retired actress, singer and musician (piano, clarinet, sax, guitar and kazoo)
Glasgow
Joined September 2011
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Jenny of Oldstones - cover of Games of Thrones Season 8 Episode 2 song youtu.be/C0xxBGlOqLA via @YouTube
Eloise Kay retweeted
I don't know why I didn't think of this before! The local paper is automatically delivered free to thousands of people in my community.
Since it landed on everyone's doormats I've had about ten people wave in the street and holler, " hey, saw your article!"
1/
Eloise Kay retweeted
During an abuse FFH (trial) the opposing barrister read out my rape counselling notes, laughing, jeering, sneering at me. I was terrified, and humiliated. Trying to give evidence on the stand was horrifying under these conditions.
This (and other) disgusting, barbaric behaviour from supposedly trusted members of the legal profession traumatised me hugely.
'He took my body without my consent. Then the justice system handed him my mind'. Paula Doyle is one of many rape survivors who want the law on using counselling notes in court to be changed trib.al/9ZC84tC
Eloise Kay retweeted
I'm a cardiologist. A 42-year-old mother of two came to my office complaining of jaw pain and crushing fatigue. She ran half-marathons. Her EKG was normal. Another doctor had sent her home with anxiety medication.
When I got her into the cath lab, I found severe microvascular disease — plaque choking the tiniest vessels of her heart, the ones standard angiograms routinely miss.
Her heart had been starving in silence while everyone told her she was stressed.
She is alive today. Too many women like her are not.
Heart disease kills more women than every cancer combined. And medicine is still diagnosing it through a male lens.
84% of cardiologists report having patients in the past year whose heart disease was misdiagnosed by another physician. Women with a STEMI heart attack have a 59% greater chance of being misdiagnosed compared to men. Women with an NSTEMI — 41% greater chance.
The reason is structural. For decades, we screened, tested, and treated women using a template built for men.
Men's heart attacks announce themselves — the crushing chest pain, the clutched fist, the Hollywood collapse. Women's hearts whisper. Crushing fatigue that feels like wearing a lead vest. Jaw pain written off as TMJ. Nausea blamed on a stomach bug. An ache between the shoulder blades blamed on a long week. Shortness of breath blamed on being out of shape.
For years, medicine called these "atypical" symptoms. They are not atypical. They are female-typical. Half of humanity is not a variant.
And the biology runs deeper than symptoms.
Women have smaller hearts and narrower coronary arteries. Plaque doesn't only clog the big highway vessels — it hides in the microvasculature, the tiny branches feeding the heart muscle itself. A woman can have a heart attack with a completely "clean" standard angiogram.
SCAD — spontaneous coronary artery dissection — occurs 90% of the time in women. Often young, fit women with zero traditional risk factors. It's the leading cause of heart attack in women under 50, accounting for roughly one quarter of all cases in that age group. Most doctors have never diagnosed one.
And some of the most dangerous cardiac risk factors are hidden in women's medical histories where no one thinks to look:
Preeclampsia or gestational hypertension doubles to quadruples lifetime heart disease and stroke risk. Pregnancy is the body's first cardiac stress test — and these complications are early warning sirens, not closed chapters.
Autoimmune disease — lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis — far more common in women, turbocharges inflammation and plaque formation at any age.
Cardiovascular disease in women aged 20-44 is projected to surge nearly 50% by 2050.
The youngest patients in my practice keep getting younger.
What every woman should ask her doctor — and what every doctor should be asking:
"Given my pregnancy history, autoimmune status, and family history — what is my full cardiovascular risk?" If they don't ask about preeclampsia or gestational diabetes, volunteer it.
"Should I have an Lp(a) test and a coronary calcium score?" Standard cholesterol panels miss too much. Lp(a) is genetic, one-time, and most women have never been tested.
"My tests came back normal but my symptoms haven't stopped — what's next?" Normal stress tests and angiograms can miss microvascular disease, spasm, and SCAD. Persistent symptoms warrant coronary CT angiography or cardiac MRI.
And if something feels wrong — say these exact words to your doctor: "I am concerned this could be my heart."
That single sentence changes the workup. Do not soften it. Do not apologize for it.
80% of heart disease is preventable. But the playbook has to be built for female biology.
Two decades ago, I wrote one of the first books warning that heart disease was the number one killer of women and that medicine was diagnosing it through a male lens. It was recognized by First Lady Laura Bush at the White House during the early years of the national conversation about women's heart health.
