, like two months ago. I was diagnosed with osteoporosis. And I was like, I got on menopause therapy, hormone therapy, menopause hormone therapy, MHT. I got on that in 2019/2020. I can’t remember exactly when I went on. It must’ve been 2019. So I’d given myself a good running start, but I could have given myself like another decade of that.
And we know, I mean, from studies, we know that going on more menopause hormone therapy as you’re going through perimenopause will help prevent osteoporosis. I didn’t know that. Nobody told me. Now I have osteoporosis, full blown, not even osteopenia, full blown osteoporosis. And, you know, it took me months to even see a specialist and I’m not seeing them until December. So I don’t even know what the program is these days, except for I’m taking vitamin D, I’m taking calcium, and I’m waiting to talk to a specialist, because that’s how healthcare in the United States works today.
11:49 Dr. Ginger Garner: Well, I’m happy to talk about that later. I have to deal with that all the time. And that was probably, oh goodness, that was a good chunk of the patient clinical care that I had to provide last week is women coming in, the same thing happened, they weren’t told. It wasn’t even a concern because they were using bad science from 20 years ago that said, oh, you don’t take HRT and if you have a history of cancer, you don’t take HRT. Well, actually, if you take it, it decreases your risk.
11:21 Deborah Copaken: Especially for somebody without a uterus and nobody told me either. And by the way, I was diagnosed. I don’t even want to call it breast cancer. It wasn’t breast cancer. It was called stage zero back then, breast cancer. Which these days they’re not calling breast cancer, but I had a lump. It was, you know, it was in my breast. It’s gone. Everything’s fine, but nobody told me that when you lose your uterus, you prevent breast cancer by going on menopause hormone therapy, which used to be called HRT and now it’s called MHT or whatever. I don’t know what the terminology is, but I think that everybody’s calling it MHT these days.
12:55 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah, there’s BHRT, bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. The thing is, most practitioners and I hate to say this, but I’m also 50 now and I’m just tired of mincing words that we can just say most practitioners are operating on old science and they’re not actually informing women of what the new evidence-based care is. That’s because they’re not keeping up with it themselves. And so I see a lot of women who are not even being given the choice or the option to consider replacement therapy.
And then things like this happen where osteopenia, osteoporosis, especially with either hysterectomy or ablation, maybe they just had ablation and their uterus isn’t working anymore. It’s effectively, you know, DOA. You don’t really know when you go through menopause either then because things abruptly stop. So it’s basically surgical menopause. And that makes things very confusing. So yeah, it makes me really angry.
And you experiencing that is like, it’s an understatement, you know, for me to say that I went through a surgical menopause too, as well. So, um, there’s a lot of things to be said for that experience. But for everyone listening, I just want you to know that if you’re going through this experience, if you have heavy periods, endo, adenomyosis, a surgical menopause of any sort, which can also mean you’re on birth control, that is a higher level conversation to have with your practitioner. And if they can’t answer those questions, that’s a good time to find a new practitioner.
14:28 Deborah Copaken: I actually did so much research to find my current gynecologist. And it took, I would say, weeks of like pouring through the Google reviews, reading who was on my health care plan, calling the practitioners themselves, interviewing them and saying, what do you think about hormone therapy? I finally found amazing Dr. Molly McBride here in New York.
I’ve sent, I would say over 50 people to her and they’ve all called me back saying, oh my God, finally somebody is listening because she stays up on the latest science. She’s empathic. She meets with you for 20 minutes. She’s incredible. but it took forever to find this person. I will say also though, I had an experience this weekend that I, I took as hopeful, which is I had another UTI because I get them. And I was away, um, with my partner and, you know, I had to go to a small town hospital to get a test and, um, it came back positive.
And he immediately said, “listen, I know, I don’t know if anyone’s told you this, but you really should be on vaginal estrogen. I was like, I got it. Yes, I am.” But a male practitioner in a small town hospital was saying to me after, yeah, you must be on vaginal estrogen. I just thought, okay, the message is getting out. The activist urologists on Twitter and Instagram are finally getting their message to the regular practitioners who, by the way, it’s not their fault because they weren’t taught this in med school, right?
Also, I would say that med school these days is better too. My daughter is a third year med school student and she said that she did have excellent studies on menopause, on hormone therapy and all that. So I feel like this next generation of doctors coming up, these women who are in their 20s right now and men, hopefully will have a better arsenal of information and also are part of the whole Gen Z tech generation. So they will stay abreast of these things and not just believe what some, you know, white dude wrote back in 2000.
16:40 Dr. Ginger Garner: That’s right. So well said. That is so well said and that is also a hopeful message too but because for everything that’s happening to our generation, we can hope that you know the next generation is not going to have to suffer through that because of your book, because of practitioners, because of better research, because we’re finally being included in research. Which is another huge problem of not of us not even being considered. Even when there was a government mandate to include us women in research, still not happening. So we have really a possibility.
