#5SmartReads - December 5, 2022

Hitha on contraception for ejaculators, the role of food in our memories and in waste, and the state of hospitals right now

December 05, 2022

I think about Gabrielle Blair’s viral Twitter thread about ejaculation at least once a week (and highly recommend her book Ejaculate Responsibly).

Before I had my sons, I wondered why the burden of birth control was on those with uteruses when we have a narrow window to get pregnant, whereas ejaculators could theoretically impregnate someone with every release.

Mercifully, I’m not alone - and there is quite a bit of research being done in birth control for ejaculators beyond condoms.

A topical gel applied on the shoulders seems to be the most promising option right now (and the furthest along in clinical development), along with pills and an injectable solution.

On the non-hormonal front, there’s a gel injected in the vas deferens (the tube that carries sperm to the urthetra) that blocks the transport and acts as a reversible vasectomy.

Though my sons are young, I am thinking about how we’ll handle the conversation about sex and consent and protection, and I hope that one of these options will be authorized by FDA within the next 10 years, to be a part of this conversation and be an option for them.

I got swept up in getting my own AI-generated portraits over the weekend, and I was fascinated by how the AI-powered Lensa made me look like a character right out of ACOTAR, Star Wars, Foundation, or a political campaign poster.

For as captivating as these images are, there’s another side to it - and that’s the side of the artists whose work is exploited by tools like these.

“In a sense, all technological progress is the story of one industry learning from, cannibalizing, and eventually replacing an older one, but never has it felt more direct than this.”

Every publication has bias, and Fast Company is very much aligned with the interests of the companies creating the AI technology versus the artists whose work is being fed into these platforms - often without compensation or with relatively meager compensation.

I admittedly canceled my Lensa trial and deleted the app from my phone after downloading my magic avatars, given the murky ethics waters of artist compensation and who owns these images. As fun and amusing as these fads are, we’re in a uncertain ethical and ownership environment that’s important to consider before we hop on these trends.

“The food we waste globally accounts for about 10% of greenhouse gas emissions. If food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest contributor to climate change after the U.S. and China, The Guardian reports.”

Y’all. We have a problem.

I’m very much guilty of this and only recently have moderated our grocery lists and am a couple of years into composting our food waste at the farmer’s market every Friday.

But there is food that still ends up in the trash because I didn’t eat or cook it soon enough. And I feel like I need to print this article and put it on my fridge and our grocery list whiteboard to be more mindful in grocery shopping and meal prepping.

And on the topic of food, food science has done a lot to improve our food supply, making it last longer or create shelf-stable products.

It has also made meal preparation a lot more convenient - and created some incredible memories with that convenience.

“My family didn’t have to labor over food to make it special. They just did what tasted good, what we could afford, what was easy, and it became what we loved. They cooked quickly and cleaned up even faster, wanting to get out of the kitchen and rest for a change. We took our time eating, we played dominoes with Papa. We never missed a Macy’s parade or Cowboys game.”

I still find the slice and bake sugar cookies (with the jack-o-lantern during Halloween or Christmas tree during this season) to be absolute magic. Break-and-bake chocolate chip cookies are a mainstay on our grocery list, just like they were on my mom’s shopping list.

And I’m a firm believer in canned cranberry sauce and boxed cornbread mix, always.

Do you have a beloved prepared food? It can be a childhood favorite or a newer discovery. Share it below!

As frustrating as the past few weeks of someone being sick in our home was, I’m so grateful everyone’s illness was mild and resolved without any significant intervention.

So many families aren’t as lucky - those with a sick child, and those who work in healthcare who are doing the most with the least.

Don’t take it from me. Take it from Hui-wen Sato, a pediatric ICU nurse who shared her reality with GRID:

“Our capacity has really taken a hit since covid. By and large, everyone is short-staffed. That impacts everything. There might be a long line of patients coming into the ED [emergency department], and we have to transfer patients out of our ICU to a regular medical surgical floor, but if those floors are short-staffed, it impedes our ability to get patients out of our ICU in a timely fashion, which impedes our ability to admit patients from the ED. The overall flow is impaired because capacity is lower. Our hospital has been doing less non-urgent, elective surgeries since we just don’t have as much capacity.

In our ICU, we physically have 24 beds, but because of our staffing, we only have adequate staff for 20 or 21 occupied beds. Just because there are three more physical beds open doesn’t mean that we can safely staff them. We also typically have to hold space for what we call the code bed, that’s used for a code blue [a hospital-wide alert that a patient needs immediate emergency care, often for a cardiac or respiratory arrest]. We try to keep one bed open for when someone inside the hospital has an emergency, or someone comes through the ED and is terribly, critically ill, not just needing oxygen for RSV but they got slammed by a car and need that bed.

Because of the respiratory surge, there’s so many who show up in the ED who need oxygen right now. And we take them, but I always have to think about the other things that can happen. There are still car accidents. There are still patients on the regular floors who suddenly have a medical crisis. Those kinds of things don’t stop just because this respiratory surge is happening. How do you plan when you don’t know when those emergencies are going to happen, and you don’t want to come up short, but you’re always short-staffed?”

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