Kristyn Hodgdon
Everything you’re feeling, but didn’t know how to say.
Age of Attraction Got Me (Then My Uterus Had Questions)
Something you should know about me: I am a hopeless romantic. I have watched almost every season of The Bachelor. I have cried at the finale. I am not immune to a love story, and I never have been. So when Age of Attraction showed up on Netflix — a dating show where people build connections without knowing each other's ages — I was in, immediately and completely. What I didn't expect was to spend half the show thinking about fertility.
The premise: singles date without knowing how old anyone else is, reveal ages when they're ready to commit, then decide whether to move forward. It's hosted by Nick Viall and Natalie Joy, who have an 18-year gap themselves — which is either genius casting or a lot to unpack over cocktails (probably both).
But then the fertility warrior in me shows up, the one who spent years in waiting rooms counting follicles and learning odds, and she has a different question entirely. When a woman who's 54 is falling for someone who's 27 and they're both all in, nobody on that show is asking out loud: does he want biological kids? Does she know whether that's still possible for her? Because the science is what it is — by 40, about 1 in 10 women will conceive in any given cycle. By 54, that conversation looks very different. Has it happened in the Promise Room, or are they just hoping love will be enough when it surfaces later?
It will surface. I say that not as someone who thinks it's a deal-breaker, but as someone who knows that the gap between a romantic decision and a reproductive one is real, and that reality TV, by design, stays on the romantic side of it.
I sit on my couch knowing what they haven't asked yet, rooting for them anyway.
Photo source: People
Reader, I Cried: The IVF Cancer Study We've Been Waiting For
I have the kind of health anxiety that comes from knowing too much. Not spiraling-at-2am anxiety, but the specific, well-researched kind that accumulates when you work in women's health, carry an ATM gene mutation, have a history of infertility, three IVF babies, and a best friend who died of breast cancer at 31. I'm not being dramatic. I'm simply a woman who's done the math.
For me, "preventative health" looks like annual mammograms, a breast MRI every six months in between, and a standing appointment with low-grade dread every time a result takes longer than expected to populate in the patient portal. It's manageable — it's just always there, slightly beneath the surface. So you can imagine how it felt to read this.
A new study in JAMA Network Open analyzed nearly 418,000 women who underwent fertility treatment and found that their overall invasive cancer rates were comparable to the general population. Reader, I cried a little.
To be fair, it's not a complete all-clear: uterine and ovarian cancer rates were modestly higher in some groups, and researchers believe that likely reflects underlying conditions like PCOS and endometriosis rather than the treatments themselves. Still worth a conversation with your doctor. But the headline finding — that IVF doesn't appear to raise your overall cancer risk — is going in the file I keep of things that help me sleep at night.
Because here's what nobody warns you about fertility treatment: it doesn't end when you get the baby. The what-did-we-do-to-my-body question follows you into the next chapter, asking itself whether you invited it or not. A study like this one doesn't answer everything, but for the first time in a long time, the math feels slightly more in my favor.
Ask Clara:
"Can birth control cause breast cancer?"
Reading Anxiety: Why I Always Need a Book in My Head
Confession: I always need to be reading a book. Not want, need. If I have a story in my head, I can't hear my own anxiety. It doesn't have room. The spiral that would otherwise set up camp between my ears gets evicted by fictional people with fictional problems, which are somehow infinitely more manageable than my own.
Nora Ephron once wrote that reading is everything: that it makes her smarter, gives her something to talk about, and is, in her words, "the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself." That it's escape and the opposite of escape at once. That it's bliss. I've read that quote probably a hundred times, and it still feels like someone finally put words to something I'd been doing my whole life without being able to explain it. Science has confirmed this, which I'm sure Nora would find both satisfying and slightly beneath the point.
My current read is This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crum — part thriller, part slow-burn love story about best friends who host a survival podcast, one of whom disappears, with her own unpublished memoir slowly revealing why. I started it on a Tuesday night and my husband had to physically tell me it was 11:30, which, with three kids under eight, is genuinely not okay.
There's something medicinal about fiction that I haven't found anywhere else. Not podcasts, not TV... those leave too much room for my brain to wander off and catastrophize. A really good novel requires just enough of me that worry can't find a foothold, and the part of my brain that would otherwise be composing worst-case scenarios gets handed something better to do with itself.
I've been doing this since I was a kid reading under the covers with a flashlight, long after my parents told me lights out — and if it's a coping mechanism, it's the one I'd pick every time.
Is the "Soft Girl" Era Making Us Soft?