I'm haunted by how much of that book I could republish today unchanged.
The science has advanced. The awareness has grown. But the gap between what we know and what happens in the exam room is still costing women their lives.
Share this with every woman you love — and every doctor who treats them. READ MORE: open.substack.com/pub/afshin…
Eloise Kay retweeted
There is a level of financial fear that comes with chronic illness that most healthy people never have to think about.
You’re paying more money to survive while your body is simultaneously making it harder to earn money.
Because eventually it’s not just symptoms you have to worry about.
Every flare up has consequences attached to it.
Missed work.
Reduced income.
Medical bills.
Recovery time.
Medications and copays.
People talk about chronic illness like it only affects health, but for a lot of people it slowly affects financial stability, independence, and your entire sense of security too.
Eloise Kay retweeted
A thirteen year old girl died of sepsis after her mother, Louise Longster, said she repeatedly asked medics for help but was treated like a 'mum who had been on Google' while her daughter was brushed off as a 'diva teen'.
She said her daughter had been in so much pain she asked her whether she was going to die and said: 'It's haunting that the 13-year-old was the one who was right.'
But a coroner ruled Chloe's death was contributed to by neglect, and the Care Quality Commission (CQC) fined the NHS Trust £1,250 for failing its 'duty of candour'
It’s disgraceful that teen girls are being repeatedly failed due to bias and #misogyny in health care.
Chloe joins a long list of teen girls failed due to hospital neglect
Martha - bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8e1…
Melody - bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lo…
Amy - theguardian.com/uk-news/2016…
Ruth - inquest.org.uk/ruth-szymanki…
How many more 11- 16 girls with be failed before @CQCProf and @wesstreeting get to grips with this crisis ?
Added that treating someone’s life as worth £1250 is an absolute insult @CQCProf and is not a deterrent for any trust
@KenZeroHarm @LabourKeriHowe @PHSO_theFACTS @PHSOmbudsman @c22cuk @ElissaNoves @cjayanetti @martinimarie @JuliaCa20602661 @Beth_Tastic @NicklessColin @redpepper1011 @hopestardust20 @SarahSpoorUK
An NHS Trust which dismissed a schoolgirl suffering from sepsis as a 'diva teen' before she died in 'unbearable pain' has been fined just £1,250. That's an insult.
mol.im/a/15545805 via dailym.ai/android
Eloise Kay retweeted
I've seen this Lancet article going around recently, and to be honest, I find it horrifying. Imagine a researcher in 1965 looking at the rising tide of lung cancer and declaring: "People are just going to smoke. It’s human nature. Let’s stop talking about prevention and just focus on curing cancer."
If we had adopted that strategy ("The situation is hopeless, focus on treatment") it would have led to the deaths of literally tens of millions of people over the last 50 years. Why? Because medicine still cannot fix the damage smoking causes. We didn't beat lung cancer with chemotherapy; we beat it by taxing tobacco and banning smoking in restaurants.
Yet, this is exactly the strategy we are currently adopting for Long COVID. We are told that mass infection is inevitable, masks are "too hard," and our only hope lies in finding a cure for a complex neuro-immune disease that we have virtually no understanding of whatsoever.
Never in the history of medicine have we successfully dealt with a public health issue by abandoning prevention. A few examples:
1. In the 1950s, highways were slaughterhouses. We didn't solve this by training better trauma surgeons to stitch people back together. We solved it with airbags and seatbelts. If we had relied solely on "better treatments" for car crash victims, the death toll would still be astronomical.
2. When people got sick of condoms, we didn't say, "Oh well, let everyone get AIDS." We continued to encourage them, and also developed PrEP. We didn't abandon the goal of stopping HIV transmission; we just built better tools.
3. We didn't stop Cholera by inventing better rehydration fluids. We cleaned the water. We built sewers. They didn't ask every citizen to "boil their water responsibly"; they engineered the risk out of the system.
Currently, we are accepting the mass disablement of children and adults based on the arrogant assumption that future medicine will be able to "fix" their broken immune systems. But ask anyone with any chronic illness: medicine is terrible at treating it, let alone fixing it.
To bet our children’s futures on a non-existent cure while refusing to implement the one thing that actually works (prevention) is appaling.
For those who think COVID is a hoax or a cold, I can sort of understand not caring about prevention - because at least it is internally consistent. But people who understand the risk and still don't emphasize prevention are either immoral or just haven't thought too deeply about the problem.
