Salt in the Wounds

It's been said that the do-it-yourself operations were safer than having a doctor do it because doctors carried germs from other patients. No one knows who did the first professional C-section in America. Dr John Lambert Richmond, a janitor and Baptist minister who attended enough medical lectures to earn an MD degree, did one on April 22, 1827, using common pocket instruments. The woman developed an oozing infection, but she and her baby survived. Doug agreed not to date any of the divorced parents at their kids' school as long as Jamie agreed to do the same. Jamie's Aha: Though she felt like Doug was looking for new ways to torment her by dating other mothers, she gathered her courage to speak up and ask him for a behavior change. Here's a quick recap of the lessons we learned about dealing with our exes' WBRs and new social life. Sometimes these are easier said than done, that's for sure, but we found it helped to be reminded of them. Do your best to shift the focus off him and onto you and your new life. Let go of all efforts to keep tabs on your ex's social life. Speak directly to your ex about the guidelines you will both agree to about introducing new romantic partners to the kids. Refrain from comparing yourself to the WBR. Understand what time of day you tend to feel the most vulnerable and have activities or phone calls with friends planned. Remember, happiness isn't finite--there's plenty to go around; Notice the emotion and how it's affecting your physiology. Recognise the feeling and whether you've felt it before. Is it familiar? Where do you feel it? Is it a feeling of tension? How is it manifesting itself physically in and on your body?

It is what it is Don't deny what you feel. Through this, you'll soon feel that you are not your emotions. You're much larger than them. The security guard knelt down to the boy's level and opened his arms, showing the four-year-old what was required. The lad, assuming the best, opened his arms and went in for the full hug. And that was where the newspaper story ended. Whether security went on to discover a flick knife tucked into the lad's belt, or a kilo of hash in his socks, who knows? I'd say it's unlikely because Kai is how we all start out, primed for love, not hate. Next stop, oh my goodness, Eckhart Tolle. Hold tight for this one. Tolle's argument is that the universe is consciousness trying to escape into the daylight. Hence, from the first spark of universal energy, consciousness has been looking for a way to be aware of itself. Consciousness's bid for freedom has taken billions of years to get to the point of being at the cusp of something approaching success. Dr Richmond is honored in Cincinnati, Ohio, with a commemorative statue that states: In Memory of John Lambert Richmond, MD, who performed the first Caesarean Section in America. But maybe not. According to another tale, Dr Jesse Bennett delivered his own child by C-section on January 14, 1794. Supposedly, he laid his laboring wife on planks balanced across two barrels and dosed her with a large dose of laudanum (an opium derivative), took out the baby, and took out his wife's ovaries, too, so she would not get pregnant again. Some people doubt the Bennett story. They think that his wife had the C-section but it was done by Alexander Humphreys, a respected obstetrician.

By the early years of the 1900s, a quartet of events converged to transform cesarean sections from a deadly encounter to a viable and increasingly popular option. The discovery of germs encouraged doctors to wash their hands and prevent potentially life-threatening infections. The rise of hospital births gave doctors more leverage. Lastly, the need for intervention skyrocketed. In those early days of our divorce when he was falling in love with Emily and I was still alone, I wish I'd known that his happiness takes nothing away from my own. There's no way around it--getting divorced feels incredibly sad and stirs up emotions that are unique to you. But there's also an upside. When you let go of how you thought your life would turn out, you make room for the universe to bring you something new and amazing. Discover ways to find peace of mind. Jump-start your self-care routine by following our TLC action plan. When you shift the focus away from him and back to you, the real healing begins. I am not what has happened to me. I am what I choose to become. Carlotta was struggling to accept that her husband had left her. You need to realize and repeat to yourself that all emotions are impermanent and fleeting. They arise in response to a stimulus, linger, and then disappear. Your task here is to first acknowledge and then observe the emotion as it overtakes a part of your body, changes shape, and eventually dissipates. Instead of taking the negative emotion `personally' and allowing it to deeply affect you, through mindfulness you're given an opportunity to view these emotions from a detached perspective, simply as psychological events, `data points' that pass through - Why did it cause such discomfort? Trust yourself to choose the appropriate action - seek the lesson, the learning and the growth you can take from the experience.

What did it teach you about yourself? What did you learn? Did you simply react to the emotion, or did you take time to respond? What was your explanatory style? Hence, consciousness is rising. Consciousness is becoming conscious. You can loosen the grip of the sides of your chair. You're not supposed to understand it. Tolle's a guru. He's capable of having thoughts that nobody else has. He might be right. If I could understand his writing, I'd be able to have an opinion. But I can't, so I haven't. I'll tell it exactly how a guru doesn't. Rampant malnutrition striking the recent influx of immigrants produced bone deformities and caused many women to have misshapen pelvises that blocked the baby's exit. In Lying-In, Richard and Dorothy Wertz credit German physician Max Sanger for boosting survival rates and popularizing the operation. In 1882, he used aseptic technique and silk thread and claimed that 80 percent of his patients survived. It was an astonishing triumph compared with previous survival rates that were somewhere between 30 and 50 percent. In 1828, for instance, Mrs. Payne, an African-American Virginian, had her C-section in front of several doctors and leading citizens who watched her and her baby die shortly thereafter.

In 1908, Franklin S. Newell, a Harvard physician, put forth the prescient notion of C-sections for social reasons, maintaining that elite turn-of-the-century ladies should have C-sections because they were too fragile to push. He published his comments in an article called The Effect of Overcivilization on Maternity. He said packed social calendars left women no time for fresh air and exercise, which weakened their strength to push. She talked to her girlfriends and in therapy about how she felt stuck in the role of the wronged woman, unable to break free. The betrayal and profound hurt she experienced when she found out about her husband's affair gutted her, and she was having trouble recovering. I thought we had an understanding, that we were connected in a way that would never allow either of us to do something so cruel to the other, Carlotta says. Despite her best efforts, she was spending a lot of time thinking about her ex and the new woman in his life, imagining how happy they were while she was alone and depressed. She wanted to be released from this obsessive thinking but was unable to stop. She felt like she was running on a hamster wheel, around and around, perpetuating her upset. Like Carlotta, we all face an important choice after our divorces: accept what has happened and begin our healing journey or rail against it, depleting our energy and feeling miserable. If you're dwelling, replaying, or obsessing over things that went wrong in your marriage, then you're punishing yourself and likely suffering. How did we start to heal? The most powerful tool we found to help lessen our distress and anguish about our divorces was acceptance. Did you find yourself reverting to any lingering self-limiting beliefs? With this new awareness, what will you strive to do differently? It's important here that you redefine the experience as a life lesson and be grateful for what it's taught you. Gratitude in itself will give you strength and remind you that you're in control. You choose how you perceive and explain the world around you and the degree to which you recognise this will influence your future. My personal experience with my perceived `failure' of not being accepted into the program taught me so much about myself.