Life, the Universe and Everything

The alarm went off early, too early for me, and I was surprised I had even been able to fall asleep the night before. It was like the anticipation before leaving on a long-awaited vacation, but a lot worse. I got out of bed, dressed and we drove from the hotel in Trevose to the hospital in Bristol.  We got there just before 9AM.

Typical hospital admission: ID, credit card, paying even more money, wristband.

I went to another wing of the hospital and had some blood drawn for some labs.  I sat there for what felt like hours, all alone, wondering when someone would remember me.  It was only twenty minutes.  The phlebotomist pinched me as the needle went in– the most painless experience I’ve ever had with a needle, though I did get a big bruise from it later.

After the blood draw, we went upstairs to a waiting room, and after about five minutes, a nurse brought us back to a pre-op prep area.  I took off my clothes, put on the gown, the socks with the grippy stuff on the bottom, a bathrobe.  We waited for at least an hour while the morning surgery finished up. To keep me occupied, my friend Melynda and I watched Nom nom nom nom babies for about the eightieth time. It’s not a work of musical genius, but it made me laugh and helped keep my mind from jumping into the deep end of anxiety.

Shortly after 12, the nurse came in. The morning surgery had been finished and now it was my turn. She took me to the surgical prep area: I got a bed, they started my IV, gave me an anti-coagulant and put compression stockings on my legs. There were all the usual consent forms, the one from the surgeon I signed before she even finished reading it to me. I wasn’t about to back out at this point. After all the busy work, I was just waiting to get wheeled into the OR and I started tearing up. I’ll be honest– I was scared. I was afraid of how much things would hurt after, afraid that I’d wake up in the middle of the fucking thing, and well, just afraid. This was a big step and I was laying there, all alone. One of the OR nurses came over to me and asked how I was, handed me a tissue and talked and joked with me to help keep my mind off it. I can’t, for the life of me, remember his name, but that had to have been one of the most valuable services I think I’ve ever received from a nurse and words fail me in trying to express my gratitude for his kindness.

After a couple more minutes, around 1:15, the anesthesiologist came back, pushed something into my IV, and that’s all I remember.

I woke up around 5:15 (the only reason I remember the times is that there was a clock facing me) in a recovery room. I couldn’t really feel anything, the way it always is when you wake up after sleeping– nerves slowly start waking back up and you can start moving your hands and arms and head. The surgeon was there, and she told me not to move my legs, or even try. Based on the kind of surgery, they didn’t want the area to get compressed or squished by my thighs, nor any stress placed on any of the muscles or stitched incisions. So I laid there. I had a vague feeling of cold around my crotch– ice packs, but not much else. I was there for maybe 15 or 30 minutes, just long enough to fully wake up, and they wheeled me to my room.

Christine and Melynda were there, a nurse hooked up my IV, and I got my morphine drip. I had an Ensure milkshake-thing, those protein drinks that keep you alive when you can’t really eat solid food. I tried watching movies– I actually felt pretty decent, but then pain would creep up, I’d press the button, and the morphine would knock me right out.

I had the morphine until Wednesday, and I remember very little of that time. I’m pretty sure I talked to Christine about several things, including getting a puppy, but I think I hallucinated most or all of that conversation. I was on twitter, too, but I have no idea whether any of what I said over those days was even intelligible.

In the periods of lucidity, despite the pain medication, despite the bandages, despite the packing in my vagina, despite the not hardly moving at all, I could feel that things were different. I couldn’t tell exactly how different, but I did know that there wasn’t a penis attached to my body anymore. A few nerves woke up, nerves that used to be on the outside and were now on the inside of my body. It was weird, but not necessarily in a bad way.

On Wednesday, I was able to get up and walk around the floor of the hospital where my room was– one turn around the perimiter of the nurses’ station, what would take a person about 30 seconds, took me nearly ten minutes on a walker. But I was up, walking and feeling mostly good.

I was reluctant to take the Vicodin they were giving me due to my history with it. I can’t really explain, other than to say that the thought of taking Vicodin again was about as unpalatable to me as chewing Tylenol. I started having problems with nausea, which I think, was at least partly due to the pain– not taking any pain medication at all made it very hard to keep food down.

