Measles Vaccine Rash: What It Is, Causes, Symptoms & Treatments

Why Does Hot Weather Make You Sleepy?

If the intense summer heat has you feeling a little sluggish, there's a good reason behind it. In essence, your body is having to work harder to try and stay cool.

Your body's natural response to this intense heat is to try and self-regulate - to keep your body from overheating.

This is especially true when the temperature climbs above 100 degrees. Your body has to work harder to maintain an internal temperature of around 98.6 degrees.

Your body regulates its temperature through sweating and increasing blood flow to the skin. These processes force your body to exert extra energy. Hence, you may feel tired and lethargic, without even having done much.

Medical experts use the term "vasodilation" as a way the body responds in an attempt to regulate its temperature.

This bodily response is when blood vessels dilate as a way of releasing heat. Since wider, dilated blood vessels can result in lower blood pressure, this can further contribute to that feeling of sluggishness or fatigue.

In addition, our sleep can get disrupted in hot weather, especially if a comfortable temperature indoors cannot be attained. Of course, a lack of sleep can have a carryover effect the next day.

Other contributors to feeling tired during the summer can be dehydration, decreased appetite, and overall heat stress on the body.

It's important to recognize the signs of heat stress or worse, heat stroke, which is a medical emergency.While most of us aren't on the edge of heat stroke, it's vital to be aware of these symptoms and always listen to your body. Take note of all the signs of heat-related illness below.

In conclusion, the sluggishness we experience is a way our bodies are telling us to slow down and take it easy, especially during the hottest part of the day.

Now, I don't know about you, but I'm ready for a nap!

Fever Feels Horrible, But Is Actually Helpful

Kurzgesagt explores what happens when a virus or bacteria enters a human body and the essential role fever plays in helping your body fight off disease.

Fever feels bad. So we take medication to suppress it — but is this a good idea? It turns out fever is one of the oldest defenses against disease. What exactly is a fever, and how does it make your immune defense stronger? Should you take a pill to combat it?

We often mistake fever for the disease…it's actually part of the cure. When my kids were young, I vividly remember our laissez-faire French pediatrician urging us not to give them medication to get rid of their fevers because that was the body fighting back and doing useful work — unless their temps got too high of course.

When I Was 13, The Unimaginable Happened. I Had To Grow Up Anyway.

Boobs are back. Also, they never went away. This is part of Boobs Week—read the whole thing here.

The lesson in fifth grade sparked a mixture of intrigue and dread. We had been separated by gender into two classrooms, and Ms. Lacolla sat with the girls in a circle to teach us about puberty. One girl hid in the closet; she had no interest in learning about periods.

But there are many things girls are born not knowing, and so someone must be in charge of telling. My great-grandmother Charlotte, for instance, was never told about the fact that blood would one day come out of her body. Her mother had passed away from scarlet fever when Charlotte was 6. Of course she assumed, when she saw the stain in her underwear years later, that she was dying. She had no one to ask, and held the knowledge of her impending death as a secret.

My mom told me that story when I was young. I imagine that it was on her mind when she planned how to introduce me to womanhood. She bought educational books about the changing adolescent body so that I wouldn't be caught off guard, and funny books with real teen stories so that I wouldn't feel alone. When I finally got my period, I ran to my mom, not with fear and not with excitement, but with a certainty that she would know what to do next. That's all a little girl should need to understand.

My mom wasn't one to cause alarm, but one morning when I was 12, she remarked that I better brace myself for a roller coaster, by which she meant becoming a teenager. No warning or book can really prepare you for puberty. But my mom did her best. She told me that I looked exactly how I was meant to look; she also showed me how to pluck my unibrow when I was unhappy with it. In fifth grade, when I said that I hated myself, she exiled me to the bathtub and told me to sit there until I could take it back.

But inadvertently, in preparing a girl to become a woman, she passed along some of that inherited shame too: Her weight fluctuated; her hair thinned; she did not always love herself exactly how she looked.

When I was 5 years old and my mother was 36 and still breastfeeding my baby brother, she had a chunk of her right breast removed. Her breasts were beautiful, large, shapely. But the right one hid a malignant tumor 7 centimeters long and 5 centimeters wide.

