Thealogy Thursday:Intro

For months now, I've been thinking about doing an occasional spotlight on theology and/or thealogy. Since this isn't a daily or even weekly blog, I'm not going to promise to use this topic every week. But occasionally I'll come back to these ideas.

Important disclaimer: My background is as a casual layperson. Academically, I have a Minor in Religious Studies, and spent 12 years in primary and secondary Catholic Schools. My M.A. in Humanities included some more philosophy, but I did not fit the Sociology course on Religion into my program.

I do a lot of independent reading, and have long been involved in Adult Religious Education discussion groups, but my opinions should be considered just that: opinion. I do not speak Greek, Aramaic, Coptic, Syriac, etc. I've recited or sung Church Latin quite a bit, and my minor in Spanish helps me with understanding it, but it wouldn't be enough to complete Seminary.

As I have discussed in various places on this blog, my faith background has five major roots:

Music Monday: Confident

Over the weekend I got to see some excellent choreography to this song, performed as a senior solo, and really listened to the lyrics. The music video isn't the story that the student brought to mind, but it's also a decent one.

Realities of Pregnancy: After Loss

I said I would come back to the NPR article about Pregnancy Loss. One of the reasons that people often don't reveal pregnancies until about the end of the first trimester, is because they don't want to have to "untell" people if things go badly.

Natural miscarriages are *extremely* common. My mother lost two pregnancies, and my grandmother lost several. Common enough that my high school science teacher expressed the opinion that human bodies prefer to have a "trial pregnancy" before completing the real deal.

When my mother suffered her first miscarriage, she was further traumatized to learn that the medical term for a natural miscarriage was "spontaneous abortion." She was morally opposed to abortion, and there it was in her medical records.

In the aftermath of my salpingectomy, and the removal of my ectopic pregnancy, I had a follow-up visit with the OB/GYN surgeon. I had to have additional blood tests, to ensure that the pregnancy hormone returned to normal levels, indicating that any remaining tissue was absorbed into my body or expelled from it.

It turns out that, if that did not happen properly, a Molar Pregancy could result - which could further progress into cancer.

So I had follow-up visits until my hormones returned to not-pregnant levels.