I’m having trouble sleeping tonight, so I’ve been watching Mystery Diagnosis. It’s a show all about various horrifying rare diseases and conditions, and the trouble that real life people had with them before some doctor finally figured out what they had.
One of the stories tonight was about a baby girl with an extremely rare blood disease that made clotting extremely difficult. (Much worse than the royal families one.) There are therapies but no cure for it. This particular disease is so bad that the girl (11 at the time of filming) knows that she can never safely go through pregnancy. In fact, she can’t afford to menstruate even once, and will be taking huge amounts of hormones every day of her life to prevent this. She commented on her sadness about this, and her hope to become an adoptive mother someday.
And then, in the next hour, there was a commercial for that no-menstruation birth control pill, with the actresses on the ad exulting that they will never have to have a period ever again, and being all happy clappy about it. Honestly, I’d be surprised if nobody in that household has killed a TV over it. It must be hard to need a much stronger product so badly for reasons of pure survival, and then be forced to see a playlet about how happy you should be — happy to get rid of something that you yourself would love to have a chance to have!
We live in a very strange, sad world.
Aliens in This World 