(www.sass-pants.com) — The results are in, and we have our 5 winners of the American Heart Month giveaway of the limited-edition crystal Diet Coke Red Dress Pin, designed by Heidi Klum. We had 9 eligible entries! Here’s the random sequence from Random.org.

As you can see, our winners are as follows:

Congratulations, ladies! Thanks for playing, and best of luck with your heart-healthy changes.

Contents Copyright © 2009 Kristen King

(www.sass-pants.com) — As American Heart Month comes to a close, Diet Coke offered me the chance to run a great giveaway targeted toward raising awareness of heart disease, the No. 1 killer of women in America. The prize? A limited-edition crystal Diet Coke Red Dress Pin, designed by Heidi Klum, for five (5) lucky readers. Scroll to the end of the post for details on how to win. Read the middle for more on heart disease and The Heart Truth.

About the Campaign

The Heart Truth is a national awareness campaign created by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), that warns women about their No. 1 health risk, heart disease, and the need to take action against its risk factors. As the national symbol for women and heart disease, the Red Dress aims to inspire women to take action to protect their heart health. For more information, visit www.hearttruth.gov.

About Heart Disease

According to the NHLBI, important risk factors for heart disease that you can change are:  

• High blood pressure
• High blood cholesterol
• Diabetes
• Smoking
• Being overweight
• Being physically inactive

Although they’re not things you can do anything about, age and family history are also major risk factors for heart disease. The NHLBI says that while certain risk factors cannot be changed, it is important to realize that you do have control over many others. Regardless of your age, background, or health status, you CAN lower your risk of heart disease — and it doesn’t have to be complicated. Protecting your heart can be as simple as taking a brisk walk, whipping up a good vegetable soup, or getting the support you need to maintain a healthy weight.

For tips on how to create a heart-healthy lifestyle, visit the American Heart Association.

About the Giveaway

Five lucky winners will be chosen at random from the comments on this post to receive a limited-edition crystal Diet Coke Red Dress Pin (pictured at right), designed by Heidi Klum. (Heidi wore the pin on the red carpet at the Academy Awards this week!) The hourglass shape is intended to remind women that it’s time to get educated about heart disease.

To enter, just leave a comment on this post sharing one heart-healthy lifestyle change you’re going to make.

Deadline: Friday, March 6, 2009, and 11:59:59 p.m. EST.

Simple, right? Go to it.

The Fine Print

1. Comments like, “Give it to me!” or “I want to win!” ARE NOT ELIGIBLE. You have to answer the question.
2. One entry per person, and yes, I do check IP addresses to remove duplicates.
3. You must be a US resident to enter. No shipping outside the United States, not even to Canada. Sorry!
4. Comments must be received by Friday, March 6, 2009, at 11:59:59 p.m. EST
5. I will use the random sequence generator at Random.org to choose the lucky winner (who will be the first eligible entry in the sequence). The announcement of the winner will be FINAL. No arguing.

Good luck!

Contents Copyright © 2009 Kristen King
The Heart Truth and Red Dress are trademarks of DHHS.

(www.sass-pants.com) — There’s a crappy period, and then there’s menorrhagia.

Women with menorrhagia experience extremely heavy blood loss with each period. We’re talking more than double that of an average period (30-40 mL is standard), a flow that will soak through a regular pad or tampon in an hour. Women with menorrhagia often suffer from severe cramping and constant abdominal pain during every period, and it can interfere with their ability to lead a normal life.

Robin McIvor is a woman who overcame menorrhagia through endometrial ablation, and she was kind enough to talk to me about her life and her experience.

Sass Pants: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

Robin McIvor: I’m a 38 year old Vancouver, Wash., resident where I live with my husband and daughter. My background was always medical. I have been a caregiver from the time I was in high school, I was a CNA and then I joined the Army. In the Army I was an optician and an optometric technician for a period of time, and then the military sent me to nursing school. I have been a nurse since 1993 when I graduated, and I have worked in the VA as a floor nurse, as a med-surg nurse, and then in 1996 I got hired in the emergency department in Vancouver, Wash., at the Southwest Washington Medical Center, where I currently work as a nurse. I currently work full time as a fireman and part time as a nurse.

Sass Pants: Why did you decide to join the Army? Have other members of your family been in the military?

RM: My dad and my brothers were in the military and my dad retired from the military when he was in his early 40s, when I was 4. After that, he worked as a contractor and an architect, so I had family history. My uncles, my cousins, everyone went into the military, and an added benefit was the military was willing to pay for my nursing school. I was willing do all the push-ups and sit-ups in the world, as long as I don’t have to pay back student loans.

I had a great career when I got out and then I got called back to duty that is how I ended up in Iraq in 2005. I was actually in inactive status for the military and they went through their roll calls and picked a bunch of nurses, veterinarians and water purification people to go to Iraq to do all the humanitarian aid. I took care of all of the medical stuff, I went about the countryside and took care of the local populace and figured out where their local clinics should be or where they needed to be, or renovating them and that sort of thing. My job in the war was quite rewarding. It was scary, but it was very rewarding, because the people are fabulous.

