Health News

For a start, it’s often a surprise to many women to realize that their wombs are really quite small. At least they are when they’re not pregnant. A non-pregnant womb is about the size of a woman’s clenched fist or a small orange; just right to be tucked safely away behind your pelvic bone, which you can feel low down in your belly linking the two inside edges of your hip bones. Your womb is virtually all thick muscle, with a small space inside it, between those thick walls, like a balloon before it’s been blown up.

That sticking out of the top of your womb, like two narrow curved horns are the two Fallopian tubes, which are specially designed to carry the newly developed egg from your ovaries into your womb. They curl round alongside the womb, so that their open ends are hovering just above your ovaries, the two glands that hold the millions of microscopic egg-cells Nature provided you with even before you were born. The open ends of the Fallopian tubes are fringed like a sea anemone and the inside of each tube is lined with little hairs, so that the

egg-cell can be wafted gently along inside it.

It seems extraordinary that the womb could carry anything as big as a full term baby, or that it could cause so much pain. But as we know, it can and it does. And one of the reasons is that although it’s quite a small bag of muscle, the muscles themselves are exceptionally strong, so when they contract, as they do when they are pushing a baby into the world, or when they are getting rid of the unwanted lining of the womb, you usually know about it.

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Many people who get furiously angry find that this mood gives them masses of energy. One way of dealing with the anger is to use up the energy. If you can choose some really useful violent activity, like digging the garden, scrubbing floors, washing the paintwork, making bread, or jogging, then you’re making a conscious effort to channel this energy practically and tackling your problem in a most positive way.

It certainly seems better to release your energy than to try to repress it. But even if you dig and scrub and bake like mad, there will still be times when your anger catches you out and you find yourself in the middle of a growing row. The old advice to count to ten before you say anything is precious little help at a time like this, but if you can remember to breathe in second gear you might find that this will give you the pause you need. And if you can then start relaxing those tense muscles in your face and fists you just might be able to stop the whole thing and get it under control. Breathing in second gear is doubly helpful when you’re in a temper, because as well as slowing you down and making you feel less angry it also gives you something else to concentrate on instead of whatever it is that’s making you furious. It won’t always work of course, because the pressure of your emotions at this time is so very strong. But it’s worth a try. If you do succeed, you’ll have every reason to feel very pleased with yourself.

This irrational anger is the symptom of the miseries you are most likely to know about, whether you suffer from it or not, and that’s because it’s been in the news recently. It’s far and away the most dramatic of all the symptoms and that makes it newsworthy. Journalists, like doctors, call it pre-menstrual tension, or pmt for short. Many of their articles, particularly the ones in the women’s magazines, are helpful and sympathetic. But I have also read stories in the popular press about mothers who battered their babies, wives who attacked their husbands, and even a girl who was sent to prison because she set fire to her parents’ home, and the journalists have asked us to believe that the only thing that was wrong with them was that they were suffering from pmt. Although I’m sure they were all suffering from the aching miseries, I’m equally sure there were lots of other problems in their lives too. We are all too complicated, and so are our lives, for such a very simple solution.

We ought to be glad that the subject is at least being aired. But over-simplification can be a nuisance and it’s one we ought all to guard against, because it can affect us all. If we’re not careful, pmt could become a sort of public scapegoat, so that any woman who is angry about anything could safely be ignored, dismissed or patronized. ‘Oh well, of course she can’t help it, poor thing. It’s that time of the month!’ Nudge, nudge; wink, wink! We need to hold on to our knowledge that a lot of anger is both necessary and justified if we and our children are to survive in what is, for so many of us, a cut-throat world. The acid test is to ask ourselves what a man would have said and done in the same circumstances. If a man’s anger is justified, then so is a woman’s.

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