Things changed after that. But then again, everything is changing when you are 5 years old. She had to buy new skirt suits because the chemo affected her weight; I placed my teeth, which were falling out, under my pillow so they could be exchanged for coins. She stopped breastfeeding my brother; I stopped using my pacifier after a late-night visit from the Pacifier Fairy. Chemo days became fun field trips, a day off from school; I'd draw pictures for the nurses while she got her drip IV. We also joined a bonsai club together and traveled as a family to Niagara Falls. It was all part of the growing up and the learning.

We celebrated when the cancer was gone, a party at home. In the summer, we went to Freeport, Maine, to watch our favorite singer, Mindy Smith, perform at the L.L. Bean Store Discovery Park. We ate hamburgers on a picnic blanket as the sun went down; I thumbed the handle of my new blue backpack, which I would carry to fourth grade in the fall. Mindy Smith's mother died of breast cancer. We listened to her song about missing her mom—Please don't go/ Let me have you just one moment more—with a strange sense of relief. "We don't have to worry about that anymore," my mom said to me.

My dad has since told me that that wasn't true: They were worried all the time. It was one of those secrets that adults have to hold.

It's weird how breasts show up where they weren't before. Once, my nipples hadn't required anyone to avert their gaze. But then, at 12, I was growing tiny mounds. I had finally received the soft and deathly embarrassing suggestion from a male relative "I think it's time for a bra."

I went shopping with my mom to buy the tiniest support bras that existed. "They're breast buds," she told me. Like my breasts were flowers.

Little did we know that idyllic night in Freeport that the cancer had moved into my mother's bones, where it was quietly growing. It only got worse, and shortly after I turned 13, she died. I hid myself in her clothes. I wore her sweaters, jewelry, shoes. It was impossible to give anything away when I wasn't sure what she would have wanted me to keep.

But I gradually found the things she left for me. I came across a bag in her sock drawer labeled with her familiar handwriting: "To Anna, for when you're a grown-up." I wasn't, yet. I waited for a long time to open it. I could have waited forever. When I looked inside, I found pacifiers and teeth.

When I was 21 years old, cleaning out my closet during a break from college, I found the box of her old bras. She had left a note there too: "For Anna. Lightly used." They were vintage at this point, from the '80s or '90s; not much more than thin silk with underwire.

I tried one on, put on a shirt, and was amused that it made my breasts far apart and pointy.

"Look." I showed my boyfriend. "They're triangles."

I wore them a few times ironically, curiously. Then I began to like them. I had inherited my mom's large breasts, and the bras fit well. Trips to Aerie had left me with a number of padded bras and bralettes that gave me too much support or too little, didn't feel comfortable or didn't look flattering or both. I took the bras as another gift from my mom, a continuation of the other lessons. I kept wearing them.

I had my dad's metabolism growing up, which kept me lanky and lean, but that was another thing that changed as I blossomed into a woman, dealt with the stresses of college and a pandemic. The weight gain happened slowly enough that at first I noticed it only on the scale. But then it showed up in photographs. Eventually, it followed me into mirrors. I saw it everywhere.

It came to a head in my mid-20s during a beach trip with some friends, a week of too many bathing suits. We had drunk a little too much and stayed out a little too late—one of those nights that ends with someone crying on the bathroom floor. I was comforting the weeping friend until another friend asked me about the black streaks on my cheeks. Had I been crying too?

I cried again. I hadn't put words to it before, but I knew it now: I didn't love my body. Worse than that, I was betraying my mother, who had told me to love it, who had loved me with no reservations. My mother whose body broke, my mother who was beautiful, whose body my own looks like. How would she feel to know that I couldn't look in the mirror anymore?

Gaining weight had meant bigger boobs too. I wore my favorite of my mom's bras—cream-colored with tropical flowers and lacy silk cups—when I finally went to buy new ones. Surely, at 26 years old, I should know how to find bras that fit well on my own, I thought, should have already arrived at a sense of stability in my body. But I didn't, and I had not.

So I went all the way to Brooklyn for a fitting, about an hour away from where I lived. I had done a lot of research to choose this bra fitter, who was hailed as a miracle worker in the online reviews. I wanted an adult to help me, and she seemed qualified for the job.

The bra fitter didn't say anything when I arrived at her shop, just led me to the back. She had a slight hunch, and her shirt had ridden up above a fold in her belly in an unflattering way that made me question her sizing judgments. But I reminded myself of what I didn't know. It had taken me over a decade to come here, to ask for this lesson. She directed me into a changing stall, closed the curtain, and instructed me to undress. I had just removed my shirt when she stepped in to start her assessment.