17:11 Deborah Copaken: It’s really important not to just include us but to disaggregate our data. Like it’s not just that you want to include us in the studies. You want studies on various substances to study how it works in women and how it works in men and disaggregate that data. Otherwise it’s useless to us.
17:26 Dr. Ginger Garner: Right. Yeah. We’re not just, we’re not small men. No. I hope you guys are feeling hopeful in hearing this information that there are practitioners out there that you do have to do your research. You can always reach out into, in the show notes to us to help direct you towards practitioners. That’s our goal. You know, that’s our passion is to help you find someone who’s going to listen to your story because if a practitioner truly, deeply listens to your story, they will understand what your needs are.
And if they don’t, they will admit it, they will say, “gosh, I think this person might be a better fit for you.” So yeah, it’s a definite goal to end this whole issue with medical gaslighting, especially around pelvic health issues that mostly end up, but men get it too. Men can get gaslight over like post prostatectomy and things like that happening where they’re like, “oh, that’s what happens after that surgery. You just leak.”
No, it’s not. So with pelvic health issues in general, I think all genders can get medically gaslit. But for the most part, it does unfortunately fall into the pelvis of a woman.
Well, let’s shift gears a little bit because there’s another really big theme in your book at which also women can be gaslit over, and that’s relationally. And in the workplace also, but this whole relational workplace thing gets tied together because, and here’s the thing. I was gonna talk about this last, but because it is so germane to what we’re talking about. The fact that we have, and we’ll just jump off from this piece of the conversation.
I’m a huge advocate for making sure we have policy that supports actual family friendly situations in the United States, and right now we don’t. We are dead. We are bottom of the barrel, dead last for maternal health outcomes, for both paternal and maternal support and policy. It’s just terrible. So unfortunately, that’s the truth. But the one thing that I think is particularly insane is that our health care is attached to our marriage and our jobs. And because we’re just experiencing discrimination in the workplace as women and particularly more so as mothers, the fact that you have healthcare attached to a marriage and a job is just like a relational, social, cultural bomb.
20:12 Deborah Copaken: I do think that I stayed in my marriage for much longer than I should have for fear of losing my healthcare.
20:20 Dr. Ginger Garner: And you’re not alone in that, I think.
20:24 Deborah Copaken: I know, I know. It’s embarrassing to say that out loud, but it’s also true. When I was considering leaving my marriage, there was no Obamacare, there was no choice of getting healthcare outside the corporate structure. And so what I did when I got separated and then divorced was I took jobs that I didn’t want simply for the healthcare. I basically had to put my career as a writer and thinker and producer of books and other things on hold until I could get my kids through childhood with health insurance.
Their dad had moved far away and he didn’t have health insurance. So I was kind of in charge all of the sudden, of everything. But that can make you sick too, right? Doing work that you don’t want to be doing in an organization that treats you horribly. And I would say I had that on several occasions.
So the first one, when I got this diagnosis of stage zero breast cancer fired me for spending not enough time at the office. And every one of my absences, nine in all, in three months, which I understand that’s a lot of absence in three months, but they were all spent at Sloan Kettering. So it’s like, there’s nothing I could do. So if you’re fired from a healthcare company for taking care of my health, just like, you know, you can laugh or you can cry, right?
Being sexually harassed out of another job. Being, you know, working at another company where you would get fired because they weren’t doing so well or they were changing tax or somebody new came in charge like the fact is, none of us can rely on our jobs, the way that our parents’ generation could. And so, you’re constantly switching health insurances, constantly switching doctors as a result of that, because this doctor is covered by that plan, not that plan.
I will say that I have been on the New York State health insurance. It’s not great and it’s expensive, but it’s not like Cobra expensive. So my Cobra, just to give you an idea of what I was paying when I would lose these jobs was $2,400, $2,500 a month for me and my kids, so four of us. These days, for myself individually, I’m spending like $429 a month, which is now going up to $700 a month next year. So that’s like almost double increase.
Still beneath the $2,400 a month that I was so unable to afford. But I just feel like we have to burn the whole system down. It’s not like, this is such a patchwork. It’s like a pair of jeans and we’re putting patches on it, but we need just healthcare, not just insurance companies making money off of us. When I lived in Paris, When I lived in France and I got sick or I needed a pill, I would go to the doctor and I would get my prescription and I’d be treated for my cold or my strep or whatever the heck I had when I was there. And I would walk away and I would stand at the counter and be ready to pay. And they’re like, no, no, you don’t pay. We need a system like that. We need a system that, you know, the national, the NH, oh my God, I can’t think of the word. The NHS, sorry.
In England, you know, a friend of mine, an American, got really sick in England several years ago and he went to the private hospital because he’s an American and he thought that’s what you do. They nearly killed him at the private hospital. He was nearly dead. He was transferred immediately to an NHS facility because they thought he was dying. And within two days, he was fine. So when we hear, oh, socialized medicine is terrible, it’s not terrible.
