Opinion: What the West gets wrong on Stalin and Putin
Opinion by Jade McGlynn – January 20, 2024
Editor’s Note: Jade McGlynn is a non-resident senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and author of two books, “Russia’s War” and ”Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia.” The views expressed in this commentary are her own. Read more CNN opinion here.
Last month, a new ‘Stalin Center’ was opened in Barnaul, Siberia. Its aim, like its predecessors’ in the Russian cities of Penza and Bor, is to glorify the Communist dictator.
Jade McGlynn – Jade McGlynn
Alongside a marked increase in Stalin statues across Russia — more than 100 since 2012 — the Stalin centers appear to affirm a simplistic story: The Kremlin is rehabilitating the ‘Vozhd,’ or great leader.
The second such center, which opened in 2021 in Bor, also in the west of the country, was originally a private initiative by a local Communist businessman. It began with a statue of Stalin looming over the Volga River. The mayor of Bor even petitioned for its removal, albeit unsuccessfully.
And now the most recent center, in Barnaul. It was established by the Communists of Russia, a radical and marginal Stalinist party that is separate to the much larger pro-Kremlin Russian Communist Party.
In other words, these centers, like many of the new Stalin monuments, are not Kremlin-imposed but rather grassroots or at least non-state initiatives. Perhaps this should not be surprising. According to the independent Levada Center, Stalin has taken first place in their ‘who is the greatest figure of all times and all people’ survey since 2012.
Students of a military-sponsored school attend the opening of a series of busts of Russian leaders, including Josef Stalin (center), in Moscow, on September 22, 2017. – Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP
Putin’s pro- and anti-Stalin balancing act
Of course, this favorable view is not uncontested. The Russian human rights organization Memorial worked tirelessly for over 30 years to document Soviet crimes, which were widely discussed during the Gorbachev and post-Soviet era.
More recently, Russian journalist and YouTube star Yury Dud powerfully depicted the horrors and legacy of Stalinist Gulag forced labor camps in his 2019 documentary “Kolyma: Birthplace of Our Fear.” The YouTube video has over 29 million views.
Putin’s treatment of Stalin takes both of these stances into consideration. Rather than a glorification of the Communist dictator, he offers a somewhat equivocating view that strives to placate both pro- and anti-Stalin constituencies within Russian society.
To do so, he glosses over but does not deny the large scale of the Communist dictator’s terror and repressions. In 2017, Putin unveiled Russia’s first monument to the victims of Stalin’s repressions in Moscow: the “Wall of Grief.” During the opening, he asserted: “We must never again push society to the dangerous precipice of division.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin (right) at a ceremony unveiling the country’s first national memorial to victims of Soviet-era political repressions called: “The Wall of Grief” in Moscow, October 30, 2017. – Alexander Nemenov/Reuters
Over his 24 years in power, Putin’s rhetoric on Stalin has remained reasonably consistent. He does not deny Stalin’s crimes but rather tries to divert attention away from them, admitting the horror of the Gulag and mass repressions but insisting that the memory of these crimes should not overshadow Stalinism’s achievements. In his view, efforts to overly ‘demonize’ Stalin are part of an attack on Russia.
Silencing Stalin’s victims
While Putin has shown little enthusiasm for glorifying Stalin, his government has worked methodically to silence, or at least render abstract, the memory of the Gulag’s victims.
For example, the “Perm-36” memorial complex, Russia’s only remaining intact Gulag, was taken over by local authorities in 2015. When it reopened, individual stories of the prisoners’ lives were replaced by content celebrating the prison guards and the camp’s contribution to timber production during World War II.
Elsewhere, the 2021 shutdown of Memorial — which documented Soviet human rights abuses especially during the Great Terror — and the recent removal of ‘last address’ plaques marking victims sent to the Gulag, were almost certainly state-directed initiatives that seek to erase reminders of the human cost of Stalinist repressions.
Gulag forced laborers of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, are pictured in their living quarters in the 1930s. Thousands of laborers died during the construction of the canal. – Laski Diffusion/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
However, their removal cannot be reduced to the question of Stalin’s legacy alone — it can also be seen as an attempt to eliminate evidence of the crimes of the security services, in which Putin’s career and power base are rooted.
After all, thinking about the individual victims leads to thinking about the individual perpetrators.
The Putinist regime
The erasure of personalized reminders of the Gulag and Terror must be contextualized within the Kremlin’s use of history and myth to legitimate the Putinist regime, Russia’s war on Ukraine, and the country’s great power status. As the prosecutor at Memorial’s liquidation trial in 2021 argued: “Memorial besmirches our history. It forces us — a generation of victors and the heirs of victors — to justify our history.”
The prosecutor’s comments reveal not an ignorance of the dark spots of history but a desire to ignore them. There are obvious parallels with the present day, when many Russians are trying hard to ignore the devastating war their country is waging on neighboring Ukraine.
Certainly, this is a more pertinent point of comparison than the notion that Putin’s regime in any way approximates Stalin’s. The estimated imprisonment of between 628 and 1,011 political prisoners in today’s Russia is a horrific reminder of the brutal authoritarianism with which the Kremlin rules. But to compare it to the millions worked to death in Siberian labor camps or executed in KGB basements is hyperbolic.
What the West gets wrong about Stalin and Putin
Moreover, these comparisons divert attention from important differences between the Stalin and Putin regimes. Beyond the drastically different scales of repression, the most obvious one is that Stalinism was a deeply mobilizing ideology that sought to remake man and undertook industrialisation with unprecedented scale and speed. That is abundantly not the case in Putin’s Russia, where the government instead encourages a ritualistic patriotism and political apathy.
Such conclusions point to intractable policy and security issues for the West. If Putin was in power solely thanks to the machinery of repressions, then it is not Russia that is a security threat, but his regime. In such a case, the problems posed by his regime would cease to exist when he does.
Likewise, if one argues that Putin is the only driving force behind Stalin’s rehabilitation, then one can also continue the fantasy that, if it weren’t for Putin, Russians would embrace Westernized liberal democracy and stop justifying the sacrifice of thousands of lives for the whims of the state.
These assumptions are flawed and lacking in nuance, no matter how comforting such a shallow understanding of Russian society might be.
The Western tendency to reduce mass-scale crime to an omnipotent leader has always been a misleading one. Even Stalinism was not the work of one man, but of the security services and individuals willing to denounce their fellow neighbors for housing rights or petty grievances, as the Kyiv-born Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov so mercilessly satires in his short stories of the time.
Likewise, efforts to pretend that Putinism is just the work of one man will lead to myopic thinking and poor analytical predictions regarding Russia’s future. The question of Putin’s position on Stalinism suggests he is far from the all-powerful instigator of a Stalin cult and rather a manipulative manager of divergent, pro- and anti-Stalin societal attitudes, which he tries to balance and fuse into a workable and unifying national narrative.
That a notable section of Russian society exudes nostalgia for a leader who repressed millions illuminates pervasive and troubling issues that should inform predictions and planning for a post-Putin Russia.
The problem is not just one strongman — it is that so many people wanted a strongman in the first place.