By the time I was discharged Friday afternoon, I’d not had any solid food for a week, but at least the nausea was starting to subside. I managed to get into a wheelechair, and from the wheelchair to the car without too much pain, but the car ride back to the hotel was pure agony. It was very uncomfortable to sit (I’m sure you can imagine), and those inflatable donut cushions didn’t really provide support in the places I needed it, so I balanced, somewhat precariously on several pillows. When we made it to the turnpike, I found myself in the worst traffic jam I’ve ever seen– parts of it were shut down for construction.

Having not been on any pain medications, and not being terribly comfortable to start with, sitting in stop and go traffic for thirty minutes was horrible. And we’d only gone about one mile. We had about six more to go. I started crying. My pain levels had gone up and thinking of sitting in the car for several hours was enough to make me lose my shit. Christine, completely out of ideas, started driving down the shoulder of the highway, cutting back into traffic as necessary. All told, the drive back to the hotel, which should have taken about 16 minutes, took over an hour and a half.

We got to the hotel and despite all my reservations against it, I took a Vicodin and drank another protein shake. And of course, I was completely fine. The medication didn’t make me sick, and I had an easier time keeping food down now that I wasn’t feeling so horrible the entire time. We stayed in Trevose for a couple nights– me laying in bed, taking Vicodin every few hours, drinking protein shakes, watching movies and trying not to laugh at anything funny because it hurt to laugh. I had to empty my catheter every few hours as they’d capped it before I left the hospital. So I still had to “pee”, for some definition of the word that didn’t actually involve getting out of bed.

On Sunday the 11th, we transferred to a hotel in New Hope, closer to my doctor’s office where I’d be having my followup appointments. That ride, thankfully, was completely uneventful.

On Tuesday the 13th I had my first followup visit with the doctor. They removed the last of the bandages, removed the packing from my vagina and I got to see… what looked like someone had detonated a stick of dynamite in my underwear. Lest you think I’m unhappy with the results, that’s not the case, not in the slightest. One week after that kind of surgery, though, well, nothing is going to look pretty, no matter how good your doctor might be. The incisions had skin glue on them (which is a blackish color) to keep them from tearing open, some areas had turned black from a lack of adequate blood flow post surgery. Everyone is different, blood vessels are in different places, and sometimes you just don’t get adequate flow. It happens, and the doctor assured me that everything would heal up and even the areas where some of the tissue had died would eventually grow over. She said it wouldn’t look the same in several months and not to worry prematurely– while there is a chance the cosmetic appearance would be a little assymetrical, I didn’t have much to worry about functionally speaking and any problems could always be addressed later on.

So, here I am, typing this about six weeks after that doctor visit and she was right– most of it has healed up. There’s one section I’m a little concerned about– that small assymetry, but honestly, it’s not horrible. Depending on how it heals, in six or nine months, I’ll consider whether it’s going to require a revision, but it needs at least that long to heal, for all the swelling to dissipate and for us to really know what we’re dealing with.

Functionally speaking, everything works– I can pee properly, or as properly as any woman can pee– one thing I didn’t know until I had my consult is that urinating with a vulva can be messy– it’s not unusual for it to get on your buttocks or part of your thigh. I don’t mean that peeing is analogous to a whirlygig lawn sprinkler, but it’s not like you can write your name in the snow, either.

Over the last several weeks, I’ve had the typical ups and downs– my surgeon warned me that a post-op depression is common and so I’ve been taking my medication, but there are times where mutilated is exactly the word I want to describe how I’m feeling. It’s an odd thing to have absent parts of my body that I’ve lived with for more than 30 years.  And now they’re gone. I’m happy they’re gone, and I like how my clothes fit, and I like… well, I like how things turned out. But there’s still a bit of residual sadness, a mourning, a final mourning, for what I left in that OR– those last vestiges of that person I was.

I don’t mean that I want to go back to the way things were, or that I’d undo my surgery, I just mean that sometimes, in the dark, when everyone else is asleep, I cry a little for the way things had to go in order for me to get here. I think Dolly put it best: “Redmeption comes in many shapes with many kinds of pain.” It definitely does. I feel better, life feels better, but it hurt me, a lot, to get here.