It actually works in the places where people have it, it works. Yes, you might wait for a specialist for a longer time than usual, but I’m like in apparently one of the best places to go to a doctor in New York City and I need a specialist for my osteoporosis and I was diagnosed this summer and I’m not getting an appointment for until six months later. I mean, okay.
24:55 Dr. Ginger Garner: That’s quite a wait also. Yeah. In working and speaking, I’ve been able to lecture in different countries and speak at different conferences. So I stay with friends, or if I’m there, I’m always there for healthcare. And so I am hanging out with my colleagues who work in that system. So that’s been in England, in Ireland, in the Netherlands, in South Africa, etcetera. And I come away with a personal experience and story of what those health care providers function in and under and how they experience the system.
So just to give you an example, I was speaking at a therapeutic yoga conference in Amsterdam a few years ago and was hanging out with a friend who was organizing it and she’s a nurse and a single mom. And she was just telling me the stories of just obviously (A) not traumatic, like, oh, when my when my child runs a fever that the physician comes out at night, you know, they don’t go to the ER, they don’t get an $8,000 bill from the ED. Because it’s after hours care and because they pull in, you know, the wrong type of care, specialized care, or keep them in a room and then charge them, you know, for that or charge them 50 bucks for Tylenol or whatever.
So I hear those stories. And also what stands out to me is the lack of trauma that’s been experienced inside the system. Like when their child is ill, it’s not the things that you had to go through and experience that are in your book. It happened and they got it the next day and they went about their day instead of what we have, which is bankruptcy. Right. And living on the edge and charging your credit card up and taking out a second mortgage, you know, there’s all kinds of devastating stories that we shouldn’t live and die moment to moment based on whether or not we can afford the health care that we need to access.
27:01 Deborah Copaken: That’s why I started the book with the first chapter when I was bleeding out from vaginal cuff dehiscence, which is really serious. It’s when the vagina comes undone after surgery. So basically your innards, everything’s falling out. So there’s blood everywhere. It’s a massacre. It’s like out of a bad horror movie. And my daughter who was 20 at the time, found me wandering the apartment, bleeding everywhere, going to the refrigerator, putting giant chunks of myself that were coming out into the refrigerator, because I was like, oh, I might need to save these. And her saying, we have to get you to the hospital right now. And I said, oh, but I can’t afford an ambulance. Yeah.
You know, when we have a fire in our home, we accept that it’s okay to call the fireman to put out that fire. But when we have a fire in our body or something goes wrong, we don’t call because we’re afraid of that $4,000 bill, that $8,000 bill. We don’t know because nobody tells us before we get in the ambulance. I mean, I had an interesting experience recently, which is that I was in a car accident. And I had, you know, blood on my face and my broken hand and all this stuff and I was thinking, oh, I don’t want the ambulance to come but of course they had to come because I’m lying there and, you know, bleeding and worried, worried, worried about the ambulance bill.
And it came and it was $2,700. And I just thought, okay, how am I going to pay this? And then I remembered, oh, wait, this should be covered by my car insurance. And so I sent it off to Geico and they paid it. And I was like, why isn’t health insurance that way? Why? I mean, Guy goes to a car company and they’re paying that $2,700 bill because that’s part of what I paid for when I paid my car insurance every year, which is much less, by the way, than my health insurance bill.
And yet we pay so much money for our health insurance and we have nothing covered. Or like, I have a $6,100 deductible in my current plan. And when I, you know, I went deaf from COVID, so I have hearing aids and I needed another surgery. And I kind of like, my first, the first time I went for surgery, I was with United Healthcare at the time, and it was three minutes before surgery was supposed to begin. I’m in the hospital, I’m in my gown, my doctor scrubbed in. I’ve got the line in my arm, and he comes into the room almost in tears, and he’s like, United just denied your surgery.
And I had to leave. And then we had to do it without general anesthesia. And it was so fucking painful that he kind of had to stop in the middle of it. And I just had the resurgery done last or two weeks ago and under general anesthesia, because my new insurance covers it.
And apparently after I wrote this like op-ed for The Daily Beast, many more insurances are covering it now a year later, but still I had to go through that absurdity. In a hospital gown and being told by UnitedHealthcare, who is the devil by the way, and I don’t care if I’m saying that online, UnitedHealthcare turned down a surgery three minutes before it was supposed to begin. What kind of country are we living in when that can happen?
30:28 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah, I’m just thinking of the stories and it’s, you know, shouting that out is what needs to happen. When a friend of mine, her husband needed a lung transplant, he was going to die without this lung transplant. He’s a young man. This was over a decade ago, I believe. Denied. They denied him until she took to social media, until she shouted loud enough, until she made enough noise where they would actually give him the surgery that would save his life as a father of two young kids.
30:59 Deborah Copaken: So not unexpected.