Eloise Kay retweeted
I had the following horrific experience today during a faculty meeting. I'd had a zoom call a few days ago with someone who was using an AI secretary - it recorded the call and emailed both of us a summary, complete with action items, etc. Oh that could be useful, I thought.
So I clicked the link in the email to see the summary. It asked me to login with my google account. I thought, what's the harm. (Famous last words!) I glanced at the summary, deleted the email and forgot all about it.
Today we had a department meeting about sensitive topics. Then the AI secretary joined the call and announced to everyone via chat that it's there to help *me*, that it will be recording, transcribing, and analyzing the conversation. I panicked and logged off the zoom call, joining the meeting from a colleague's computer. But that didn't kick the AI off, it was still in the meeting! I don't know how it got in the meeting in the first place (perhaps it read the zoom link in my google calendar? I didn't think I gave it access!...). The chair had to manually boot it out of zoom, and even then I wasn't sure that it wasn't still recording us. How mortifying! (After the meeting, I googled how to get rid of it.)
Eloise Kay retweeted
I would offer that Alex Pretti putting his body—with his hands up—between a woman and the BP agent who had just violently shoved her into the snow, offer stark competing visions of manhood. Pretti, a nurse caring for veterans, who took a face full of pepper spray to shield that woman, is a much better masculine ideal that the masked coward shoving the woman and executing a man on his knees. MAGA may venerate the latter, but most people in a healthy society want the former.
Eloise Kay retweeted
“I burst into tears during a RECOVER-TLC meeting and quickly turned off my camera when a parent, suggested scheduling the study during summer break so it would not interfere with schoolwork. I sat there listening to my daughter moaning in pain from the simple act of shifting in bed; schoolwork had vanished from her world three years earlier.”
We urgently need to include severe Long COVID patients in research. They are already invisible to many, and sadly to research as well. Excluding them may cost us understanding the disease; they hold the answers to Long COVID.
I wrote for @thesicktimes
thesicktimes.org/2026/01/13/…
Eloise Kay retweeted
There's some great stuff in here.
READ AND SHARE!!
Our letter to WHO, signed by over 2,300, calls for respirator use in healthcare to protect patients and staff.
Covered by Kat Lay in The Guardian:
theguardian.com/global-devel…
Eloise Kay retweeted
The recent academic article defending FGM in the British Medical Journal is shocking. Their labelling of the call to end this practice as "Western sensationalism" speaks to how much further there is to go in the fight to end this form of severe, violent harm to women and girls all over the world.
CUSW were honoured to host Nimco Ali OBE, a leading activist and FGM survivor, at our second speaker event earlier this month. Her comments on how and why FGM is wrongly defined and defended as a "cultural practice" were especially insightful and clear.
We held this event early on due to a shared view among our members that FGM is not adequately discussed and understood, despite its widespread nature and the serious harm it inflicts. A women-only event consisting almost entirely of an in-depth Q&A presented an opportunity for our members and attendees to share thoughts and learn from an inspiring leading figure about this form of sex-based violence and oppression suffered by women and girls.
The Five Foundation, co-founded by Nimco in 2019, does invaluable work campaigning to end FGM as well as organising funding and advocation for grassroots organisations.
@NimkoAli
@TheFiveFound
@bmj_latest
Eloise Kay retweeted
Today, in a #LongCovid space, a patient told a fierce truth. We can hear it among ourselves, when we talk to each other. Many, a great many, of us are declining. It is brutally obvious to us. Her point was that even two years ago we were sick as hell but still able to make things happen. Big things. Even from our beds or couches. Things that are now completely, utterly out of our reach. We have been begging you for years but once again, please protect yourselves and your family, especially your kids, from SARS-CoV-2. Trust us. You don't want this and you don't want this for your kids. 😭😭😭
Eloise Kay retweeted
New drone surveys show that bird flu has wiped out nearly half of the females in the planet’s biggest elephant seal population. The staggering loss highlights how rapidly the virus is spreading through wildlife and how much remains unknown about its long-term impact on marine ecosystems.
See what researchers uncovered: bit.ly/49BmYId
📸 Connor Bamford / British Antarctic Survey
Eloise Kay retweeted
At the entrance to Kyiv's memorial park, a haunting sculpture depicts a very thin girl with a very sad look and a handful of wheat. Behind her stands a giant Candle of Remembrance of the Holodomor, a man-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians.
