Behind the Scenes Minis: Poetry and Birth Control

Tracy and Holly discuss their memories of nursery rhymes, and their experiences with women's health care.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class A production
of I Heart Radio, Happy Friday, Everybody. I'm Tracy Vie Wilson,
and I'm Holly Fry. So this week we did a
six impossible episodes about mother goose um and I had

(00:23):
a weird research journey. So I picked this topic for
this particular week because I was gonna get my first
dose of COVID vaccine um and that was just logistically
going to take effectively a half a day to get done.
And then also I was like, what if I don't
feel well, I should do something that I would still

(00:45):
be able to finish in the time that that we have. Uh,
and six impossible episodes, even though they deal with six
individual things a lot of times, are a little more
restrained in scope to a full on episode where we're
trying to get a really broad familiarity. Was something before
getting into it. So it seemed like a reasonable conclusion

(01:06):
that even if I had some kind of you know,
immune response after the vaccine that made me feel bad,
that I would still be able to get my work done.
I did not. I had a sinus headache the next day.
That was because it was full of pollen. Otherwise I
was totally fine, and I spent way more time on
that first section on who Mother Goose was than I

(01:29):
was anticipating. It was really almost the entirety of a day.
I got to the end of the day, I was like,
I've got to move on. I think I have answered
this as much as I can. And the next day
I got up in my brain was like, you haven't though.
You got to go back to this whole Mother Goose thing,
and I was like, come on now, I gotta I
gotta get the rest of the episode done at some

(01:51):
part Mother Goose forever. Yeah. And then another weird thing
happened with all this. I live outside of Boston in
um and the place that I was getting my vaccine
was that this incredibly efficient and well run, high capacity
vaccine site in Wooster, Massachusetts. And as we were driving

(02:14):
to it, my spouse and I in the car, we
were stopped at the stoplight and could see the building
across the way and it was the American Antiquarian Society,
and I was like, man, if we were not in
a pandemic, I would say, let's stop in at that place,
which we did not do. And then it was the
next day that I started doing all of this research

(02:36):
and came across the whole thing with the American Antiquarian
Society having to debunk the wrong stuff, and I was like, man,
what a weird coincidence that I literally saw this place
yesterday on the way to get a COVID vaccination. You
may have told me, and it's not related to history.
Did you and your beloved get to do your vaccinations
in the same place? Yes, we do not. We got

(02:59):
to dry of all over Georgia, which is happy to
do it, but good fortune. Yeah. So the where we
went to get our vaccines um was this high capacity
site at Worcester State University that is set up to
vaccinate hundreds of people a day, and it's probably twenty
minutes farther from our house than most of the other

(03:23):
mass vaccine sites that we could have gone to. But
the fact that we were able to both get an
appointment at the same time there was the deciding factor
of like, that's where we're going, so that because you know,
we don't there aren't really any places to get a
COVID vaccine and driving distance or in walking distance of
our house at all, so we were going to need

(03:45):
the car to do it, and getting both of us
to the same place at the same time in one
car was way more feasible than trying to juggle availability
at like two different places on different days. So yeah, yeah,
shout out to that whole crew everybody that's running that,
because it was Our appointments were at eleven twenty in

(04:06):
the morning and at eleven thirty eight we were done,
including our fifteen minute observation. That's nice. We brought Starbucks
gift cards to the people that did our vaccinations, just
because they're on the front lines doing a lot of
work and honestly, like we witnessed it as we hung
out ours. We're in a pharmacy, but just them getting

(04:27):
kind of browbeaten over stuff that was not their decision,
like in terms of like when people were allowed to
book their their stuff based on their conditions list, et cetera.
And I was just like, the least thing I can
do is buy these poor people a coffee. Yeah. I
actually was not going to be eligible until April nineteen,
but then Massachusetts added a whole bunch of criteria to

(04:50):
who was eligible, and it meant that we were both
eligible at the same time, which was not going to
be the case before Andy, Um, so yeah, yeah it
worked out. The Other thing about this episode is that
it made me feel tremendously old. And here is why.
When we were talking about ring around the Rosy, I
was like, remember what it was like when you thought

(05:11):
it was fun to fall down? Yeah? I had that
thought a lot um And I also it reminded me
somehow of the time that I tried to get on
a swing set as a thirtysomething so even ten years
or so ago, and immediately feeling horribly queasy. And when