Jan Sramek, the CEO of California Forever and Flannery Associates who has bought up over 60,000 acres of nearby farmland with plans to build a new city, in Solano County, Calif. on Dec. 21, 2023. (Aaron Wojack/The New York Times)
RIO VISTA, Calif. — When Jan Sramek walked into the American Legion post in Rio Vista, California, for a town hall meeting last month, everyone in the room knew that he was really just there to get yelled at.
For six years a mysterious company called Flannery Associates, which Sramek controlled, had upended the town of 10,000 by spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to buy every farm in the area. Flannery made multimillionaires out of some owners and sparked feuds among others. It sued a group of holdouts who had refused its above-market offers, on the grounds that they were colluding for more.
The company was Rio Vista’s main source of gossip, yet until a few weeks before the meeting no one in the room had heard of Sramek or knew what Flannery was up to. Residents worried it could be a front for foreign spies looking to surveil a nearby Air Force base. One theory held the company was acquiring land for a new Disneyland.
Now the truth was standing in front of them. And somehow it was weirder than the rumors.
The truth was that Sramek wanted to build a city from the ground up, in an agricultural region whose defining feature was how little it had changed. The idea would have been treated as a joke if it weren’t backed by a group of Silicon Valley billionaires who included Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist; Reid Hoffman, an investor and co-founder of LinkedIn; and Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of the Emerson Collective and the widow of the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. They and others from the technology world had spent some $900 million on farmland in a demonstration of their dead seriousness about Sramek’s vision.
Rio Vista, part of Solano County, is technically within the San Francisco Bay Area, but its bait shops and tractor suppliers and Main Street lined with American flags can feel a state away. Sramek’s plan was billed as a salve for San Francisco’s urban housing problems. But paving over ranches to build a city of 400,000 wasn’t the sort of idea you’d expect a group of farmers to be enthused about.
As the TV cameras anticipated, a group of protesters had gathered in the parking lot to shake signs near pickup trucks. Inside, a crowd in jeans and boots sat in chairs, looking skeptical.
Sramek, 36, who is from the Czech Republic and had come to California to try to make it in startups, was now the center of their economy. Flannery had become the largest landowner in the region, amassing an area twice the size of San Francisco.
Christine Mahoney, 63, whose great-grandfather established her family’s farm when Rutherford B. Hayes was president, said that, like it or not, Sramek was now her neighbor. Mahoney had refused several offers for her land, and Flannery’s lawsuit — an antitrust case in federal court — described her as a conspirator who was out to bilk his company.
But she had never met the man in person, so she came to say hello.
“You might be asking yourself, ‘Why is this guy with a funny accent here?’” Sramek began the meeting.
He spent about 20 minutes pitching his plans before submitting to questions and resentments. People accused him of pushing small farms out of business. They said Flannery’s money was turning families against each other.
“Good neighbors don’t sue their neighbors!” one man yelled to applause.
Sramek, who is tall, intense and practiced in the art of holding eye contact, stayed up front after the meeting to glad-hand.
When Mahoney and her husband, Dan, 65, approached him, Sramek said, “Hi, Christine!” as if they had met several times before and he wasn’t currently suing her.
“I’d like to welcome you as our neighbor, but it’s kind of difficult,” Christine Mahoney said.
She talked about how much stress the lawsuit had put on her family.
Sramek nodded, as if she were talking about someone else, not him. Then he asked the couple to dinner. The Mahoneys agreed.
Going to the Ballot
One key difference between building an app and building a city is that a city requires permission. On Wednesday, Sramek’s company officially filed a proposed ballot initiative that would ask voters to buy in. Specifically, the measure aims to amend a long-standing “orderly growth” ordinance that protects Solano County’s farms and open space by steering development to urban areas.
Solano’s residents have consistently backed the city-centered-growth laws, so Sramek’s project is bound to be controversial. To overcome resistance, the initiative includes a long list of promises like new roads, money to invest in downtowns across the county and a $400 million fund to help Solano residents buy homes.
Sramek also revealed that he hoped to build directly next to Rio Vista, with a half-mile-wide park separating the old farming town from the new tech city. Renderings that his company released this month portray a medium-density community that is roughly the opposite of a subdivision, with a grid of row houses that lie a short walk from shops and have easy access to bike lanes and bus stops. He said the first phase of building could accommodate about 50,000 people.
Even if the measure gets on the ballot and passes, it will be one step on a path requiring approval from county, state and federal agencies — a long list of ifs that explains why large projects are usually measured in decades, not the few years that Sramek seems to imagine.
It’s a crucial step, however. Beyond amending the ordinance, a win would pressure county officials to work with Sramek, so opponents are already lining up. A group called Solano Together, a mix of agricultural and environmental organizations like Greenbelt Alliance, recently created a website that characterizes the project as harmful sprawl that would destroy farms.
The fight is something of a throwback. Whether it was paving over San Fernando Valley orange groves to build out Los Angeles or ripping out apricot farms in what is now Silicon Valley, California became the nation’s biggest state and economy largely by trading open and agricultural land for population and development.
That shifted in the 1960s and 1970s, when a backlash against the growth-first regime and its penchant for destroying landscapes helped create modern environmentalism. In the half-century since, this turn has been codified in laws that aim to restrict development to existing cities and their edges. It has protected farms and open space, but also helped drive up the cost of living by making housing scarcer and more expensive to build.
Sramek framed his proposal as a backlash to the backlash, part of an ideological project to revive Californians’ appetite for growth. If the state is serious about tackling its dire affordable housing problem, he argued, it doesn’t just have to build more housing in places like San Francisco and its suburbs — it also has to expand the urban footprint with new cities.
As a matter of policy, this is hard to dismiss. This is politics, however, so the bigger question is whether voters share his desire to return California to an era of expansion. And whether — after six years during which Sramek obfuscated his role in Flannery’s secret land acquisition, along with the company’s billionaire backers and true purpose, all while pursuing farmers with aggressive tactics and lawsuits — they find him trustworthy.
The Golden Boy vs. 1877
Christine and Dan Mahoney’s house looks onto a barn that says 1877, the year Christine Mahoney’s great-grandfather built it.
When I met the couple for an interview at their house last year, Christine Mahoney had decorated the dining table with black-and-white pictures of relatives in button dresses and bonnets. Later we drove along roads named for her ancestors.
Winding through the hills, Christine Mahoney ticked off parcels that belonged to the family, others that were owned by neighbors and more owned by Flannery. When I asked how she discerned the lines of ownership in an expanse of yellow grassland, she said: “You live here a hundred years.”
Sramek, meanwhile, talks about growth in moral terms, as if progress and wealth are simpatico and the most consequential people are those who build big things and a fortune along the way.
Driving near the Mahoneys’ ranch recently, through the same yellow hills, he posited that the mix of wealth and innovation that has exploded in the Bay Area has happened only a handful of times in history. (Florence, Paris, London, New York, Chicago and “maybe LA” were some others.) We were 60 miles from San Francisco in a place where the tallest structures are wind turbines, but his message was that the region could be an economic sun, and that bringing more people in the orbit was worthy of the trade-offs.