31:01 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah, it leaves me stuttering with anger, actually. And it’s that kind of anger and rage that we actually have to talk about, you know, to see things changed.
31:16 Deborah Copaken: But it also brings me back to your original question, which is, we stay in bad relationships, because we’re worried about losing our health insurance. Then the trauma of being in that bad relationship, I believe, causes bad health, right? I do believe that living in stress every day in a bad relationship, when you have these cortisol spikes constantly, that’s not good for the body and it cannot be doing good things for your insides. And so you’re in this bizarre cycle of like, I can’t leave the relationship, I don’t wanna lose my health insurance and now I’m getting sick because I’m in this bad relationship.
And it felt at the time like there was no escape and it took, like with anybody who leaves a toxic relationship, it took a lot and it wasn’t easy. And I’m not gonna sugar coat it and say, oh, it was easy and great, and I’m glad I did it. I am glad I did it, but it’s taken me 10 years to be able to say I’m in a really great place right now with an empathic partner who cares, with a mostly healthy body, except for, you know, deaf from COVID, but you know.
32:35 Dr. Ginger Garner: Oh, my gosh, I’m so, so sad that that happens.
32:39 Deborah Copaken: But, um, well, I mean, here, here are the hearing aids. This is what they look like.
32:44 Dr. Ginger Garner: Oh, wow. They’re so incredibly small.
32:46 Deborah Copaken: And this is thanks to Elizabeth Warren, who mandated that hearing aids should be over the counter. And just to give you an idea of what was pre-Elizabeth Warren and post. So pre-Elizabeth Warren, when I first got diagnosed with deafness, the hearing aids were $10,000 uncovered by insurance. And they weren’t good. And they would have like this little thing behind the ear, which if you’re a woman with long hair and you do this, it’s like a shock every time you do that. Cause it’s the receivers behind your ear.
So I thought, well, I got to get something that goes in my ear. And I was finally able to go to like Costco and get them for a little bit less. But then after Elizabeth Warren signed this bill that said hearing aids could be, must be able to be sold over the counter. These were $2,400. Now that’s expensive, still. But it’s not 10 grand. You don’t need a prescription for it. And you don’t need to go get a very expensive hearing test. You can do it all through. So it’s, I’m actually like, I really believe in this company. It’s called Eargo, E-A-R-G-O. So anyone who has any sort of hearing issues, I would just go get a pair of teeny tiny hearing aids, because guess what? When you don’t take care of your hearing, you are at much higher risk of Alzheimer’s.
34:08 Dr. Ginger Garner: And the amount of, you know, the research, the statistics that you include in, in your book also, it just really helps to shine a spotlight to really elucidate how important it is to pay attention to the symptoms that you’re having and to make sure that you can find a provider that’s gonna listen to you. So I really appreciate that out of your book too. I didn’t get to mention that, but I wanted to mention that.
One thing I’d like to go back to for just a minute is you mentioned 10 years past in your marriage and you mentioned telling no one about, I’m going to use a quote here, “the dark corners of your marriage. The shame of speaking the words out loud, but also the shame, self-blame, and dissonance of believing myself to be a strong, capable woman who’s simultaneously too weak,” which we need to dispel that, right? “Too weak to leave a dysfunctional marriage or to even admit that it’s dysfunctional.”
So many women go through that. I mean, if the majority of women initiate divorce, over 70%, and even higher with college-educated women, we need to talk about that. Like that’s got to change. Right. And it happened to you.
35:25 Deborah Copaken: I think what happens in a marriage that is not working is that it’s like the frog metaphor, right? You’re like a frog in boiling water that you’re getting more and more used to. You know, when you get in the water, it’s fine. It’s, you know, you’re swimming around and then it just, the heat gets turned up and the heat gets turned up and suddenly you’re a frog in boiling water. Right. And there was, you know, I can tell you the moment that I knew my marriage was over, but it was pretty radical.
And it was, and this sounds so silly, but this is what I finally took, which was we’d been on a family vacation to Greece. We’d exchanged homes. There was a thing called homeexchange.com that doesn’t exist anymore. So we found this family to trade our home in Harlem for their home in Greece, which allowed us to have a family vacation in Greece. It was free for both of us. And the Greek guy was like a professor of Harlem Renaissance and all this stuff. So he’s excited to live in Harlem. We’re excited to spend some time in Greece.
Our flight went back through Paris and I have a bunch of friends in Paris from having lived there. So I decided I was going to like stay with my friend Marion for a few days, visit with her and have the kids with me. And my ex-husband flew home from there. And one day I was in the garden, the Jardin Luxembourg, the Luxembourg gardens, and my kids were on the merry-go-round and I called my then husband and I wanted to tell him, oh, the kids are on the merry-go-round. It’s so cute. Remember when Jacob was little and now Leo’s on there. And like, I just was calling to, you know, share.
