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Tuesday, September 6, 2016

The End of an ERA and the Dawn of a New One

Image credit: c.berlet+publiceye.org
Miracle Girl: The End of an ERA and the Dawn of a New One

As a budding little feminist, I felt crushed when the E.R.A. was defeated, shy just three states. The women's rights movement largely had Phyllis Schlafly to thank for that setback. But society would lend the final blow to not to the forces of feminism and cultural liberalism, but to Schlafly and the Religious Right.

The worm has turned on the corpse of the culture wars of the past, which will be buried along with one of its most unbending warriors
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Coma Girl

Coma Girl

Not a miracle recovery, but a miracle of modern medicine

In 2013 I fell into a six-week coma and nearly died after I contracted legionella. The Legionnaire's disease was in turn triggered by immunosuppression caused by the prednisone I was taking for my rare autoimmune disease, dermatomyositis.

I suffered a series of strokes on both sides of my brain when the sepsis caused my blood pressure to plummet. I fell into a deep coma. My kidneys and lungs began to fail, as my body was began dying one organ at a time. My doctors told my loved ones to give up hope for my full recovery. They expected me to die, and even if I somehow lived, I would remain a vegetable or at best left so hopelessly brain-damaged that I would never be same. But unbeknownst to them, while they were shining lights in my eyes and shaking their heads, I was telling them in my coma-dream--my secular version of a near-death experience--to leave me alone because I was trying to get back to sleep. I was experiencing what is known as covert cognition, the subject of my Skeptical Inquirer article "Covert Cognition: My So-Called Near-Death Experience," which appeared in their July/August issue.

But it wasn't a miracle--despite what so many continue to believe--that I recovered so fully. I owe my life not to God, but the miracles of modern medicine, as well as the nature of the watershed-area brain damage I suffered, as I detailed in my article and in this blog.