There's a video circulating that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. It's a critique of the "soft girl" era — the aesthetic of candles, nervous system regulation, protecting your peace, saying no, slow mornings, and the general pressure to do less of anything that might cause discomfort.
And the question it asks is a good one: in our collective rush to calm down, are we losing something?
I'll be honest. I've been fully enrolled. I traded HIIT for Pilates. I drink my coffee before breakfast in the morning to avoid cortisol spikes. And I do think a lot of it is legitimate — women in particular have spent generations absorbing stress that was never ours to carry, and learning to set it down is not weakness.
But there's a version of this that has gone sideways.
When "protecting your peace" becomes a reason to avoid hard conversations, hard work, hard feelings — when the nervous system becomes a permanent excuse rather than something you're actually healing — that's just avoidance. And somewhere along the way, avoidance got a really good PR team.
Pushing through hard things isn't the opposite of healing. Some things are just supposed to be hard (ahem, parenting), and you don't find out what you're made of by opting out of them. The soft era, taken too far, quietly tells women to shrink... just in pastel, with a red light mask on.
We can regulate our nervous systems and still be in the arena. Some of us don't have a choice.
What Christina Applegate's Book Made Me Google
As someone with an autoimmune condition (hi, Hashimoto's, the gift that keeps on giving), I'm obsessed with the research connecting what happens to us emotionally — especially early in life — to what eventually shows up in our bodies.
I came across this Norwegian study while listening to Christina Applegate's new memoir, You with the Sad Eyes. She trauma dumps — freely and without apology — and somewhere in the middle of it, I couldn't stop thinking: what if these things aren't separate stories?
Turns out, researchers are asking the same question.
The study followed nearly 78,000 women and found that childhood sexual or emotional abuse was associated with a significantly increased risk of developing multiple sclerosis. Women who experienced sexual abuse had a 65% higher risk. Those exposed to all three types of abuse (sexual, emotional, and physical) had a 93% higher risk.
The body keeps running a stress response that was never supposed to be permanent, and then everyone acts surprised when it shows up as something.
Women are already underdiagnosed and underbelieved in medicine. Add a trauma history, and suddenly symptoms become anxiety, stress, and "have you tried therapy?" The idea that the stress response to trauma could be a biological MS risk factor doesn't just tell us something about the disease; it tells us something about why women's pain gets dismissed for so long.
Most of us have spent years wondering what our bodies were trying to tell us. Some of us are still finding out.
Ask Clara:
"When does MS typically show up in women?"
Endometriosis: Four to Eleven Years of Being Told "It's Fine"
Every day, without fail, a version of the same search lands in Rescripted's data: why are my period cramps so bad, is this amount of pain normal, can't get out of bed during period. Millions of women, typing the same quiet desperation into a search bar (at what I can only assume is 2 a.m.), hoping someone on the other side finally has an answer.
Here's the thing: for a lot of them, it's not just bad cramps. It's endometriosis, a chronic condition where tissue similar to the uterine lining grows outside the uterus, causing pain that can be genuinely debilitating. And according to new clinical guidance just released by ACOG, people are waiting between four and eleven years on average from the onset of symptoms to an actual diagnosis. Four to eleven years of heating pads, Advil, and being told, in one way or another, that this is just how periods are.
It's not.
What makes this guidance feel significant — and it is significant, because this is new guidance that, for the first time, focuses specifically on diagnosis — is that it gives clinicians permission to stop waiting for surgery to confirm what a patient's symptoms are already saying. A clinical diagnosis, based on history and physical exam, is now explicitly supported. Which means treatment can start faster. Which means women don't have to keep suffering through month after month while the system gets around to believing them.
March is Endometriosis Awareness Month, which is usually when the infographics appear and then disappear. But I keep thinking about all the women in our community who are still in the middle of that wait — still wondering if they're being dramatic, still being dismissed.
You're not. The system just took eleven years to say so.
My Whole Personality Is a Pisces (Except When It Isn't)
Every year around my birthday, I do this thing where I take stock — not in a vision-board way, more like a slightly uncomfortable look at whether I actually am who I think I am.
I've always identified hard with my sign. Pisces: creative, intuitive, charismatic, sees the best in everyone to an occasionally inconvenient fault, toxically positive (if we're being honest about it). Co-Star, for their part, suggests my best career options include "amateur poet," "sad clown," and "orb of light," which honestly tracks more than I'd like to admit. All of it has felt true for so long that I stopped questioning whether it still fit, which is probably its own kind of Pisces behavior.