(05:35):
I was a child, I love to be on the swings.
I would swing all day. I wanted to swing higher,
and I was like, how uh, man aging not not
the favorite thing, but yeah, I had the same exact
thought about Yeah, remember when I could just fall on
the ground and not worry about just giggle and it
was great fun. Yeah. So, even though I had a

(06:02):
colossally long convoluted rabbit hole that took way way longer
than I was expecting, this was still generally a really
fun episode to work on, and I was kind of
relieved that when I was doing a very final like,
is there any other piece of this that I have

(06:23):
somehow missed. I found the entry for a printing of
UM of that that not supposedly eighteen thirty three Mother
Goose collection in the collection like on the website of
the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, And that was the
only place that I found that actually spelled out this

(06:43):
has a copyright date of eighteen thirty three. We have
it referenced as being printed in eighteen sixty, because this
thing was printed in eighteen sixty, And I was like, Okay,
I feel like if if the curators at the m
f A have come to this conclusion, I feel okay

(07:04):
about also having this conclusion about this particular thing. Yeah,
it was a whole the whole process this This research
involved UM going page by page through scans of the
Boston Evening Transcript because I did not know when this
thing had come out, but since I had seen somewhere

(07:26):
that it had apparently revived in eighteen sixty, I was
like going through eighteen sixty editions of the paper trying
to figure it out. UM. And also, it is not
unusual for for my spouse to to help me out
with UM, either getting access to books or with a
research question or whatever, because he is a librarian this

(07:48):
is the first time that it's been like us sitting
together at the computer trying to find the answer to something.
Because my emailed disc option of the answer I was
looking for was like he was like, this is just
come over here because I'm not sure what this is about. Uh.
So shout out to him also for assistance trying to

(08:15):
find research answers. This week, we talked about the Nelson
Pill hearings into the safety of oral contraceptives that took
place in nineteen seventy, which means, just heads up, we're
about talk about contraception a little bit more. Uh if
that effects who all here listening with or whether you
are listening, I totally understand people's frustrations, uh with the

(08:39):
idea that an incredibly rare blood clotting disorder that had
happened in six out of six million in vaccinations approximately
had led to a pause. Um, while there's a much
larger risk of a different, a very different type of
clode from oral country sceptives like I totally get that

(09:01):
frustration because, as I said in the episode, like what
actually happened to somebody in my extended family before I
was born had a stroke that was connected to her
birth control pills when that was like such a larger
dose of hormones that was in them at the time.
But the other thing is I have a zero percent
success rate and staying on oral contraceptives. Literally every time

(09:22):
I have ever been on them, I have ultimately stopped
because the side effects were too much. Uh, and like
that can be a whole, very frustrating process. Yeah, for sure,
mine was on and I didn't love side various side effects,
so I switched several times. And then I just had
this moment in my late twenties where I was already

(09:43):
married my beloved and I knew we never wanted kids,
and I was like, why am I doing this? Yeah,
and I so I just was like, surgically sterilized, which
is the best decision for me ever, simplified my life,
Like I can't even scribe. Yeah, my um my mom
has had to be on estrogen blockers to treat a

(10:06):
breast cancer. And so I, uh, I was not on
any kind of contraception for a long time because I
did not have any need for it. Um. And then
I met Patrick, who I am married to now, and
I was like, well, I guess I'm gonna have to
take care of this situation. And even though like I
did have a whole thoughtful conversation with my doctor, and

(10:27):
my doctor was like, it really is probably not going
to increase your risk to be on a hormonal contraceptive,
but I understand your concerns. So I got a copper
I u D. And that has, you know, in other people,
side effects that they cannot tolerate. For me, the unpleasant
parts of it were over relatively quickly, and that also

(10:47):
has been a great decision for me. So yeah, it's
one of those things where like seeing people express their
frustrations about blood class associated with the pill and like
how that was being uh compared to the vaccines, Like
I totally get it, and at the same time, it
really frustrated me because I was like, these class are
so dissimilar and we really need to be able to

(11:10):
tell people what the risk is and we can't do
that if we don't know what the risk is yet,
right well, and I the whole time, you know, we've
been going through this episode and related to, you know,
the comparisons that people have been making with vaccinations, there
is part of me that wonders, and this is strictly