An immigrant and striver who at 22 was a co-author of a book called “Racing Towards Excellence,” Sramek got his first spurt of publicity at Goldman Sachs, where the financial press hailed him as a “Golden Boy” trader and considered it newsworthy when he left, after two years of employment, to chase a bigger dream in startups.
His tech career was less sparkling. After Goldman, he moved from London to Zurich and started a corporate education company called Better. It operated for two years and prompted a move to San Francisco, where he founded a social media company, Memo, in 2015.
Memo was billed as a higher-minded version of Twitter and won praise from venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. That praise was delivered on Twitter instead of Memo, which was pretty much the story: Memo failed to rack up users and shut down after a year.
His failures aside, Sramek was smitten with the Bay Area’s culture of creative capitalism. He was less enamored with the actual place.
The mythical Silicon Valley was in reality a bunch of office parks and cul-de-sacs where subdivision-grade homes went for $2 million. The more picturesque and urban San Francisco was being consumed by rising rents and their attendant homeless problems.
Complaining about the cost of living, and the region’s inability to fix it, had become something of a side hustle for many Bay Area CEOs. And after Memo, Sramek started looking for a big disruptive idea for them to fund.
“If we go back six or seven years, the popular hit in the press was ‘Silicon Valley is not doing enough in the real world,’” he said. “And I was sitting there working on this.”
Flannery Associates
Sramek likes to fish. The way he tells it, around 2016 he and his girlfriend (now wife) started making the one-hour drive from San Francisco to Rio Vista to catch bass on the Sacramento River. One of those trips, driving past pastures and grazing sheep, sparked an idea.
“What if you could start from scratch?” he said.
In a state whose agricultural bounty has historically been a function of moving water great distances, the area is something of an anachronism. For generations, families like the Mahoneys have practiced “dryland farming,” which means they rely on rain, not irrigation.
The Mahoneys talk about this the same way they talk about their land and family: with an emphasis on tradition and the romance of continuity. Sramek described the land as “not prime.”
The phrase angered several farmers at the Rio Vista town meeting, but in dollar terms it’s accurate. At the time of Sramek’s first fishing trip, land in the area was trading around $4,000 an acre — a pittance compared with a Central Valley almond orchard (about $10,000 to $55,000 per acre) or a Napa Valley vineyard (anywhere from $50,000 to more than $500,000 per acre), according to the California chapter of the American Society of Farm Managers and Rural Appraisers.
Sramek starting doing research and soon found himself immersed in zoning policy and poring over old development maps dreaming of a startup city. Investors were initially reluctant, he said, so he borrowed $1 million from friends and banks to put a deposit on a handful of properties, then hired consultants and land-use lawyers to assess what it would take to build there.
By now Sramek was well networked. He had done a fellowship at Y Combinator, a startup incubator. He was in a book club with partners at Sequoia Capital. He was friends with billionaires like Patrick and John Collison, the sibling founders of the payments company Stripe.
The Collisons became two of Flannery’s first investors. Andreessen and Chris Dixon, also of the Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm, joined soon after, along with Moritz, who was Sequoia’s chair. All of them helped Sramek solicit others.
In a 2017 note to potential investors I obtained, Moritz wrote that if “done right” the project could help relieve congestion and housing prices in the Bay Area, and mused about the potential to experiment with new kinds of governance. It could also be spectacularly profitable, he said: Moritz estimated that investors could make 10 times their money even if they just got the land rezoned, and far more if and when it was developed.
Flannery Associates was named for Flannery Road, which borders the first property Sramek bought. Aside from that detail and its Delaware incorporation, residents and public officials could find almost nothing about its shareholders or intentions. Just that it wanted a lot of land, didn’t care about the price and was willing to strong-arm owners when money didn’t work.
In addition to working their own land, many farmers in the area lease parcels where they grow crops and graze animals. As Flannery consumed more and more property, people like Ian Anderson found themselves in the uncomfortable position of trying to rebuff its offers for parcels they owned — while at the same time farming land they rented from Flannery.
Anderson learned how vulnerable he was after a local newspaper quoted him saying that the company had begun insisting on short-term leases and that this made it increasingly difficult to farm. Later, Flannery’s lawyer sent him a letter informing him that it was terminating multiple leases covering thousands of acres.
“The Andersons have made it clear that they do not like Flannery,” according to the letter. “The Andersons are of course free to have their opinions, but they cannot expect that Flannery will continue to just be a punching bag and lease property to them.”
Rep. John Garamendi, a Democrat from the area, characterized moves like this as “mobster techniques.” The bigger concern was that Flannery’s holdings had grown into a giant mass that butted against Travis Air Force Base on three sides.
The proximity to the base alarmed both the county and the Department of Defense, which prompted local officials and members of Congress to call for investigations. The investigations elevated the mystery of Flannery Associates into a mainstay on local TV news.
“The FBI was investigating this, the State Department was investigating this, the Treasury Department was investigating this — all the local electeds were trying to get information and calling their legislators,” said Rep. Mike Thompson, another Democrat from the area.
The company remained silent.
Sramek said Flannery had operated in secret to prevent landowners from jacking up prices, and defended the lawsuits as just. He argued that while some farmers didn’t want to sell, most had done so willingly — at prices no other buyer could offer.
“We paid way over market value, and created hundreds of millionaires in the process,” he said. “We are glad that we have been able to settle most of our disputes, and we are open to settling the remaining ones.”
A Simple Case of Wealthy Landowners?
By 2023, Sramek and his investors were in deep. Flannery had spent some $900 million buying 60,000 acres. The first two rounds of funding, at about $10 million each, had ballooned to several more rounds at $100 million each. (Sramek said the company had now raised “more than $900 million” but would not be more specific.)
Big investors begot bigger investors, and the list expanded to a roster of Silicon Valley heavyweights including Hoffman and Powell Jobs.
The company’s offers became so generous that many farmers decided they couldn’t refuse.
The Mahoneys sold Flannery a few hundred acres early on. (Their land is owned by several different entities and hard to tally overall, but in the 1960s Christine Mahoney’s father told a newspaper that he had 16,000 acres in the area.) But as Flannery gobbled more of the land around them, Christine Mahoney said, she realized that something big was happening and that their entire farming business could be at risk. So the family stopped selling to Flannery. The company persisted with more offers, however, improving terms and increasing prices to levels that would have netted tens of millions of dollars. The family continued to say no.
Flannery arrived while the Mahoneys were in the midst of transition. Over 150 years, the family’s company, R. Emigh Livestock, had expanded from two dozen lambs to one of largest sheep farmers in California. Christine Mahoney’s father was in his 90s (he died last year) and she was passing leadership to her son Ryan, who said his wish was to stay there until he was in his 90s, too.
You wouldn’t know it from her jeans or penchant for nostalgia, but Christine Mahoney had spent her career running a corporation, one whose business was raising lambs and cattle. She was, like Sramek, a CEO.
And after years of back and forth, one thing Flannery’s entreaties had made clear was that there was one property the Mahoneys owned that it coveted above the others: Goose Haven Ranch. But Goose Haven was the one the family was most protective of. It had been the center of the lambing operation long enough that the road leading up to it was designed for wagon traffic.