"That bra is too small," she snapped upon seeing my mom's tropical flowers. Angry, somehow, that I might not know that. "You need to get rid of it."

I took it off and let her consider my breasts, inspect the girth of my ribs. The next 20 minutes were mostly silent. She opened the curtain at will, tossing new bras my way.

I asked her what size I was as she fixed the band behind my back. "It doesn't matter," she said. "You don't need to know that." What she meant was: Sizes across brands are different, and so it's a number not worth caring about. But still, "I'd like to know," I told her. I wanted something to take away with me so I could do this again on my own. She didn't answer, instead pointing to a rash between my breasts, developed from wearing the too-small bra for too long. She clicked her tongue.

I finally got dressed to leave, wearing one of the bras she had selected, and placed my old bra gently in my backpack.

She blocked me on my way to pay with a small trash can in her hands. I stared at her.

"Throw it away," she said.

"What?"

"That bra you came in with. Throw it away." She held out the trash can. "I won't let you leave until you throw it away."

Blood pumped hot in my ears. My mother's not here, I could have said. So, unfortunately, it had to be you.

My mom had always been preparing for when she might leave. In 2006, when I was 9 years old, she wrote my brother and me a letter. "It feels so funny sitting here beginning this letter while you are off to play at Marcy's for the afternoon," she wrote. "I compose letters all the time in my head, thinking of things I want to tell you and worry that I won't be here to do so." She recorded videos with her friend Gail; every Tuesday they got chai lattes and sat on our porch to create a diary of her life in case she wasn't there to tell us one day.

Because there are things that need to be handed down. My mom bundled everything up, just in case. She typed up a document with the important numbers and names: our doctors, dentists, teachers.

When she was placed in hospice care, shortly after I had become a teenager, she had things mostly ready. I hadn't accepted yet that this was the end. In a fit of optimism, she told me about a friend in her cancer group who went to hospice and later made a full recovery. I parroted the story back to her a few days later, and she shook her head, reminded me that that had been a miracle. We both hopped between hope and reality.

One night, as I was beginning to realize what came next, I asked her to accompany me to the bathroom, a strenuous journey that we made hand in hand. Her mind was hazy; she wasn't all there anymore. She sat on the toilet seat as I sat on the side of the tub. I was firm, insistent; I came with business.

"Mom," I said. "Can you teach me how to shave my legs?"

We walked through it together—the shaving cream, the gentle pull along the skin. "Remember, stop at your knees," she said. "If you go above, that hair will get thicker and darker."

It was one of the last lessons from my mom, a little bit of folklore passed from one woman to another. For a long time, I stopped at my knees.

My mom had been there for my first period; it happened about six months before she died. She made it a big deal. She got me a card and a bag of gifts with a little figurine holding flowers and a word underneath: Celebrate. Inside the card, she had written: "Congratulations on your passage onto 'womanhood'! I welcome you to this special circle with love and joy."

And indeed it was a special circle, full of love and sometimes joy. Marcy talked me through inserting my first tampon from the other side of the bathroom door; Martha came over on Monday nights to teach me how to cook; Aunt Anne took me shopping. As I grew into a woman, I also learned how to make my own decisions, ones that sometimes defied my mom but would not disappoint her: I eventually shaved above the knee because the hairs had gotten dark on their own. I knew—hoped—she would understand.

My mom thought a lot about what she was passing down to me, first as a mother, then as a mother who was leaving. She handed down the lesson that womanhood is a gift—but it came packaged with the shame inherent to a woman's existence in this world. She prepared for that, too, by giving me the capacity to navigate it. To have the courage to say I love you, I love you, I love you to myself as many times as I need to until I believe it. To forgive myself in the times I don't. And to give this same grace to all the women I'm walking the way with.

I've wondered sometimes, in the months since the bra-fitting incident, about how things could have gone. I ended up simply gaping at the fitter until she let me leave with my mom's bra safely tucked in my backpack.

But maybe if I had cried, she would have cried with me. Maybe it was tough love, and her tenderness was not so far beneath the surface. Maybe she had done this too long, seen too many clients. Maybe she was just dealing with the facts of the case. Maybe she had forgotten that all women have to eventually leave their mothers, or that their mothers have to leave them—but that we are all, nonetheless, still little girls.

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