Now, lest this seem misleading, I don’t know that surgery made everything better, but I am sort of… happy.  Not happy exactly, not the way some people use the word, especially since I know there’s still a substantial amount of self-loathing in there, but, well, things are different.  And that’s what I was counting on.  Things are different.  This tipped my life upside down and that’s all I really expected it to do.  It’s a different matter whether I’ll be able to set things upright and be happy with the end result.  I’m hoping I will, since that was kind of the point of doing this. It’s a bit like re-modeling a house– you knock down a lot of what you had and hope that what you can rebuild will be worth living in when you’re all finished.

Over the last couple years I’ve become very bitter at God and life and the Universe for all of this– I spent probably $30000 out of pocket on medical expenses last year when I can’t pay pre-existing medical bills– I’m in the hole $15000 from my suicide attempt in 2010.  My wife and I have a substantial amount of credit card debt, very little money left at the end of the month and no real way to ever get anything in a savings account.  We’re thinking of selling our condo back in California just to make it easier to make ends meet here.  So all of that sucks. Everyone it seems, has money trouble these days, and while it may have been smarter to use the money to pay the pre-exisiting debt, to pay off some credit cards, I don’t think I could have survived much longer, not if I had to stay the course with the way things were.

Sometimes, at night, when I’m crying, the other thing I think of is Frodo, with Sam on the slopes of Mount Doom, after the ring’s been destroyed and the land tears itself apart all around them. “It’s done, Sam,” Frodo says. And while I’m holding a lot of conflicting thoughts in my head in those dark hours, being able to say that to myself, that it’s done, does help, even if only a little, even if it doesn’t cure every ill.

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*I stole the title of this post from a dear friend who stole it from someone else.  That makes it okay, right?

After the Morphine

It’s been brought to my attention that I’ve failed to update the blog here and let people know that I am, in fact, alive.  So, here I am, alive.

It’s been just over three weeks since my surgery, and things are going, but going slowly.  I can walk, but not easily.  I can sit, but not comfortably.  Sleep is a hard-won commodity and I end up with a lot more urine on me than I’m used to having.  These things are all going to get better– they’ve already improved a lot in the short time since all the bandages, packing and catheter were removed. I’m mostly off pain medication now, too.  I take Tylenol from time to time as I need it, but I no longer take anything like clockwork.

In other words, I’m doing well.  Or at least as well as you might expect from someone who’s had a relatively major surgery.  Things are still settling, though, physically and emotionally, so there will be another post in which I say more about everything.  Rest assured, though, it is coming.

Surgery Prep, Part II

I just got off the phone with the hospital, confirmed my check-in time for Monday, and now I’m starting what I expect to be the longest weekend of my life.  Waiting.  Just waiting.   For someone who usually hates Mondays, Dec 5th will not come soon enough.  I have things to do and I know I’ll stay plenty busy doing laundry and packing up any last minute necessities, but the time is dragging by so slowly already, that I can’t imagine the next two and a half days feeling like anything other than dog years.

The closest thing it reminds me of is Fred Clark’s post about Holy Saturday.  My life has been an endless period of waiting for this Monday, this turning point in my own calendar.  There were times where I thought I would never see this, as though the timer had stopped and would be stopped for years– there was none of what Fred calls “Sunday certainty.”  Only hope.  Then it started, moving, closer and closer, and December couldn’t get here fast enough, and where did all that time go?  The days have passed, the weeks, the months, and now, I’m at the cusp. It feels a bit like a dream, like I’ll wake up on Monday and realize that I dreamt all of this and that I am, of all people, most to be pitied.  I feel like I can’t speak with the certainty that this will happen because it hasn’t and my one fear, if I have a fear around surgery, is that it won’t happen.

From what I understand, I’ll be on morphine until Thursday and discharged from the hospital on Friday.  I’ll post an update here as soon as I can, but it may almost a week before you hear from me again.

Until then.

Grieving

I’m going to be repeating a bit from a previous post with this short entry, I expect, but what I’m feeling seems to be something familiar, just more acute as the surgery date gets closer and closer– a very deep sense of loss.  That God is not God.  That when I wrote the check for the surgeon to book the OR for that day in December, I was saying, in effect, “I no longer trust you to take care of this.  I trusted you for too long and you’ve let me down.  I’m doing this now.  I’m taking charge.  I’m in control.  I’ll solve this problem.”