And he didn’t answer. And then I called again and he didn’t answer. And I just kept calling and calling and calling. And he never answered. And I just thought I’m alone in a foreign country, sending text messages, calling, And he’s not responding all day. And when I finally did reach him, he says, well, what’s the big deal? And I said, well, what if it was a big deal? It’s not a big deal, but what if it was? I’m alone with three kids in France. And I remember I got a haircut that day and I just like, I had this need to like cut my hair and have a clean start. And I thought to myself, I’ve got to get out of this marriage. I just got, I have to get out of it. I know that doesn’t sound so severe, but it was kind of like the tip of the iceberg where if you just can’t get your partner to answer the phone on any given day, it just felt wrong.
38:07 Dr. Ginger Garner: It’s like the Cassandra syndrome. Like you’re trying to explain something that sounds so minimal, but it’s like death by a thousand cuts. And that’s what Cassandra syndrome is when you try to explain to someone, you know, that moment in time where something happens and you aren’t believed, you know.
38:29 Deborah Copaken: And so when you say like, we were talking about, you know, you don’t even know that your relationship is dysfunctional. I think on one level I did, and on another level I’m hopeful. And I kept thinking, well, he’ll grow up, he’ll mature, he’ll become a better version of himself. And I kept that hope for 20 years. And I think at a certain point, you have to accept the reality of what you’re living in and not hope for something better.
39:07 Dr. Ginger Garner: That’s a big that’s just deserves a moment for everyone to exhale and consider that because women are also socialized to accept a wide range of things, whether it’s a lack of empathy or a lack of intimacy or a lack of connection or just the fact that they’re not doing what they should be doing. They have eyes. They know someone’s feeding and clothing the kids and buying toothpaste and the stuff gets done. They can see that it’s getting done. But then there’s maybe no acknowledgement of that.
Like there’s especially me. I mean, I’m from the South. Right. That is very pervasive in the South, where women are just supposed to stand by your man, like the song goes, like no matter what happens. And that’s not okay. That’s not okay.
40:03 Deborah Copaken: But it’s also cultural too, in terms of just not even just Southern women versus Northern women. It’s just, I believed at the time, and I don’t see it now this way, that divorce was a failure. When in fact the failure was to not acknowledge the dysfunctional relationship and to not get out of a bad place.
Now, I will say that having made that move, it has helped me since then. So I was, after my marriage ended, I’d spent four years alone and then I was with a partner for four years. And I found out in the middle of that partnership that he was, an addict, cheating and lying about the cheating. That when I called him out on something that was really odd, he lied about it.
And for me, it was so easy at that point to say goodbye. What I learned from living in a toxic relationship for too long was you don’t stay in it. I tried to work it out with this new partner and I soon realized it would never work out. And there was just no, I mean, there was sadness that this new thing hadn’t worked out, but there was no looking back. You know, it was like, goodbye, close that chapter, move on.
And it also helped me when I was looking for a new partner or dating, you know, to know right away and realize, okay, this will work. This is not going to work. This is not going to work. And I’m happier, I would be, you know, I have found a wonderful man. A wonderful, empathic, incredible human being.
But had I not, I was already okay with being alone because being alone. was better than being in a toxic relationship. There was a diagram once, a cartoon, I don’t know if I saw it on Twitter or social media, but it was like a staircase. And at the bottom of the staircase was a fighting partner, like two partners fighting. And on the middle step of the staircase was a person standing alone. And on the top of the staircase was a couple in love.
You’re better off on that second step alone than at the bottom step fighting with the partner. Fighting is no good for anyone. And I’m not talking about like tiny arguments that have to happen for a relationship to move forward. I’m talking about daily spikes of cortisol with somebody who’s just not seeing you, not listening, not appreciating you, not loving you.
42:33 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah. Yes. Yes, because I see those cortisol curves. And labs and when people come in and they’re struggling with the combination of things that makes your story so incredibly unique, but also shared with so many other women. And that’s the overlap of having, you know, it’s just like in your book. You know, all the lady parts. Having all these issues happen with the lady parts that overlap with relational issues when you’re not being seen, felt, heard, for whatever those reasons are, that is like telling our story. So, so many women’s stories. And that’s what’s so powerful about it.
43:11 Deborah Copaken: What has been interesting to me is I thought of my story as very specific, right? But you don’t write a memoir if you don’t think that your specificity will lead to something more general and universal. And what I have found is that I receive, I would say at least five emails a week, if not more from strangers who find me on, you know, Instagram or through my website or wherever they happen to find me. And they’re either like a short paragraph of you’ve told my story. Thank you so much.
Or they’re much longer and devastating because they’re telling my story. They’re basically telling my story back to me, but they’re living it. And they ask for advice. And I always say to people that reach out to me, I try to answer every letter. I don’t get to all of them, but I try to answer every letter. And what I tell the people that are asking for advice is I said, you reached out to me. So in some way, you reached out to a stranger. You know the answer to your questions. You just wanted validation. And I’m going to say, I will validate whatever you are feeling, but it’s up to you to make these decisions on your own.
