| No stress relief for stress writer and Organized mind, organized life |
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Editor's note: Last year, CNN Health chronicled the breast cancer journey of our stress columnist, Amanda Enayati, in a series of five essays spanning from diagnosis to recovery. Today, she writes about the uneasy closure afforded by her recent reconstructive surgery, more than four years after diagnosis. The original essays can be found here.(CNN) -- "I see here you'll be staying overnight," says the woman at the surgery check-in, fixing me with a soothing beam.I'm sure my husband is making apologetic faces behind my back. I don't care. I've been at this counter before. Last time, it felt like I barely got out with my life. No Hotel California for me this time.The mood is understandably lighter this round. Last time, they were removing one heck of a cancerous tumor. This time, they're reconstructing one breast and lifting the other one to match. Why, it's darn near a party.We move to the next window, where they place white plastic bracelets on both my wrists. [Read the full article] (CNN) -- Two women with untreatable eye diseases said they had dramatic improvements in their vision after injections of human embryonic stem cells, making it the first documented time these controversial cells have helped someone."This is a big step forward for regenerative medicine, said Dr. Steven Schwartz at UCLA's Jules Stein Eye Institute. "It's nowhere near a treatment for vision loss, but it's a signal that embryonic stem-cell based strategies may work."Schwartz added several caveats - that the study was preliminary, only in two patients, and that it's difficult to measure vision in low-vision patients. But even so he was "thrilled and excited" about the study.Schwartz and his colleagues published their study in The Lancet. For each patient, stem cells derived from an embryo were injected into their retinal tissue. They had to take anti-rejection drugs for a short period so their eyes wouldn't reject the foreign tissue. [Read the full article] With more than 800 people waiting, Pastor Rick Warren took them one by one and immersed them in the church's baptism pool. During this spiritual rite at Saddleback Church, the pastors hold the people briefly underwater, and then pull them out."On that particular day, I was baptizing 858 people," Warren told his congregation last fall. "That took me literally four hours.""But I thought, I'm fat," he said. "I'm a terrible model of this. I can't expect our people to get in shape unless I do."Warren, considered one of the most influential pastors in the country, delivered the inaugural prayer for President Obama in 2009 and wrote the best-selling book "The Purpose Driven Life." Now, he was embarking on a new mission: Curbing the obesity epidemic at church.Warren seems like an unlikely man to lead an anti-obesity crusade. A ruddy man with plastic frame glasses, he has admitted to gaining 90 pounds over the last 30 years and failing at various yo-yo diets. [Read the full article] 
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