Elsewhere in the county, Flannery had started buying into farms by acquiring shares from family members who wanted out, then becoming what amounted to unwelcome partners with the ones who remained. Two of these arrangements led to lawsuits between Flannery and the other owners. Both settled, but one of them netted a trove of emails and text messages among several neighbors including the Mahoneys.
In May, Flannery used those messages to file an antitrust suit against the Mahoneys and several holdouts. The suit contended that the farmers were colluding to raise prices, describing them as “wealthy landowners who saw an opportunity to conspire, collude, price fix and illegally overcharge Flannery.” It asked for $510 million in damages.
The complaint describes the messages (like Christine Mahoney writing to a neighbor, “That’s great that we can support each other!”) as “a smoking gun” proving that the defendants did want to sell but at even higher prices than Flannery was offering.
In a joint motion to dismiss, lawyers for the Mahoneys and other defendants described Flannery’s lawsuit as “a ham-fisted intimidation technique” designed to smother them with legal fees.
Even after being sued, the Mahoneys still had no idea who Flannery actually was.
The Campaign Apology Tour
In August, The New York Times broke the news of who was behind the purchases. Sramek confirmed his role, and soon topped his LinkedIn profile with a new title: CEO of California Forever, the company’s new name.
He has been in campaign mode ever since, meeting with elected officials, union leaders and environmental groups. California Forever has opened four offices across the county, and Solano’s freeways are now plastered with California Forever billboards.
In a state where it can take years to get a duplex approved, Sramek seems to have calculated that his project is too big to fail. Developers, planners and lawyers I spoke to all expected the project to either never happen or take at least 20 years. Whether out of bluster, delusion or confidence, Sramek, who recently bought a house in nearby Fairfield, said he had promised his wife that their infant daughter would start school in the development he wanted to build.
He didn’t find some secret hack that can make California an easier place to build. Rather, he believes the state’s attitude toward growth is changing. Californians, he thinks, have grown frustrated — with punishing housing costs, with homelessness, with the state’s inability to complete projects like the high-speed rail line that was supposed to connect the Bay Area and Los Angeles but has stalled. So just maybe his will, and gobs of money, can create a new posture toward growth.
“There’s a cultural moment where we realize the pendulum has gone too far,” Sramek said. “We can’t say we are about economic opportunity and working-class Californians are leaving the state every year.”
Last year’s event in Rio Vista was held at the end of lambing season in December. Before the meeting, I dropped by a barn with the Mahoneys where a group of “bummers” — lambs born weak or to overburdened ewes — were in sawdust pens drinking milk. They would be chops in less than a year, and Christine Mahoney cooed to them between my questions.
I asked her a crass but obvious one: why the money from Sramek, those tens of millions, wasn’t enticing.
“Everybody has their price, right?” she said. “I’ve heard that so many times. ‘Everybody has their number — what’s your number?’ I guess I haven’t found it yet.”
“When God calls us home, that’s our number,” Dan Mahoney joked. “Totally different philosophy.”
On Wednesday, Sramek returned to the American Legion post in Rio Vista. This time he had arrived as part of a kickoff event for the ballot initiative. Neighbors and protesters had returned but were prohibited from going inside, where slides of maps and renderings were presented to the press, and details about design were discussed.
The maps had a curious detail: On the edge of the proposed community’s downtown, was Goose Haven Ranch.
The night before the meeting, the Mahoneys sold it. They got about $23 million.
Rats and mice swarm trenches in Ukraine in grisly echo of World War I
Christian Edwards and Olga Voitovych – January 21, 2024
The frontlines of Russia’s war in Ukraine have become infested with rats and mice, reportedly spreading disease that causes soldiers to vomit and bleed from their eyes, crippling combat capability and recreating the gruesome conditions that plagued troops in the trench warfare of World War I.
A Ukrainian servicewoman, who goes by the call-sign “Kira,” recalled how her battalion was beset last fall by a “mouse epidemic” while fighting in as the southern Zaporizhzhia region.
“Imagine going to bed, and the night begins with a mouse crawling into your pants or sweater, or chewing your fingertips, or biting your hand. You get two or three hours’ sleep, depending on how lucky you are,” Kira told CNN. She estimated there were around 1,000 mice in her dugout of four soldiers. “It was not the mice who were visiting us; we were their guests.”
The infestations are due partly to the change in seasons and mice’s mating cycle, but are also a measure of how the war has become static, after Ukraine’s counteroffensive was largely rebuffed by heavily fortified Russian defenses. Amid another harsh winter, mice are foraging along the nearly 1,000-kilometer (621-mile) frontline, spreading disease and dissatisfaction as they search for food and warmth.
Kira said she tried everything to rid their bunkers of mice: sprinkling poison, spraying ammonia, even praying. Nearby shops stocked up on anti-mouse products and made a killing, she said. But, as the mice kept coming, they tried other methods.
“We had a cat named Busia, and at first she also helped and ate mice. But later there were so many of them that she refused. A cat can catch one or two mice, but if there are 70 of them, it’s unrealistic.”
Videos shared on social media by Ukrainian and Russian soldiers showed the extent of the infestations on the frontlines. Mice and rats are seen scurrying around under beds, in backpacks, power generators,coat pockets and pillowcases. One shows mice pouring forth from a Russian mortar turret like bullets from a Browning.
In another, a cat tries to swipe a mouse on an armchair, before a soldier taps the top of the seat and dozens more cascade down. The cat, hopelessly outnumbered, admits defeat and falls back.
A mousetrap in a garbage can tries to stem the swarm of rodents in a trenches near Bakhmut, Ukraine, in October 2023. – Libkos/Getty Images
Ukraine’s military intelligence in December reported an outbreak of “mouse fever” in many Russian units around Kupiansk in Kharkiv region, which Moscow has been trying to claim for months. The report said the disease is transmitted from mice to humans “by inhaling mouse feces dust or by ingestion of mouse feces in food.”
CNN has not been able to independently verify the report, but according to the Ukrainian military the ghastly symptoms of the disease include fevers, rashes, low blood pressure, hemorrhages in the eyes, vomiting and, because it affects the kidneys, severe back pain and problems urinating.
The result, Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence said, is that “‘mouse fever’ has significantly reduced the combat capability of the Russian soldiers.” It did not say whether Ukrainian troops had been similarly affected.
The Ukrainian authorities did not name a specific condition as striking Russian troops, but there are a range of diseases associated with living near rodents that have similar symptoms, including tularemia, leptospirosis and hantavirus.
The report was reminiscent of those from World War I, where the putrid pileup of waste and corpses allowed “trench rats” to breed rapidly. Rats are nocturnal and are often busiest while soldiers are trying to rest, causing huge stress.
Robert Graves, an English poet who fought in the trenches, recalled in his memoirs how rats “came up from the canal, fed on the plentiful corpses, and multiplied exceedingly.” When a new officer arrived, on his first night he “heard a scuffling, shone his torch on the bed, and found two rats on his blanket tussling for the possession of a severed hand.”
In World War I, the rat population swelled when the conflict stagnated. And there are fears that Russia’s war in Ukraine has done the same. The head of Ukraine’s armed forces, General Valery Zaluzhny, told The Economist late last year: “Just like in the first world war we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate.”