44:26 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah. Yeah. I think that by asking the question, um, you know, quite often, I think the encouragement is people kind of gutturally know that when something’s wrong, like if you feel like you’re not being listened to at your healthcare provider’s office, you’re right. But it helps you. It’s so important that you just said that, that just to tell someone that they’re heard can sometimes be all it takes to push them over into the decision-making category of, “oh, I’m gonna do this now because someone has lived this.”
45:03 Deborah Copaken: And talk to friends, honestly, too. I mean, we’re so afraid of, you know, dissing our husbands or partners or in front of others, but there comes a point where you actually do have to start speaking to others about this. And again, I remember a very specific example where, my ex-husband got mad at me and he said, I’m not coming to this dinner because I’m mad at you for whatever reason it was. Oh, I remember what it was, but it doesn’t matter. Um, just tell them I’m sick.
And I was like, I’m not lying for you anymore. And I got to the dinner and my friends were like, you know, where’s your husband? And I told them the truth. I’m saying he got mad at me for X, Y, or Z, which was crazy. And so he decided he was not going to come. And. That was incredibly liberating. And again, that was another moment where I was like, okay, I guess this is what I’m going to do from now on. I’m just going to tell the truth. Because when we lie for our partners, when we cover up for their bad behavior, we’re aiding and abetting. We’re keeping ourselves in that prison.
46:08 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah, yeah, we are saving our partner or whomever it is from natural consequences from occurring. You know, when you’re trying to, whether it’s get them to be more involved with their kids, if they’re not involved with their kids, it’s like, then you’re constantly bailing someone out of natural consequences that-
46:27 Deborah Copaken: Yeah, and we have to take responsibility for our own role in the tango. I mean, you know, it’s a cliche to say it takes two to tango, but it does. And I know that my passivity and my inability to speak truths out loud to others, I know so many reasons why I was at fault too. And mostly it had to do with just trying to keep the peace and trying to keep everything together and not rock the boat. And in some cases you have to rock that fucking boat. You have to rock that boat.
46:59 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah. Yeah, that is such a good way to finish that conversation because I think from a physical standpoint, I spend a lot of time helping women regain their voice. Because a lot of times when they have pelvic floor issues, they lose their voice, and vice versa. But on a spiritual, like psychological, emotional level, there’s that reclaiming your power, you know, of finding your voice. And we’re often taught, well, we always are taught as women and conditioned, “oh, don’t do that. Yeah, that’s too aggressive. That’s bitchy. That’s controlling. That’s whatever.” It’s like, it’s like, no, that’s, that’s just my voice and my feelings. That’s not controlling.
47:42 Deborah Copaken: And one of the great advantages of using your voice is you might find common ground with other women and help them.
47:49 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah, yeah, which is what it’s been. It’s been so incredibly, what a gift to have you, you know, talking today with me on the podcast as a result. I want to finish with one topic that I think that hits every woman, no matter if you’ve had any pelvic health issues or any other lady parts issues or relational issues, and that’s the topic of mental health.
Because I think that women are frequently gaslit into saying, well, if you just weren’t, whether they’re gaslighting themselves or someone else is gaslighting them. If you just were stronger, you wouldn’t have that problem. If you just had done ABC, you wouldn’t have postpartum depression. If you had just, maybe you should just get screening for postpartum depression, or maybe you should just get screening for this, when in fact it’s often a result of the conditions that we’re living under, particularly in the United States, that’s creating the mental health problem to begin with.
48:48 Deborah Copaken: Well, let’s start from the obvious barrier to mental health, which is money. Again, let’s go back to the example of the NHS or France. When you need mental health care in those other countries, you go get it. Maybe it’ll take a while to find a practitioner, but you get it and it’s part of your healthcare. Here, we consider it separate. Here, most insurances won’t cover it. And so, especially in a city like I live in, I’m in Brooklyn, mental health care these days is like minimum
$300 an hour. You know, who can afford that, right? Who can afford $300 every week? I did bankrupt myself doing it for a little while because I was going through such a tough time post separation that I just thought it’s my mental health or my life, right? I mean, there was one point where I thought of throwing myself out a window and I thought, oh, I gotta get help. I got three kids. I can’t throw myself out the window. Like I’ve got to figure out how to get better.
I will say that barring the existence of affordable mental health care, which we don’t have in this country, and which is why I think we’re having a mental health crisis in this country right now. One thing women can do, and I know this sounds so reductive, but yoga. Yoga really I feel like saved my life after, for example, when my dad died and I was so depressed and I didn’t want to be on antidepressants anymore. And my doctor very wisely said, wrote on a piece of paper on his prescription pad, the word yoga and handed it to me.