(11:31):
conjecture on my part, how much of some of the
problem around the oral contraceptive element of it is related
to just people's discomfort with discussion of women's sexual health,
both in the sixties, which seated the whole problem and now,
I mean, remember trying to ask my mother about birth

(11:51):
control when I was like seventeen, so of an age
where I was smart enough to understand it, and she
acted like I had said something horrific and shameful, and
like I, you know, had basically said, I think what
I want to do is kill a bunch of people.
I mean, it was that level of horror for her,
um And I can't imagine. I mean, that's like in
the late eighties, So I can't imagine there aren't a

(12:13):
lot of other people in our age group, and even
younger probably who kind of similarly have some blind spots
because they just did not grow up in families where
you ever discuss such things, right, And so even if
there were politicians having discussions around it, doctors publishing articles
about it then maybe made its way into the press,
you were not going to get exposure to any of that. So, like,

(12:36):
it doesn't surprise me that people don't really fully understand
the nuanced difference between those and what's going on with
the vaccinations. Yeah. Yeah, in my own family, like my mom,
My mom tried so hard, uh to tell me that,
like menstruation is a normal part of life in words,

(13:01):
but like the behavior that she and everyone around me
modeled was that menstruation was a horrific, shameful secret and
no one ever should know that I had my period.
Oh yeah, yeah, And so I was incredibly relieved the
first time I ever had, uh, you know, a g
y N exam, the nurse just said, do you want

(13:23):
birth control? And I was like, Holy Molly, I don't
have to try to figure out how to bring this
up with a doctor myself. Um, and yeah, that was
weirdly profound relief to me to just like have the
have somebody at the doctor's office start the conversation. Yeah,

(13:44):
I mean, I I understand that for a lot of people,
and a lot of for cultural reasons and just familial reasons,
like there is I always joked that I was definitely
raised in a family where like if it was related
to or came from your body, it was shameful and
was not to be. Yeah, but there are so many

(14:04):
people who fall into that where we just like, you
don't bring it up. And I get for some people
it's just uncomfortable and I don't expect everybody to like
share all their stuff. But I just remember the first
time I was exposed to a friend who very casually said, oh,
I'm having my period this week blah blah blah for
some reason. And I was like, well, she said it.
She said it out loud. She said it out loud
right here in front of me. I heard it. She

(14:25):
said it. She doesn't look ashape what's going on Like.
It freaked me out so bad, but it made me
rethink like, oh, maybe this isn't the weird thing I
had been trained to think it was. Yeah. Yeah. I
have a friend that got in trouble at work one
time for walking to the bathroom with a you know,
a tampon and its wrapper in her hand. And she

(14:49):
was like, I'm wearing a business suit, I don't have pockets. Like,
do you want me to to get my purse out
of the locked drawer to go to the bathroom every time?
Have to do this? This is ridiculous. I feel like
there are various folks doing a lot of important work
to try to like reduce that shame and secrecy and

(15:11):
also make it clear that like a lot of different
people been straight and everyone needs to have access to
products and support and all of that. Well, and it
it just cracks me up, right because this isn't a
new thing. This has been part of the human condition
from the beginning, and yet we still haven't figured out

(15:32):
how to talk about it or discuss it without somebody
getting squinky. Yeah, we're probably going to get emails from
from squink probably, And I get it. I mean, I
still even now, even though I would say in many
ways I'm very free wee linen like open to talk
about anything, but even now, there's a part of me
that has that knee jerk of like, don't bring that up,

(15:53):
like it's different way, what's wrong with you? I have to, like,
my rational brain has to come in and go, it's
fine that that person said that. Do you remember, Yeah,
remember it's okay because we're all so hardwired. I'm hoping,
you know, incremental change is happening generationally, but boit, how

(16:14):
many years of humans spent on the earth and we
still haven't gotten there yet. So yeah, so you know
you want to send us a note about any of
this history podcast at my heart radio dot com and
all over social media at missed in History and you
can subscribe to the show with Kevin already were at
the i heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, anywhere else you

(16:36):
get your podcasts, and we'll be back tomorrow with a
classic episode and something brand new on Monday. Stuff you
Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart
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(16:57):
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