MMMMonday! Equal Pay Day 2014.

[mangofandango.livejournal.com]

Each Monday, we bring you special, maintainer-curated content intended to enrich your VP experience. Please note that you can find past MMMMonday posts using the mmmmonday tag.

Also, a quick reminder about the other places you can find VP: vp_bulletins for local announcements; contact_vp for questions and feedback on the way VP is run; the Vulvapedia for basic questions; and don't forget about our sibling community over on Dreamwidth!

Equal Pay Day in the U.S. was last week, on April 8th - the point on the 2014 calendar to which the average American female worker must work to match the average American man's 2013 pay. Today we have some links for you if you want to know more about the pay gap, or get some idea of what to do if you're being paid unfairly.

Pew Research offers some stats on the wage gap, and the US Dept. of Labor does some myth busting. Think Progress explains how the gap is wider for women of color. And here's a list of actions you might take if you think you're being paid less than your co-workers due to discrimination. (Of course, many people won't find a lot to help them in this list - this is a large problem that intersects with all kinds of power imbalances, making action sometimes impossible even if one knows they are being paid unfairly. But the list is there, in case it is helpful to any of you.)

Wage equality is a worldwide issue, but as this map shows, this map gives you a look at where the U.S. stands in relative terms.

Want to talk about your experiences with payment and discrimination? Have any other links you think might be helpful or informative? Let's talk in the comments!

Some Menstrual Product Help?

[frolicnaked.livejournal.com]

So. My period is Not My Friend on a regular basis, and it is especially Not My Friend this month.

I am looking for some help on a couple of specific issues:

1. Which disposable pads -- particularly designed for a moderately heavy to very heavy flow -- have the largest surface area? I keep bleeding around my current ones (some 11-inch, flared-end cloth pads), which is not necessarily helped by just increasing absorbency. (You know, the pad can't absorb the blood that never hits it in the first place.) ;)


2. Is there a problem with the Thermacare Menstrual Heatwraps? I visited one local store yesterday and two today that usually stock them -- and nothing. They had not switched locations, from menstrual products to pain products or vice versa. There was no space on the shelf suggesting they were temporarily out of stock or had more in back (with respect to the latter, I asked). Am I going to need to order these online? Am I going to need to buy All the Heatwraps because no more will ever be made? Does anyone know if this is a widespread phenomenon?

Thanks!

HBC and autoimmune diseases.

[neumeindil.livejournal.com]

Hello Pagers. (Before we begin; humor is one of my coping mechanisms. I mean no disrespect to anyone else dealing with infertility, the aftermath of miscarriage, etc. with my somewhat casual and irreverent tone. It's just that, at this point, if what I fear is actually reality, I need all the humor I can get.)

So, in the course of the purgatory that has been dealing with my Pandora's Box, I've been changed to Errin (Micronor) from Nuvaring after a miscarriage and then a failed Mirena insertion. (Scary to realize I can sum up the last three years of nightmares with one sentence.) The past two months are the only ones since the miscarriage when I haven't bled in excess of an ounce a day for 4 days every two weeks. IN THEORY (because, with me, there's no telling!) my hormones seem to be leveling out.

But BEFORE all that (two winters ago), I randomly noticed I had a few days where I couldn't squeeze my fists tight enough to open plastic storage containers and just generally lost my grip on things easily. It passed, so I didn't think much of it; I had too much going on working 2 jobs and finishing school. Fast forward to this past summer during the miscarriage fiasco, again, I had a few days of the same pain and some stiffness in the first joints of my hands, but everything else was making me so miserable I didn't really pay attention to it.

And finally a week ago, I noticed it again, radiating up to my elbows, coupled with the same pain in my feet up to my ankles, a low-grade fever, and this time the intensity of it was... I can only sum it up with "it's been interesting" without resorting to profanity.

So, considering my age (32), the stress I've been under with 3 jobs and the search for an upgrade to one of them, my utterly *abysmal* eating habits through the past 6 months, and the 3 generation family history of rheumatoid arthritis, I'm worried.

My question is, now that my hormones are getting leveled out, if this turns out to be RA, what am I looking at in terms of treatment?

Could the HBC be contributing to RA flares, if that's what these are? Am I going to have to try to find *another* form of birth control to keep this pain at bay?

Or, is a diagnosis of RA one more tool in my arsenal in the fight to get myself spayed?

I have an appointment Tuesday afternoon with a GP, and I'm going in prepared to dig in about blood tests including the anti-CCP test that finally diagnosed my father, as well as x-rays and the standard RA panel, mainly because I need to get them done while I still have both symptoms (pain's been about a 4-6 today, no fever, limbs are cold, but I can finally make a fist) and health insurance (which I lose July 1st, hence the job upgrade plans).

Any RA & HBC experienced Pagers with thoughts? Thanks in advance. :)