Here's the thing about Pisces, though: it's two fish swimming in opposite directions, the whole symbol built around contradiction. And lately, looking at the people closest to me — my husband, most of my good friends, basically an unintentional Pisces support group I never formally organized — it's obvious we share a sign and almost nothing else. He's internal where I'm external, Type A to my Type B, same birthday season, completely different operating systems. At some point, astrology stops explaining it and you just have to accept that people are who they are, sign or no sign.
What it's made me think about is labels more broadly: how we pick them up young, wear them long enough that they start to feel like fact, and then one birthday you look around and realize the label was never the whole picture. Just the part that was easiest to explain.
The older I get, the less I fit the story I've been telling about myself — and honestly, that feels like exactly where I'm supposed to be.
I Scheduled All My Appointments (and Then Cancelled All My Appointments)
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This week I did something I'd been meaning to do for months: I sat down, opened my calendar, and scheduled everything — the annual GYN visit, thyroid bloodwork, the follow-up I'd been quietly avoiding. It felt genuinely good, like the responsible adult version of a gold star.
And then my kid got the stomach bug.
Which triggered the kind of scheduling jenga that only working moms truly understand: the one where pulling out a single block brings the whole week down with it. The GYN had to go because someone had to stay home with a sick seven-year-old, and that someone was me. The bloodwork required fasting, which required planning, which required a version of my week that simply did not exist. And somewhere in the chaos, my pharmacy filled a prescription I actually needed with the wrong dosage, which — truly, a nice touch.
This is the administrative tax nobody mentions when they say "prioritize your health," as if the hardest part is deciding to do it. A 2024 Deloitte survey found that half of women skip or delay medical care in a given year, and are 35% more likely to do so than men... which tracks. We're not skipping it because we don't care; we're skipping it because we're the ones holding the bowl.
I did make it to therapy, though, and given the week I just described, that felt like exactly the right appointment to keep.
Trimester Zero: Knowledge Is Power, Until It Isn't
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Someone asked me recently what I thought about the "trimester zero" trend: the growing movement of women spending months, sometimes years, optimizing their bodies before they even try to conceive. Swapping out nonstick pans, replacing workout clothes, unplugging the Wi-Fi at night, taking beef organ capsules. All of it in pursuit of the perfect fertility foundation.
They asked: what's your hot take?
I said: do you want my answer as a founder, or as a person?
As a founder in the women's health space, I wholeheartedly believe knowledge is power — Rescripted is quite literally built on that premise, the idea that women deserve access to real, evidence-based information about their bodies, and that being informed leads to better outcomes. I stand by that completely.
But as a type-B human with ADHD who has lived through infertility, two high-risk pregnancies, and a miscarriage, I also know that more information is not always more peace. And peace, it turns out, matters more than most wellness influencers will ever admit.
The thing that worries me about trimester zero isn't the prenatal vitamins or the earlier bedtimes. It's the subtext. The quiet implication that if you just prepare enough, optimize enough, eliminate enough toxins, you'll be rewarded with an easy road to pregnancy. And when it doesn't work out that way, as it doesn't for one in six people globally, the information that was supposed to empower you can start to feel like a (very long) checklist of things you did wrong.
Fertility issues are not your fault, regardless of what you did or didn't do to prepare, and no amount of optimization changes that. My "hot take"? Know what helps you, ignore what doesn't, and whatever helps you sleep at night — that's the right answer.
The Thing That Wasn't on My Registry (But Maybe Should Have Been)
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When I was pregnant with my twins, I was not what you'd call a planner. I had the basics covered and a general sense of optimism, which — if you've ever carried two babies at once — you know is both completely understandable and slightly delusional. Cord blood banking wasn't even on my radar, and honestly, I wish someone had brought it up.
You've got enough to think about when prepping for baby: diapers, wipes, a bassinet that fits in your room. Cord blood banking didn't make my list the first time around, and I get why it doesn't make most people's. But the stem cells in your baby's cord blood are packed with powerful cells that could treat over 70 conditions, including leukemia and immune disorders. They're a perfect match for your baby and possibly siblings, too. The collection itself is quick, safe, and painless: it happens right after birth, so it's not adding anything to your plate in the moment. And ongoing medical research could unlock even more uses in the future.
The honest caveat: private banking isn't cheap. But some parents are now adding it to their baby registry... because it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bank something priceless. And unlike the fourth muslin blanket on your list, this one actually has a shot at mattering in ways you can't fully anticipate yet.
Use promo code SCRP at cordblood.com for 50% off CBR's annual bundle, including processing, shipping, and the first year of storage. And if you want to find out more about cord blood banking, we've got you.
The registry list is long. This one's worth adding.