Three German soldiers display their winnings after a night of rat-catching in a Western Front trench during World War I. – Hulton Deutsch/Corbis Historical/Getty Images
Ihor Zahorodniuk, a researcher at Ukraine’s National Museum of National History, told CNN the mice infestations were partly because rodent reproduction peaks in the fall, but also because of the effects of the war itself.
“The winter crops sown in the fall of 2021 were not harvested in many places in 2022 and gave generous self-seeding. The mice that bred on it survived the very warm winter and went on to harvest a new crop,” he said. The war has also dispersed natural predators, allowing mice to propagate more freely.
As well as causing anxiety and disease among soldiers, mice also ravage military and electrical equipment. When working as a signalman and living separately from other fighting troops in Zaporizhzhia, Kira said mice “managed to climb into metal boxes and chew through wires,” disrupting communications.
“The mice chewed everything: Radios, repeaters, wires. Mice got into cars and chewed on the electrical wiring, so the cars wouldn’t run, and they also chewed on tanks and wheels,” Kira said. “The losses from the mice in our dugout alone amount to one million hryvnia [$26,500].”
Zahorodniuk stressed the damage can be critical, “as lost communication may cost lives.”
Soldiers sleep in the dugout as they hold their positions in the snow-covered Serebryan Forest in Donetsk region, in January 2024. – Libkos/Getty Images
As Ukraine weathers another winter, the problem will likely get worse before it gets better. “It will get colder and colder, and they will go into the trenches more and more. The situation will not change until they all go through this,” said Zahorodniuk.
In World War I, soldiers could not solve the trench rat problem. Instead, they killed rats for their sport. Trying to spike one on a bayonet became a form of entertainment. The population did not decrease until the war ended. But Zahorodniuk warned Ukraine should not let the same happen again.
“The fight against them should be organized and not rely on soldiers and volunteers who are not imagining ways to fight. This is wrong. After all, this is a matter of the combat capability of the army. We have to take care of our soldiers.”
Former President Trump, the current GOP frontrunner, pushed back on claims of mental missteps during his Saturday rally in New Hampshire, after his main rival in the state, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, raised concerns about his mental fitness.
Trump deflected the criticism that arose after he appeared to mix up Haley and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday while talking about Jan. 6, 2021, stating his reliance on sarcasm during speeches and emphasizing that he aced a cognitive test that he claimed he took “a few months ago.”
“A lot of times I’ll say that President Obama is doing a lousy job, meaning that Obama is running the show,” Trump said during his rally. “They’ll say, Donald Trump doesn’t know who our president is. No, no. A few months ago I took a cognitive test my doctor gave me, I said give me a cognitive test just we can, you know, and I aced it. I also took one when I was in the White House.”
The 45th president has often raised concerns over President Biden’s age, claiming he is “cognitively impaired” and “in no condition to lead” the country.
During his rally on Friday, Trump appeared to have mixed up Haley and Pelosi while talking about the insurrection on the Capitol, to which the former U.N. Ambassador responded by saying that she was concerned to have somebody whose “mental fitness” is questioned while serving in the Oval Office.
“The concern I have is, I’m not saying anything derogatory, but when you’re dealing with the pressures of a presidency, we can’t have someone else that we question whether they’re mentally fit to do this,” Haley said.
During the Saturday rally, Trump continued the defense of his mental acuity, stating that he will let people know when he “goes bad.”
“I’ll let you know when I go bad,” Trump said. “I really [don’t] think I will be able to tell you because someday we go bad.”
He also refuted Haley’s claims, saying he does not mind being his age, possibly referencing when the former South Carolina governor called for “mandatory competency” tests for politicians over 75.
“They always say, like Haley, she talks about, ‘yeah, we don’t need 80-year-old,” Trump said. “Well, I don’t mind being 80, but I am 77, that’s a big difference.”
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who has endorsed the former president and is rumored to be in circulation for a potential vice president pick, pushed back on Haley’s claims, stating that “the reality is Nikki Haley is relying on Democrats, just like Nancy Pelosi, to try to have a desperate showing.”
In November, Forbes noted that Trump mixed up Biden and Obama at least seven times in recent months.
The 1 Thing Sleep Doctors Never, Ever Do In The Morning
Leigh Weingus – January 19, 2024
You’ve likely heard that a good night of sleep starts in the morning, and sleep experts agree with this statement wholeheartedly. This is because of our circadian rhythm, or our body’s natural sleep-wake cycle, which is a 24-hour process.
“The circadian rhythm, your internal biological clock, operates on a roughly 24-hour cycle and dictates when you feel awake or sleepy, largely influenced by light exposure,” explained Dr. Chester Wu, a double-board certified psychiatrist and sleep medicine specialist. “Health behaviors in the morning reinforce a strong circadian rhythm, promoting wakefulness during the day and sleepiness at night.”
Conversely, according to Wu, irregular sleep patterns, excessive evening light exposure and sedentary lifestyles can disrupt this rhythm and sleep pressure balance, leading to sleep issues.
Considering they’ve dedicated their careers to helping people sleep better, it’s safe to say the morning routines of sleep doctors are ones we want to emulate. So, what do sleep experts avoid doing in the morning to ensure they get a good night’s sleep?
They never lie in bed after their alarms go off.
In what may be the most unrelatable (but definitely smart) action ever, sleep doctors don’t lie in bed, scrolling on their phones for 15 minutes before dragging themselves out of bed. “I try not to linger in bed because I definitely feel like that causes me to feel more lazy or groggy,” Wu said.
Chelsie Rohrscheib, a neuroscientist and sleep expert, also doesn’t do this. “I never stay in bed and do activities that aren’t related to sleep and intimacy. This means when I wake up, I get out of bed immediately and go somewhere else in my house,” she said. “This helps to maintain my brain’s association that the bedroom is only a place of rest, which promotes high-quality sleep.”
“I never remain in my dark bedroom,” added Dr. Chris Winter, a neurologist and sleep health expert. “It is essential to get into the light. Light effectively shuts off your brain’s production of melatonin and lets your body know the day has begun.”
While not lying in bed was the most popular tip among the sleep experts we consulted, Carleara Weiss, a sleep specialist and research assistant professor at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, gave a slightly different answer: For her, in addition to getting up as soon as she wakes up, she makes sure not to sleep in.
“The reasoning for that relates to the circadian rhythms,” Weiss said. “Regular wake-up times help the biological clock regulate physiological functions, not just sleep. Sleeping in on the weekends leads to social jet lag and causes difficulty concentrating, fatigue, irritability, and headaches.”
Dr. Raj Dasgupta ― a physician who is a quadruple board-certified physician in internal medicine, pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine ― is also wary of sleeping in.
“While occasionally sleeping in is unlikely to have a lasting impact on your overall sleep quality, it may affect your ability to fall asleep later in the evening,” he said. “Maintaining a consistent sleep schedule, where you wake up and go to bed at the same time every day, is really important for ensuring you have a good night of quality sleep.”
Staying in bed after your alarm goes off can be doing more harm than good.