And I was like, Oh, I don’t want to do yoga. It’s dumb, I’m not that kind of person. And I bought this, it is so great because I bought a Rodney Yee DVD. This again, we’re talking like a different time. So I bought a Rodney Yee DVD because I was like, I’m not spending any money on this. And I played that DVD every day for 10 years. I saw Rodney Yee every morning for 10 years because I am a goody two shoes. And when my doctor prescribed something, I listen and I do it.
Last weekend, literally last weekend, I was out in Sag Harbor with my partner. And it turns out that’s where Rodney Yee practices. And I got to go to his yoga class. For me, it was like seeing the most exciting celebrity ever and I did I walked up to him afterwards I was like you don’t know this obviously but after my dad died in 2008 I started playing your DVD every day. So I saw you every day for 10 years and you saved my life. So barring inexpensive therapy, which we don’t yet have in this country, I would urge anyone that’s on a budget to get a, you know, you can get on Amazon, you can buy a Rodney Yee DVD, I think he’s great, and just do that every day.
51:53 Dr. Ginger Garner: That’s true. It’s, it’s how I started to major in specialization and yoga, um, was because I was treating people in chronic pain, mostly women with orthopedic and pelvic pain. And my regular training wasn’t working. It was the yoga that I had studied that allowed me to do it.
Ironically, I actually took trainings and had lots of conversations with Rodney about the future of yoga and yoga therapy and that kind of thing. That was 20 years ago. [Oh, wow. Yeah] When I started and when you mentioned doing the DVD, I was like, Oh, that’s about the time that I started that I met, you know, him for the first time. And, and, but anyway, I would wholeheartedly support that because it’s free, it’s low cost.
52:39 Deborah Copaken: And it teaches presence. I mean, that’s what yoga really does. It’s good for your body. So that’s already great, right? It’s good for strengthening. It’s good for women’s bodies. But it also just teaches you to be present and in the moment. And you know, the best time in yoga is, of course, Savasana at the end, where you’re just lying there, you know, like a dead person and contemplating your life. And it’s just, you know, again, meditation, yoga, these are tools we have in our arsenal that aren’t too expensive.
53:07 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah, yeah. And I’ll will include some link in the show notes. I have a lot of free things available for people who have therapeutic issues, whether it’s pelvic pain, vocal pain, diaphragm issues, long COVID, all kinds of stuff that are just they’re either free or very low cost available, but we’ll put the free stuff in there.
53:32 Deborah Copaken: And one more point, by the way, is that if you have a traumatic experience you’re trying to get over, I just did EMDR for the first time. I was in a car accident and I was having a hard time managing the image. It was kind of going through my head and going through my head. And I didn’t want to go back, you know, I didn’t want to spend $300 a week to like deal with this one issue. And I called a practitioner of EMDR. I told her my story and she goes, oh, I can fix you in three weeks. I was like, come on. She goes, I can fix you in three weeks. And she did. So EMDR is expensive. It’s like $700 a session. But if you do three of those and you’re done with your trauma, you know, whatever.
54:18 Dr. Ginger Garner: I’m a huge proponent for EMDR, you know, just like yoga. EMDR is, you know, most therapists will start out with CBT or DBT or some other cognitive behavioral or dialectical behavioral therapy and EMDR, and there are other similar neurological approaches to the same types of therapy. But I’m a huge proponent of EMDR because so many women experience trauma inside the system of healthcare, that you need EMDR to get over what you experienced inside the healthcare system, plus all your relational stuff. So it’s just incredible for that. I was gonna mention that, that’s one of the things, and this is a great kind of finisher point too, because I was just watching your other video on YouTube, and you’re talking to an EMDR practitioner.
[Yeah, that was my doctor.]Yeah, that’s an incredible approach. So if you don’t know about it, that’s another wonderful resource for you to check out. Okay. We could keep talking. We could absolutely do a part two because there’s so much more in your book that I wanted to mention, and maybe we’ll get to do that at some point. But I just want to emphasize, you know, to the listener that what I pulled out of Lady Parts, after reading it twice. I picked it up again and read it again, knowing your interview was coming up. Is that we need to believe women in healthcare. When they come in and they say, I’m emptying my diva cup, or I have this pain, it is real and we need to figure it out, not absolutely dismiss it. Particularly you know to be believed in the ER but also in or the ED and then you know in your practitioner’s office.
And the other thing is, you know, when you’re struggling with relational issues and mental health issues. To stop the shame and the self blame that a lot of the conditions that we’re suffering under are because of a lack of just policy that we don’t have. It’s a lack of valuing healthcare access for all. And that’s not your fault, right, that is not your fault. That’s why this podcast exists. It’s why you’re writing books and articles. Thank God for that.
It’s why these things exist, but we all have to keep speaking up and keep speaking loudly about it. But believing women and then stopping the self-blame and self-shame because we’re suffering from a lack of common sense policy. Yeah. So those are my big takeaways. Thank you so much, Deb. Do you have any final words of wisdom for us?