It’s good, of course, to take control of one’s life, to make one’s own decisions.  I can’t go through life letting other people tell me what to do, or who to be, or how to be.  But I hoped, I prayed for so many long long years and every day, every time I woke up or cried, another little part of me felt like it broke or died.  And finally, I gave up.  Enough was enough.  God had let me down.

Maybe, you might say, God just fixed things so I’d have all that money so I could get surgery in the first place, but, and this is what gets me– those same people claim that God has some plan for this, some plan for my life.  If my life is part of someone’s plan, then there’s going to be some explanation required.  It’s cruel to plan a person’s life around this kind of pain.  I don’t want to believe in a God that requires pain and suffering like this any more than I want to believe in a God who hates us so much that we’d be sent to hell for being as he made us.

I’ve made my own meaning out of this pain.  This isn’t the result of God’s plan, this was my own effort to make something good out of what has happened to me.  This blog is part of that– an effort to tell people about how this particular experience was for me.  It would be different for others, but maybe, just maybe, someone, somewhere, would get something from it.  Helping someone else in that same pain, or realizing that they’re not alone, or maybe helping someone understand what their loved one was going through– those were always my hopes for this place.  In that, I think, this blog has been successful.  I’ve met a few people that decided to use my Contact page and we’ve talked, exchanged stories, commiserated.  I’ve become friends with more than a few people who stumbled upon me in this corner of the internet.

But for all the goodness that I’ve manufactured from this, there is a grief– a grief for the things I was told about God that I no longer believe, a grief for a life that I wanted to have and couldn’t, a grief for a substitute life that I tried living and couldn’t abide.  There is grief for the things I believed that I now see to be lies.  I invested so much time in that false hope, in that belief that I could be a man if I just prayed harder, or went to church one more time, or read my Bible just a bit more.  It breaks my heart to think of all the life that has been stolen from this woman who has spent most of her adult life trying to be someone she is not.

I am moving forward, I am taking a very bold step forward, but there is a wreckage behind me and I weep for the lives within it.  That is the legacy of my church.  And I grieve for it.

Surgery Prep, Part 1

There are a couple of things that I need to do before surgery, in addition to getting the last of my money together– I have some electrolysis to finish, a physical I need to get, and at some point, I need to go off hormones.

The first I’ve been doing, and absolutely hate.  The second, I’m not too worried about.  The third might be as bad as electrolysis.

First, let me explain how absolutely horrible genital electrolysis really is.  Imagine, if you can, having a small, very thin probe, almost like a sewing needle, slid along the hair shaft and into the skin, until the tip of the probe sits down inside the hair follicle (this doesn’t really hurt, not usually anyway).  Now imagine that there’s a jolt of electric current and heat delivered via that probe into the hair follicle (and by way of collateral damage, some of the surrounding tissue).

That hurts. In fact, it doesn’t just hurt, it fucking hurts.  There are few things in the world worse than this– I’d rather break a bone than have to go through the hours of electrolysis that I’ve already had to endure.  In fact, having this done on the genitals hurts so bad that I basically had to stop doing it.  At one point, I was terrified I wouldn’t have enough hair cleared before surgery.

Fortunately (or not) for me, my surgeon offers electrolysis through her office which can be done under a local anesthetic.  That sounds great, right?  Except it isn’t.  I’ve had locals before– a small syringe, small needle and what feels kind of like a bee sting as the lidocaine enters the tissue.  I was prepared for that.  It would hurt like a motherfucker to get stung on the crotch, but that would fade pretty quick and then electrolysis would be pain free.

Except that’s not how this works.  The first day I go to the doctor’s for electro, she’s prepping the anesthetic and I make the mistake of looking over at her as she approaches me to administer it.  She was holding a gigantic barrel syringe, probably 20 or 30 ml, and on the end of it was a spinal needle that had to be 12 inches long.  I realize that terror can mess up our perceptions, but each time I’ve been back and had the misfortune to see this, it looks the same–30 ml syringe, big ass needle.