Staying in bed after your alarm goes off can be doing more harm than good.
What do sleep doctors do in the morning instead?
We know what they don’t do in the mornings. So, what do sleep doctors do? One thing that came up consistently was ensuring they were exposed to light early in the morning.
“One of the first things I do in the morning, usually within 30 minutes of waking, is exposing myself to natural sunlight by going outside or sitting by a window,” Rohrscheib said. “Light during the day is very important for keeping our circadian rhythm well-regulated. Studies have shown that a lack of sunlight exposure can reduce the quality of your sleep, contribute to insomnia, and negatively impact mood.”
Dasgupta also makes sure to get sun exposure first thing in the morning. “Getting sunlight exposure first thing in the morning upon waking up can increase alertness and energy during the day, leading to improved sleep at night,” he said.
Another big tip that came up? Exercise. “Getting active quickly is a fantastic way to signal to your brain that the day has begun,” Winter said. “The exercise does not have to be particularly intense. I start my day off by walking my dogs every day or walking with my wife to work.”
Interestingly, another thing Winter always makes sure to do is make his bed. “It’s not only symbolically powerful, but it’s also a great deterrent for individuals who might want to slip back into bed during the day and feel the napping might adversely affect their sleep the upcoming night,” he said.
As far as we’re concerned, the fact that sleep doctors don’t say anything about giving up coffee is a big win. As long as we can have our coffee, we don’t mind dragging ourselves out of bed before checking emails and scrolling through Instagram.
At 93, he’s as fit as a 40-year-old. His body offers lessons on aging.
Gretchen Reynolds – January 19, 2024
Richard Morgan competes in an indoor rowing competition in 2018. (Row2k.com)
For lessons on how to age well, we could do worse than turn to Richard Morgan.
At 93, the Irishman is a four-time world champion in indoor rowing, with the aerobic engine of a healthy 30- or 40-year-old and the body-fat percentage of a whippet. He’s also the subject of a new case study, published last month in the Journal of Applied Physiology, that looked at his training, diet and physiology.
Its results suggest that, in many ways, he’s an exemplar of fit, healthy aging – a nonagenarian with the heart, muscles and lungs of someone less than half his age. But in other ways, he’s ordinary: a onetime baker and battery maker with creaky knees who didn’t take up regular exercise until he was in his 70s and who still trains mostly in his backyard shed.
Even though his fitness routine began later in life, he has now rowed the equivalent of almost 10 times around the globe and has won four world championships. So what, the researchers wondered, did his late-life exercise do for his aging body?
Lessons on aging from active older people
“We need to look at very active older people if we want to understand aging,” said Bas Van Hooren, a doctoral researcher at Maastricht University in the Netherlands and one of the study’s authors.
Many questions remain unanswered about the biology of aging, and whether the physical slowing and declines in muscle mass that typically occur as we grow older are normal and inevitable or perhaps due, at least in part, to a lack of exercise.
If some people stay strong and fit deep into their golden years, the implication is that many of the rest of us might be able to as well, he said.
Helpfully, his colleague Lorcan Daly, an assistant lecturer in exercise science at the Technological University of the Shannon in Ireland, was quite familiar with an example of successful aging. His grandfather is Morgan, the 2022 indoor-rowing world champion in the lightweight, 90-to-94 age group.
What made Morgan especially interesting to the researchers was that he hadn’t begun sports or exercise training until he was 73. Retired and somewhat at loose ends then, he’d attended a rowing practice with one of his other grandsons, a competitive collegiate rower. The coach invited him to use one of the machines.
“He never looked back,” Daly said.
Highest heart rate on record
They invited Morgan, who was 92 at the time, to the physiology lab at the University of Limerick in Ireland to learn more, measuring his height, weight and body composition and gathering details about his diet. They also checked his metabolism and heart and lung function.
They then asked him to get on a rowing machine and race a simulated 2,000-meter time trial while they monitored his heart, lungs and muscles.
“It was one of the most inspiring days I’ve ever spent in the lab,” said Philip Jakeman, a professor of healthy aging, physical performance and nutrition at the University of Limerick and the study’s senior author.
Morgan proved to be a nonagenarian powerhouse, his sinewy 165 pounds composed of about 80 percent muscle and barely 15 percent fat, a body composition that would be considered healthy for a man decades younger.
During the time trial, his heart rate peaked at 153 beats per minute, well above the expected maximum heart rate for his age and among the highest peaks ever recorded for someone in their 90s, the researchers believe, signaling a very strong heart.
His heart rate also headed toward this peak very quickly, meaning his heart was able to rapidly supply his working muscles with oxygen and fuel. These “oxygen uptake kinetics,” a key indicator of cardiovascular health, proved comparable to those of a typical, healthy 30- or 40-year-old, Daly said.
Exercising 40 minutes a day
Perhaps most impressive, he developed this fitness with a simple, relatively abbreviated exercise routine, the researchers noted.
Consistency: Every week, he rows about 30 kilometers (about 18.5 miles), averaging around 40 minutes a day.
A mix of easy, moderate and intense training: About 70 percent of these workouts are easy, with Morgan hardly laboring. Another 20 percent are at a difficult but tolerable pace, and the final 10 at an all-out, barely sustainable intensity.
Weight training: Two or three times a week, he also weight-trains, using adjustable dumbbells to complete about three sets of lunges and curls, repeating each move until his muscles are too tired to continue.
A high-protein diet: He eats plenty of protein, his daily consumption regularly exceeding the usual dietary recommendation of about 60 grams of protein for someone of his weight.
How exercise changes how we age
“This is an interesting case study that sheds light on our understanding of exercise adaptation across the life span,” said Scott Trappe, director of the Human Performance Laboratory at Ball State University in Indiana. He has studied many older athletes but was not involved in the new study.
“We are still learning about starting a late-life exercise program,” he added, “but the evidence is pretty clear that the human body maintains the ability to adapt to exercise at any age.”
In fact, Morgan’s fitness and physical power at 93 suggest that “we don’t have to lose” large amounts of muscle and aerobic capacity as we grow older, Jakeman said. Exercise could help us build and maintain a strong, capable body, whatever our age, he said.
Of course, Morgan probably had some genetic advantages, the scientists point out. Rowing prowess seems to run in the family.
And his race performances in recent years have been slower than they were 15, 10 or even five years ago. Exercise won’t erase the effects of aging. But it may slow our bodies’ losses, Morgan’s example seems to tell us. It may flatten the decline.
It also offers other, less-corporeal rewards. “There is a certain pleasure in achieving a world championship,” Morgan told me through his grandson, with almost comic self-effacement.
“I started from nowhere,” he said, “and I suddenly realized there was a lot of pleasure in doing this.”
The US is struggling to handle an immigration surge – here’s how Europe is dealing with its own influx
Tara Sonenshine, Tufts University – January 19, 2024
Workers from the Spanish nonprofit Open Waters rescue 178 migrants from different countries, off the coast of Italy in September 2023. Jose Colon/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
As record-high numbers of undocumented migrants cross the United States-Mexico border illegally, one key question is how the U.S. got into this situation, and what lessons can be learned from how other countries respond to border security and immigration problems.