Sass Pants: You introduced Spirit of America to an Iraqi hospital. Could you tell us about this program and your work with The Najaf Teaching Hospital?

RM: The Sprit of America was a nongovernmental agency. It is a non-profit, and they raised money to purchase a cardiac monitoring system for the hospital. Their hospital was very rudimentary, electricity was sporadic and they had troubles diagnosing people.

That was my main huge project… The Najaf Teaching Hospital is in southern Iraq and it is their holiest city. The Najaf Teaching Hospital was a hospital that was taken over by the militia where they killed a bunch of the doctors and patients. It was basically bullet-ridden and flooded, and when coalition forces came in that was one of the big projects because there were no hospitals near by. American forces, a bunch of nongovernmental agencies, and a core of engineers went in to renovate the whole hospital, but they still didn’t have equipment.

I did a lot of the work with civil affairs, soliciting donations, because there is a lot of people that want to help but it is getting those people linked up with the right kind of people.

Sass Pants: You suffer from a condition known as menorrhagia. Can you tell us about this?

RM: I was always very regular, but after I had my daughter my periods were awful, and as I got older they got worse. After the birth of my daughter I tried birth control, but that never really helped my periods. After I underwent surgery, my periods got even worse. My periods continued to get worse and worse, all the way into my 30’s.

One month my period would be just heavy and cramping and terrible, and then the next month it would just be moody and awful. The final straw, the reason I went to my doctor, was we had a fire and I’m in my $600 turnouts (fire outfit) and I was ultimately always afraid of having an accident in them. When you take your pants off they are inside out, so everyone can see. One time I ran back to the station because fortunately the fire was behind the fire station so I could change. Most of the firefighters are men, so they aren’t going to understand having to run back to the station to change.

Sass Pants: Two years ago, you underwent a medical procedure called NovaSure. Tell me about this endometrial ablation procedure, why you had it done, and how it’s affected your life.

RM: NovaSure is great! I was so scared I’d have an accident at work or not be able to perform my duties that I finally went to talk to my OB/GYN about my heavy periods. I told him one of my girlfriends is a nurse in North Carolina and said that she underwent endometrial ablation and it made her periods better. So I talked to my doctor and he said we have a new procedure called NovaSure, let’s do this.

My doctor told me they used to do it as an outpatient surgery; I had it done in the office, which was nothing. All I felt was like 8 seconds of a cramp.

I took one day off and went to work the next day after the procedure. It’s like, if you get it done on Friday you can go back to work on Monday. I didn’t want to go back to work the day afterwards just because he said you know you might have some spotting for a while. It was nothing alarming and I was shocked that I was fine the next day. Having it done right in my doctor’s office was just such a breeze.

Sass Pants: Are you glad you did the surgery?

RM: I wish I had the NovaSure procedure before I went to Iraq. I don’t know what is worse: having an accident in your $600 turnouts pants at work, having to pee or change a tampon behind a humvee in the middle of public, or peeing in a hole. What do you do with your tampon when there is no flushing or anything, just wrap it up and take it with you? For backup you should always wear a pad with that tampon, which is what I did. When I worked at the fire department it was even worse, because you have wake up in the middle of the night and be ready to report to a fire. There were often times where I had accidents on the job when I had my period.

[I wish doctors would] tell their patients about the procedure, offer it to them, broach the subject. I had a girlfriend tell me and that is the only reason I knew, and she was an OR nurse so obviously if she had not seen it done neither of us would have known about it.

Sass Pants: What does the future hold for you?

RM: Until I retire, I won’t change a thing. My goal is, after I retire from the fire department… [maintain] my nursing skills. I mean realistically, even though we are first responders and the fire department and we run all the medical calls, we don’t transport you [and we are] only are working with the patient for 15 minutes and it is hard to continually maintain knowledge of medications, IV starts, stuff like that. …I get that at least working twice a month, and then when I will retire I will still have my nursing license and I will then be able to go into a clinic 20 hours a week. It’s wonderful to go to work when you don’t have to do it. You do it just because you like it, not because I need a paycheck. I enjoy it. I enjoy being a public servant.

Read more about menorrhagia:

• Menorrhagia, from the Mayo Clinic
• Menorrhagia, from Wikipedia
• Menorrhagia, from eMedicine Obstetrics and Gynecology
• Menorrhagia, from Women’s Health at About.com

Read more about NovaSure and endometrial ablation:

• NovaSure by Hologic
• NovaSure, from HeavyBleeding.com
• New rules apply after NovaSure, from BNET
  
• Endometrial ablation, from Women’s Health at WebMD
• Endometrial ablation educational pamphlet, from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG)
• Endometrial ablation, from HeavyBleeding.com

Contents Copyright © 2009 Kristen King

(photo courtesy of Robin McIvor)

(www.sass-pants.com) — Did you know that heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women age 20 and older? Or that it kills more women than the next 7 leading causes of death combined? Heart health is crucial to long life, but in today’s busy world, it’s easy to let simple health practices fall by the wayside.