56:57 Deborah Copaken: Believe your own body. Yes. Not just believe women, but tune into your own body. You know what’s wrong. You know, it used to take me days to, to realize I had a UTI. Now I can do it in like, you know, I know. And so I get to the doctor, you know, when there’s just a few leukocytes in there and it’s not, not full blown yet. But it saved me a lot of pain.
57:24 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah. Yes. And missed, you know, work and, um, and all kinds of things. Yeah, that’s absolutely true. All right, one rapid fire question. [Sure.] Because you write so amazingly, so beautifully. And so with such depth. So what books, what book are you currently reading? I know, I’m guilty of trying to read like several books at one time. So what are you reading?
57:50 Deborah Copaken: I’m reading Uncultured by oh my god, I’m now drawing a blank. She has a long last name. It’s about a young woman who grew up in a cult. And how did I find my way to that book? I think it was just like on one of those Amazon, like you might like this. And so I’m reading that book. I’m listening to Naomi Klein. She has a book called Doppelganger and it’s about how she keeps getting mistaken for Naomi Wolf, but it’s fascinating.
And she kind of goes into the history of doppelgangers and what it’s like for her to have been mistaken for this woman. And then she comes to this sort of realization of how similar they are. And it is so, so good. And I would urge people to listen to it rather than read it because she reads it herself and it’s great to hear it from her voice. I’m also listening to The Power Broker with my partner because I never read it. It’s about Robert Moses and it’s so long so it’s just like on our endless car rides we will listen to that. And I started another book. I can’t. I’m often reading like four books at once, but I can’t remember the 4th one.
59:07 Dr. Ginger Garner: That’s why I said books, plural, because, um, I feel like those of us from this similar wavelength of experience in life, or that’s what I do. I have about four or five, you know, at the same time. And I just, just pick.
59:18 Deborah Copaken: Oh, I know it’s another book I was reading. So the other book I was reading or have been reading is my partner has a wife with early onset Alzheimer’s. And so he has written a memoir of caring for her. [Oh, wow.] He just finished it and it’s not out obviously. It’s really, really beautiful. He’s written one book before. He’s a lawyer but this is his second book. His first book came out in 1999. So hopefully this book will come out next year, the year after, or something like that.
59:48 Dr. Ginger Garner: Awesome. That’s fantastic. What an incredible experience. So I’m sure that there’s so much wonderful research on actually lengthening telomeres of caregivers who are providing care for those with neurodegenerative diseases.
1:00:04 Deborah Copaken: I actually wrote an op-ed for the Daily Beast that’s coming out, I think, next week about how we have literally nothing in place in terms of caretaking in the United States for people And 80% of those who have Alzheimer’s are cared for by a family member gratis, right? Nobody’s getting paid for this. And 70% of those people are women.
So we’re putting the onus of this tremendous caretaking job on the adult daughters of those with Alzheimer’s, and that has to end too. Because if we’re, again, living in another country, be it the Netherlands or Sweden or, you know, really any other place besides here, France, there are dementia villages, there’s affordable or free memory care.
In the United States, what I was really surprised to learn is you if you want to have free memory care for your spouse and you’re above middle class, you have to divorce your partner so that they can go on Medicaid. I mean, what other industrialized nation in the world does that? You divorce the person you promise to love and honor till death do you part just so that they can get the care they need.
1:01:25 Dr. Ginger Garner: Dignified care. Yeah. It’s a crime. It is definitely a crime. From early childhood, from early life to end of life that burden inordinately falls, you know, on to women. Sometimes men. It is also like, it’s that burden of care is physically abusive to the person who cannot actually handle that and do that. And that’s where the DNA, the research on telomeres and DNA comes out of.
So goodness gracious, it’s another reason because the research really strongly supports even short bouts of mindfulness for that, for preserving your DNA and preventing the very disease that you’re actually caretaking the person for. So just another little plug for picking up mindfulness if you’re listening, but thank you so much.
1:02:15 Deborah Copaken: Thank you so much too. It’s really great to finally meet you.
1:02:18 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah, same here. You are doing incredible work. You are a force and I just really appreciate you for what you’re doing. Thank you.
1:02:26 Deborah Copaken: You too. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
https://youtu.be/u8QFPB7MqAk Follow us for Free: About the Episode: What if your pain isn’t “normal” — it’s been misunderstood? In this episode, Dr. Ginger sits down with Dr. Madhu Bagaria, a...
https://youtu.be/04zjmpV1td4 Follow us for Free: About the Episode: Men’s sexual health is often misunderstood and reduced to quick fixes. In this episode of The Vocal Pelvic Floor, Dr. Ginger...
https://youtu.be/p3A1foLw6wI Follow us for Free: About the Episode: What if your desire isn’t broken — it’s just been misunderstood? In this episode, Dr. Ginger Garner sits down with Dr....