Having worked both inside the U.S. government and in the private sector, I have observed the growing importance of welcoming foreign citizens to one’s country for improving economic growth, scientific advancement, labor supply and cultural awareness.
But migrants entering and staying in the U.S. without visas or proper documentation can create problems – for the migrants themselves, and for overtaxed governments that lack the ability to quickly process asylum cases in immigration courts, for example, or to provide temporary shelter and other basic services for large numbers of arriving migrants. These strains are happening now in many places in the U.S.
In 1924, after decades of the U.S. welcoming foreign-born citizens to its shores, Congress passed the Immigration Act, restricting the numbers and types of people who could legally enter and stay in the U.S.
That legislation ushered in even more xenophobia and division in the U.S. over the ethnic origins of immigrants – cutting off large-scale immigration, especially from Europe and Asia, until jobs needed to be filled – and there weren’t enough people in the U.S. to fill them.
In the 1960s, immigration laws were reformed again, ushering in waves of immigration from Asia because the U.S. needed people to work at unfilled jobs.
Today, once again, some U.S. politicians are pushing for new ways to restrict immigration. Much of their work focuses on making it harder for migrants to get asylum – meaning legal permission to remain in the U.S. if they have a legitimate fear of persecution in their home countries.
Overall, U.S. border officials encountered more than 1.1 million people illegally crossing the U.S. border from April 2022 through March 2023 – a sharp rise from previous years, when the number of people illegally crossing each year hovered at less than 300,000.
U.S. authorities are now stepping up deportations, quickly sending more undocumented people back to their home countries.
Germany deported close to 8,000 people, many of them fleeing the war in Ukraine, in the first part of 2023. In total, an estimated 92,119 immigrants entered Germany illegally from January through September 2023.
New German government reforms will increase that figure and no longer require officials to announce deportations in advance.
Italy, which is also battling a huge influx of undocumented migrants from North Africa, recently doubled the amount of time that it can detain undocumented migrants, rising from three months to at least six months. This decision is seen as an effort to deter more migrants from illegally entering Italy.
This allows Italy to skirt a European Union policy that requires its member countries to consider and process all asylum applicants’ requests within a year of their arrival. Since Albania is not part of the European Union, it could quickly deport the migrants that Italy sends there.
In December 2023, the European Union’s 27 countries also voted on a major overhaul of asylum laws. These changes will make it easier for countries to deport migrants who fail to get asylum. They also direct the European Union to give money to countries that allow more asylum seekers to stay in those countries.
Other approaches
Right now, Italy and Greece bear much of the brunt of migration in the EU.
More than 31,000 undocumented migrants, mainly from Syria, crossed into Greece in 2023, up from 18,000 undocumented people who entered the country in 2022.
The parliament in Greece is considering new laws that would enable the country to issue tens of thousands of undocumented migrants residence and work permits to address labor shortages.
Greece is also pushing the European Union to slap economic sanctions on countries, like Pakistan, that refuse to take back the undocumented migrants that Greece deports to their home countries.
Closer to home, Canada is also experiencing a surge of undocumented migration into Quebec and other places, prompting some Canadians to feel growing anxiety, in part because of perceptions that the sudden population growth is also raising the country’s already-high housing costs. Canada deported 7,232 undocumented people in the first six months of 2023 – a rise compared to the 7,635 deportations Canada carried out in the entire year of 2021.
Canada also announced in December 2023 that it is planning to allow people who entered the country with valid, short-term visas, and who continue living in Canada after these visas expire, to apply for permanent residency. This would mainly affect foreign students and temporary workers.
Back in the U.S., the fight over immigration continues, with Republicans eager to crack down and Democrats who generally want to avoid harsh new standards that could lead to more deportations and mass roundups of undocumented immigrants.
Traditionally, Democrats have been supportive of immigration and the rights of undocumented immigrants in the U.S.
But the wave of migrants who arrive in cities like New York and Chicago without any money, jobs or places to live is severely straining city governments’ capacity and budgets. Local leaders like New York Mayor Eric Adams are pleading with the federal government to help with a crisis that, as Adams said in September 2023, has no clear end in sight.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and analysis to help you make sense of our complex world.
Tara Sonenshine does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
During a campaign stop in New Hampshire Wednesday night, the former president touted his ability to correctly identify animals of different shapes. “I took it, and I aced it,” he told the crowd of supporters. “I think it was 35… 30 questions. And let me tell you, you know, they always show you the first one: a giraffe, a tiger or a whale. ‘Which one is the whale?’”
Trump then proceeded to weaponize his very average performance against President Joe Biden, saying he was sure Biden wouldn’t get far on the test — a tactic Trump has leaned into since bragging about the results of his annual physical while still in office. Spawning countless memes, the former president touted back in 2020 how well he had done on a 10-minute assessment designed to detect mild cognitive impairment (such as early-onset dementia) during an interview with Fox News.
“The first questions are very easy, the last questions are much more difficult. Like a memory question,” Trump preened in the interview. “It’s like, you’ll go, ‘Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.’ So they’d say, ‘Could you repeat that.’ So I said, ‘Yeah. So it’s person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.’”
As Trump supporters stood in the cold waiting for the ex-president to take the stage on Wednesday, the scene echoed his visit to the state just a day before in southern New Hampshire where fans waited in the snow for the presumptive Republican nominee. When speaking Tuesday at the Atkinson Resort & Country Club, Trump lamented that he had to leave the White House after losing the 2020 election and said it “was ridiculous that we had to leave, but we had to leave, we have to follow the laws of our land.”
He quickly doubled down on his 2020 election lies: “They don’t investigate the people that cheated in the election. They investigate the people that understand they cheated and go after them. But they don’t investigate the people who cheated like hell. We have to have fair and free elections.”
Trump, who has achieved the feat of being the only (four-time) indicted former or current president, was charged for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which his own officials at the time claimed was the most secure in U.S. history. As the former president prepared for legal proceedings in ongoing cases against him, Trump swooped a historic win in Iowa on Monday with 51 percent of the caucus vote, defeating former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis by dozens of percentage points.
I Was Diagnosed With Colon Cancer at 32. Here Are the First Symptoms I Had
Julia Ries – January 18, 2024
Raquel A./powerofforever/Getty Images
Raquel A., 33, never guessed she hadcancer, even though she had symptoms that worried her. A few years ago, her bowel movements became increasingly frequent and abnormal, which she figured was due to undiagnosedirritable bowel syndrome (IBS)or afood intolerance. She didn’t have health insurance, so she put off going to the doctor and tried to ease her discomfort withfiber supplementsand dietary changes. After getting a job that offered medical coverage, she saw a primary care physician, who told her she likely just hadanxiety. Her symptoms worsened, and in 2023, she was diagnosed with stage fourcolon cancer. Raquel has been sharing her experience with the condition—as well as what she wants others to know about seeking help as early as possible—onTikTok. Here’s her story, as told to health writer Julia Ries.