In the aftermath of World War I, Ukraine was independent. However, in 1919, the Soviet Union forcibly annexed the nation. Ukrainians, yearning for self-determination, were seen as a threat to Moscow's imperial ambitions.
In 1932, not wanting to lose control of Europe's main source of grain, Stalin confiscated the grain-producing land from Ukrainian peasants and took all the grain, creating an artificial famine. The goal was to "teach Ukrainians a lesson" so they would no longer oppose Moscow. The people who produced the most grain in Europe were left without a crumb of bread.
The height of this horrific event was in the spring of 1933, when millions of Ukrainians perished from hunger.
My late grandfather was a child, only 9, during the Holodomor. He recounted witnessing people starving to death in the streets, or just collapsing, their bodies eventually collected and disposed of in mass graves. Both dead and those still dying. In rare moments when he'd open up about it, it was very clear that the event deeply scarred him for life.
To conceal the extent of the genocide, Stalin's regime erased evidence, executed census takers, and resettled russian populations in Ukrainian villages. For decades, the Holodomor remained a silenced history, buried beneath layers of Soviet propaganda.
The Holodomor at that time broke the Ukrainian resistance, but it made the desire for Ukraine's independence eternal, forever imprinting it in our DNA.
As russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine continues, the specter of the Holodomor looms large. Every fourth Saturday of November, we light a candle to remember the victims of the Holodomor. This year, I ask you to light a candle with us and share information about the bloody genocide of the Ukrainian people that is happening yet again.
Eloise Kay retweeted
"She suddenly remembered she’d left her phone in the car. We stepped outside to get it - we’d only walked two or three meters from the gate when suddenly... There was no sound, no whistle, nothing. Just a flash, a boom - and then we were already on the ground: she was in front of me, and I was behind her. When I started shouting, 'Karyna!', she couldn’t answer me. I crawled over to her, because I couldn’t stand on my leg, and realized that my child was most likely gone."
On 19 November, Berestyn, Kharkiv region, said goodbye to 17-year-old European kickboxing champion Karyna Bakhur, who was killed by a Russian strike on 18 November.
Her father, Vitalii Bakhur, says that on 19 November his daughter was supposed to leave for Austria to compete.
📷: Suspilne Kharkiv
Eloise Kay retweeted
Nothing short of journalistic malpractice to not mention this rise is driven by people moving off legacy benefits and onto UC. If there was any code of standards among your profession you'd be fucking struck off as would most of your colleagues.
More than 4million Universal Credit claimants now have no requirement to work - that's predominantly people who are sick along with students and those with caring responsibilities
The rise is extraordinary - it's gone up from from 2.896million in October 2024 to 4.027million in October 2025, a **39% rise** in the space of a year
The government has long-grassed any significant welfare reforms after being forced to abandon changes following a mass revolt by Labour MPs. Few think they are possible given Starmer's fragile authority
There is a putative welfare bill but there is as yet no date for it and no clarity on what will actually be in it
In the meantime the numbers continue to rise exponentially
Eloise Kay retweeted
The Times: “1 million more claim UC without looking for work.”
Reality: They were predominantly moved from legacy benefits by the DWP.
That’s managed migration, not mass laziness. Stop moralising admin. It is extremely damaging, actively worsening the nation’s mental health.
ALT Alt text: Screenshot of a Times news article titled “One million more claim universal credit without need to look for job.” The subheading reads, “Number claiming Britain’s main out-of-work benefit reaches record high of 8.3 million — almost half of whom are not required to seek work.” The article notes that the total number of Universal Credit claimants has risen from 7.2 million to 8.3 million in the past year. Above the text is an image showing a phone screen displaying “Universal Credit – Sign in to your account” alongside a person holding a purse and inserting a coin. The tone of the headline suggests a behavioural issue rather than an administrative migration of claimants.
Eloise Kay retweeted
So how can you dump sewage into the environment for 454,155 hours in just one year, and fail to meet your customer satisfaction targets, fail to meet your per capita consumption targets, fail to meet your supply interruption targets, fail to meet your DRINKING WATER QUALITY targets, fail to meet your internal sewer flooding targets, fail to meet you serious pollution targets, and get fined £2 million for "reckless" pollution and still get a four * rating?
Apparently the minister for water Emma Hardy has the answer.
Water minister has heaped praise on Severn Trent for its “continued commitment to environmental performance”. Last year ST dumped human waste into the environment
62,085 times
gov.uk/government/speeches/w…