The needle is inserted at one side of the midline, next to the penis, and pushed down towards the testes.  It’s excruciating.  I usually scream.  As the needle is slowly withdrawn, the anesthetic is injected, which adds to the sting.  And screaming.  As the end of the needle nears the insertion site, the doctor changes the angle, pushes the needle back in a few inches, and injects more anesthetic in the surrounding tissue.  I’m usually crying at this point.

Then, the doctor switches sides.  Always the right side first, then the left.  On the left side, there are three tracks for the needle, one that crosses the midline, and two that mirror the right side.  More screaming.  More crying.

The lidocaine contains a small amount of epinephrine, and so I get the shakes afterwards, my heart pounding.  I looked over at the electrologist one time after this was all over and she looked like someone just killed her puppy.  I’m not sure what that meant.  Another time, I said that it always feels like the needle was coming out through my scrotum at the other end.  She responded that sometimes it does.  The amount of blood they wipe up after the injections make me wonder if she isn’t serious.

After that’s done, though, the electrolysis is a piece of cake.  The injections last for about two and a half hours, after which time the doctor usually does a second round of injections.  More screaming and crying, but we get another two hours of electrolysis out of the day.

All told, it ends up being about five minutes of pure agony to not feel four hours of electrolysis.  I’m not entirely convinced that it’s a fair trade, but I can at least manage the injections– after a while the electrolysis becomes completely unbearable so this is probably the only way I can manage to get all of it done.

Driving home, the last of the lidocaine usually wears off, and my crotch takes on a low level itching and burning feeling for about three days.  Plus I get a series of bruises that turn almost my entire groin purple.  The bruising takes about a week to really go away, but the pain usually lasts for up to three weeks or more.  Around the time it actually stops hurting, I realize I have to go back to the doctor for more.

Once, upon realizing I had to go back in two weeks, I broke down in tears.  “It hurts so bad,” I whimpered over and over to Christine as she put her arms around me.  My psychologist likened it to post-traumatic stress.  I think that might be a bit extreme, but even the memory makes me want to cry.  He may not be too far off the mark after all.

Having said all of that, it should seem pretty serious to say that going off hormones is as bad as electrolysis.  Hormones, breasts, genitals, don’t make the woman, but I’ll be honest– a part, at least, of my identity is tied up in my body and how it looks and going off hormones– I’m terrified about how it’s going to affect me.  I’m not worried about my thyroid cartilage growing back or any such thing, but I am afraid that I’ll lose some of the fullness my breasts have managed to pick up in the last year and the thought of not having all that estrogen swirling around in my brain, is well, scary. I feel a little unstable when I hit the troughs in my estrogen cycle, I imagine that being off of it for several weeks will be very stressful.

On the plus side, it will never be as bad as detransitioning– going off estrogen doesn’t mean the testosterone is coming back– there won’t be any way for my body to make it, except for some low level production by the adrenal glands.  I am a bit concerned about being stuck in PMS mode for several weeks, though.

Knowing that post-surgical depression is common, that it will probably happen, will hopefully make it easier to deal with, but I also know that I’m not always so great at handling my depression.  I have some plans in place to help, including regular appointments with my shrink, but really, I hope that having my body the way it should be, or at least as close as I’ll ever get to how it should have been, will be no small comfort.

Falling Off the Map

I realize that updates on this blog have become increasingly sparse– there actually are reasons behind that.  In fact, I blame smartphones.

I think smartphones are the perfect scapegoats– for when you can’t get a gps signal and get lost, it spontaneously restarts and “I never got that text message from you”, or in this case, “I don’t really need to use a computer at home anymore, and so don’t really have much time to sit, think, and blog.”  For some reason, I think best when typing with all ten fingers– blogging is too cumbersome to do on the phone, and too many times I’ve had long comments eaten whole, and so I mostly avoid writing anything too precious.  Which equates to less writing overall.

I’ve also been involved writing elsewhere– some erotica, and lately, some horror.  For some reason, fiction is coming easier to me these days and since this blog more or less took the place of my journal, there just hasn’t been anything to write.

Anyway, all my whining aside, I’ve been thinking of something else over the last few weeks– this blog was always an outlet for frustration, anger, fear, anxiety– for those things that were bothering me as I transitioned.  As I’m nearing a point in my life where most of the physical work of transition is done, I’m starting to think the place this blog has had in my life is becoming smaller and smaller.  I have a set of fears and anxieties that are more or less constant, especially around surgery, but most of my social anxieties have become a thing of the past.  Or so I think.