Rite Aid is partnering with the American Heart Association and its “Go Red for Women” campaign by helping customers get heart smart with a free 12-page guide on heart health, available in all its pharmacies nationwide, and interactively online now through March 28. The stakes couldn’t be higher – an estimated 70,000 American women will succumb to heart disease in the next two months alone, according to the American Heart Association.

The first step to preventing heart disease is education, and trained Rite Aid pharmacists are a convenient and trusted source for personalized heart health tips. Rite Aid customers also can pick up the heart health guide, which was developed in conjunction with the experts at the American Heart Association and explains:

• How to identify your risks for heart disease
• The numbers behind heart disease: Body Mass Index (BMI), cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar
• How to quickly identify symptoms of a stroke, which is similar to a heart attack except that the blood flow to the brain is interrupted
• Tips on how to realize a healthy lifestyle of exercise and proper diet

Online content available now through http://www.riteaid.com/health/heart includes:

• The “Go Red for Women” heart checkup
• The American Heart Association’s heart profiler
• Information on the connection between gum disease and heart health
• Information on quitting smoking including an interactive timeline of health after smoking, a “smokulator” to tally smoke-free savings, and a customizable quitting plan including topics to discuss with your doctor or Rite Aid pharmacist
• The Give Me 5 stroke warning signs

To further bolster the fight against heart disease, Rite Aid again is raising money for American Heart Association’s “Go Red for Women” campaign, which aims to debunk the myth that heart disease is a “man’s disease” and to reduce the risk of coronary heart disease and stroke in women by 25 percent by 2010.

Rite Aid associates nationwide will sell red dress pin-ups throughout February for donations of $1 or more. In return, customers will receive coupons for heart healthy products and other items. Customers who buy $30 worth of select heart-related products will receive a “Heart and Soul” T-shirt through Rite Aid’s Single Check Rebate program. Special heart-healthy displays also are in stores featuring products such as aspirin and fish oil that may boost heart health.

Whether you participate in the Go Red for Women campaign or not, take a few moments to review the heart health guide and make sure you’re doing everything you can to stay healthy.

Contents Copyright © 2009 Kristen King

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(www.sass-pants.com) — It’s solidly the middle of the night here in Virginia and I am wide awake. Well, scratch that. When I’m vertical, I feel like I’m about to fall over from exhaustion. The moment I lie down, I feel like I could run a marathon.

Ever since my car accident, I’ve been having trouble sleeping. I just can’t get comfortable, or I wake up every hour or so for no apparent reason. I haven’t felt rested in a solid month. And tonight, I can’t stop thinking about poor Julius.

The normal things aren’t helping tonight: counting backwards from 100 in Spanish; trying to say the alphabet backwards; counting as high as I can without losing my place; trying to remember the lyrics to Disney songs in the order in which they appear in their respective movies; visualizing myself falling asleep from my toes to the top of my head; watching boring television. Nothing works.

What do you do when you can’t sleep?

Contents Copyright © Kristen King

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(www.sass-pants.com) — I love those commercials from the Corn Refiners Association that suggest that health-conscious parents and other adults are morons for wanting to avoid high-fructose corn syrup. But I love even more what The Consumerist had to say about it: “All we managed to glean from the commercials is that not consuming high fructose corn syrup makes you rude.”

I’m no scientist and I’m certainly not a registered dietitian, but even I can see a correlation between the increasing presence of high-fructose corn syrup in the American diet and the prevalence of obesity in the US population. It doesn’t take an idiot to draw a correlation there. Yeah, sweet stuff is fine in moderation, but we had sweet stuff in moderation before, too, and it was never this bad. So that’s alarming.

And this week, MSNBC, The Washington Post, US News & World Report, and others reported on studies that revealed the presence of mercury in foods containing high-fructose corn syrup. The Corn Refiners Association was quick to deny the claims, suggesting that the study was based on “outdated information of dubious significance,” but I’d expect them to say that immediately while doing their own research to confirm or deny. Not saying they’re liars or anything, but saying it makes sense for them to say it’s not true.

But here’s what alarms me about all of this.

In tandem with increasing use of high-fructose corn syrup, we have increasingly prevalent obesity and diabetes. But we also have increasing incidence of autism, which many believe is related to routine childhood vaccines, many of which have long contained mercury. So not only are we injecting mercury, but we may also be consuming it in a huge proportion of foods we, particularly children, eat on a daily basis. That would certainly would explain the astronomical jump in autism in the US recent years, wouldn’t you say?

Why aren’t more people making this connection? And what are we going to do about it?

Contents Copyright © 2009 Kristen King

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