I first started having noticeable gastrointestinal issues in 2019, right before the pandemic. I was living with a roommate, and one day we started talking about how I was going to the bathroom all the time. I could go number two 8 to 10 times a day and never feel like I had a complete bowel movement. I told my roommate I suspected I wasn’t getting enough fiber, or perhaps I simply wasn’t eating “healthy enough.” Maybe I had irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), or a gluten or dairy sensitivity. It never occurred to me that I might have cancer.
I didn’t have health insurance. As a result, going to the doctor—unless I had an absolute emergency—wasn’t something I did in my 20s. Instead of checking in with a primary care doctor, I started intermittently taking Metamucil, a fiber supplement, to help regulate my bowel movements and treat random bouts of diarrhea. This helped, at least for a little while.
In 2021, I moved to the greater Seattle area, where I landed a job in the tech industry and, with it, good health insurance. My symptoms remained quiet until they came back in 2022. I was going to the bathroom a lot again, and my bowel movements became uncomfortable. My stools were pencil-thin, sometimes orangish-red in color, and occasionally there’d be a little blood. I got abnormally full after eating. I was bloated, no matter what I ate—I tried being dairy-free, then gluten-free. Looking back, these were major warning signs that something was wrong, and I wouldn’t find out until later that they were classic signs of colorectal cancer.
I scheduled a physical—my first in over a decade—in May of 2023. I told my doctor about the digestive issues I’d been experiencing since 2019: the frequent—and sometimes painful—bowel movements, the bloody stools, the early satiety. I shared that it felt like my symptoms were getting worse, and she said I likely had anxiety—and maybe gas—and scheduled a psychiatric appointment for me.
I believed her. I thought, “Maybe she’s right: I’m worrying too much about these symptoms and should just let it go.” In retrospect, she was incredibly dismissive, which I think was a result of my being so young at the time—I was 32, a woman, and a minority. Statistically speaking, people who fall into any of those categories, let alone all three of them, tend to have their health issues dismissed by doctors.
Three weeks after that exam, I developed severe abdominal pain. It wasn’t just localized to my lower stomach or my side—the pain radiated throughout my entire abdomen and toward my lower back. It was unbearable. I nearly fainted in my apartment. I’m not somebody who’s quick to take medication or go to the doctor, but I knew something was wrong, so I went to the emergency room. Again, I doubted myself and thought that perhaps I was making a big deal out of nothing. Fortunately, my ER physician took my pain seriously—she ordered a CT scan, scheduled an abdominal ultrasound, and ran a full panel of blood work. When the results came in, she sat down and told me they found cancer on my ovaries and liver. I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
I met with an oncologist and had a liver biopsy. That’s when they discovered that the cancer, adenocarcinoma, had originated in my colon and metastasized, or spread, to other organs. I was diagnosed with stage four colorectal cancer. I had an endoscopy and a colonoscopy so the doctors could get a better look—my colorectal cancer was so large and so advanced that they had trouble getting the scope through my colon.
I learned that colorectal cancer is very slow-growing. I could have had cancer for 8 to 10 years, potentially all of my 20s, without knowing it. With colon cancer, you usually don’t start having noticeable (or even severe) symptoms until it’s progressed to stage three or four. Plus, the symptoms, like nausea, constipation, diarrhea, or difficulty going to the bathroom, can be due to so many other conditions—some serious, like ovarian cancer, but others more benign, such as IBS.
After my diagnosis, I started chemotherapy. The cancer had caused a buildup of fluids in my stomach, the source of the bloating, that I had to have drained. I met with a GI specialist who advised me to tweak my diet—for example, I had to limit how much meat I was eating, cut out raw fruits and vegetables, and stick to soft foods, like pudding and mashed potatoes—which immediately improved my bowel movements. I’ve done various blood tests that assess how my cancer is progressing—including a CEA (a marker for colorectal cancer), CA125 (a marker for ovarian cancer), and CA19 (another cancer marker) tests—and have undergone genetic testing to better understand how my genes may have contributed to the cancer.
I continue to get chemotherapy biweekly, though I’ve switched to another chemotherapy drug because I experienced unpleasant side effects with the first type, and the cancer on my liver and lungs wasn’t responding to that treatment. My doctors informed me that eventually the chemo will stop working because my condition is terminal. I don’t qualify for surgery, since my cancer has spread so deeply, but I’m continuing to look into surgical options along with new treatments and clinical trials I can participate in. My chances of reaching survival two years after the diagnosis was 20%. At five years, that drops to 5%, but I’m determined to beat the odds.
Throughout this entire experience, I’ve learned how to advocate for myself. After I received my diagnosis, doctors took my condition very seriously and quickly scheduled multiple procedures and appointments for me—but that wasn’t always the case. I’d been dismissed for years, and even after I started chemotherapy, I felt as though my doctor wasn’t listening to my concerns, so I found a new oncologist who has been very responsive and attentive. I’ve learned how important it is to get a second opinion—all you need is that one doctor who is going to listen and fight for you. You might not find that person right away, but keep pressing: Getting screened could be a matter of life or death.
If I hadn’t followed my intuition—if I skipped going to the ER that day in 2023, or stuck with doctors who said nothing was wrong—there’s a chance I wouldn’t be alive. It’s so easy to doubt yourself, especially if medical professionals are downplaying your symptoms, but if you feel like something is wrong, go with your gut. It’s usually right.
Should you use protein powder before or after a workout? Here’s what a sports nutritionist says
Dan Cooper – January 18, 2024
Person placing scoop of protein powder into a blender.
Everybody agrees that you need protein to build muscle, but there’s still some debate on when you should consume it.
Sports nutritionist Roo Whelan says that the timing is actually less important than making sure you eat adequate amounts. Most studies also suggest that your muscle gains aren’t affected by when you eat your protein-filled snack.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t any benefits to filling up on protein before or after your gym session. We got Whelan to explain how it affects your body.
Benefits of protein before a workout
The main benefit of eating protein before a workout is that it could improve your performance. According to Whelan, downing a shake before you exercise can stabilize blood sugar and provide sustained energy levels.
Consuming protein before you exercise will also ensure that your body has easy access to the amino acids it needs to repair and grow your muscles.
This could minimize muscle breakdown, which happens during strenuous training sessions, and also encourage your muscles to repair themselves during your workout.
Benefits of protein after a workout
According to Whelan, your body is in a heightened state of nutrient absorption after exercise. This means that it’s especially receptive to any protein you consume, using it to immediately repair damaged muscle fibers.
If your protein shake also comes with a serving of sugar and carbs, your body can use this to replenish your diminished glycogen (energy) stores.
It’s not clear how long this heightened state lasts for, but you probably have a few hours before your body returns to normal.
The other benefit of eating your protein after you exercise is that it’s easier on your digestion. Who likes doing burpees on a full stomach?
So should you eat protein before or after a workout?
Studies suggest that there’s minimal difference between consuming protein before or after a workout when it comes to muscle gains. If you want to take advantage of all of the above benefits, you could try eating protein before and after you work out.
But unless you’re a competing athlete, it’s important not to get caught up in the weeds here. If you are trying to build or maintain muscle, the main thing is just getting enough protein regardless of when you consume it.
Looking to up your protein levels without drastically increasing your carb intake? Have a read through our guide to the best protein powders for weight loss