This blog was always a place where I could feel understood, partly because this was my universe– gender non-conformity was (and still is) the norm here.  But now I feel less and less need to retreat from others, and I find myself coming here less and less.  I expect at some point I’ll cease coming here altogether, but that time hasn’t arrived yet.  It probably will happen, though and when it does, I’ll try to give you a heads-up.

One of the other things I’ve noticed about my own writing here is that the focus evolved– I started out writing about social activism and eventually, realizing I could only ever speak for myself, started limiting myself to those experiences.  The “Trans” category is the most used, at least recently, and that has almost always meant that I was speaking from a place of my own knowledge, my own experience.

But I’m finding I need to “identify” as trans less and less, and so need that category for my writing less and less.  I seem to be sitting in a headspace now that feels female, without necessarily being trans female.  Some of my online presences elsewhere don’t refer to this blog, or even mention that I’m trans, and some of the motivation for that, I think, can be traced to my previous post– if we’re not intimate, you don’t need to know whether I’ve had surgery, hell, whether I’m even trans in the first place.  The only time it does come up is when I’m speaking from my own experiences to a new audience, a group of people who haven’t realized that not everyone in the world reacts favorably to the word “tranny” or making fun of people that don’t identify as cisgender.

In those cases, I out myself, but that doesn’t seem to overshadow the rest of me.  If anything, because it’s such an infrequently seen part of my persona, it seems that people forget as soon as the discussion is over.  I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.

I know that I get clocked a lot more than I realize, I know that more people than I know have figured out that there’s something “up” with me, but most are too afraid to say anything.  They whisper, they talk, but for the most part now, I don’t care.  I know enough people who don’t care, either, and that generally makes up for any worry I have over not being perfect.

Yes, I’m a Transsexual; No, That Doesn’t Entitle You to be an Asshole

“So, have you had the surgery yet?”

“Are you still equipped?”

“Do you still have a penis?”

I have, at one time or another, been asked those questions by near strangers. I’m going to start by saying that such questions, no matter how innocent or ignorant the askers’ intentions, are hurtful and rude. There is no excuse for behaving in such a way. If you wouldn’t walk up to a stranger and ask them about their genitalia, then it’s no more appropriate (and you’re no more entitled to an answer) just because I’m a trans woman.

We gender people every minute of every day—that’s a man; that’s a woman; that person in the suit with the hat is a man; that person in the dress is a woman, no wait, it’s a man. We identify and categorize people into gender categories without needing to see what’s in their pants or under their skirts. So, if you’re capable of gendering every other human being you meet without having to grope their genitals, then you’re capable of figuring out that I’m a woman. There’s no need to ask questions— my gender presentation, like my gender identity, is unambiguous.

I’ve had people ask why I don’t put MtF on my social networking profiles under gender, or why don’t I have a, I don’t know, a disclaimer or something in my profile about being transsexual. You really want to know why? It’s because that’s not anyone’s business except for the people with whom I’m intimate. I don’t need a billboard, a private conversation with the right person will usually suffice.

You see, this would still be a point of contention for me whether I were pre-op, post-op or non-op: it is simply no one’s business unless I choose to make it otherwise. Just because I post pictures of myself in various states of undress on Twitter doesn’t mean that we’re lovers, doesn’t mean that we’re friends with benefits, and certainly doesn’t mean I’ll spread my legs for you. Even if we are friends, that still doesn’t mean I’ll let you fuck me. So, if your chances of getting me in bed are somewhere between slim and none, does it matter whether I’ve got Cthulu himself in my panties?

I hope and expect my friends would respect the dignity of every person, whether those friends or those people are cis, trans, non-binary, het, gay, queer, lesbian, bi, pan or… If you believe a person’s value lies only inside their underwear, or in who they’re attracted to, then I’m the wrong person, hell, the wrong friend for you.

That information doesn’t headline my social networking profiles because while I may be a trans woman, that is only one descriptor, one facet of my life. It is not the totality of my being. I am not a fetish or a hard limit. My gender identity is completely female, hence the capital F next to my name. I’m a woman where it counts.