Transition

🎃 HAPPY HALLOWEEN! 🎃

Second shot of T… you know, I watched a few videos of people giving themselves shots of T and everyone just seems so nervous. That’s really gotta suck 🙁
Maybe it’s because I’ve got a long history of sticking needles in my skin (not illicit drugs… self-piercing, boredom, grossing out friends, occasional medical needs) but it doesn’t bother me at all. I’m doing subq instead of IM and it is literally painless for me… but then again, as I’ve discovered a few times now, I have “dead” spots everywhere in my skin where I don’t have much sensation at all.

Actually, that came in handy last week when I got my neck tattooed and I was actually nervous about it hurting… but lo and behold, sometimes I couldn’t even feel the needle at all (though goddamn it’s annoying to have a healing tattoo on both your neck and hand). Speaking of the neck tattoo… It’s another example of how everything’s sort of clicking in place for me. I commissioned it months ago to commemorate starting T (a tardigrade wielding a bat’leth) and it just so happened that, after all the delays acquiring needles and whatnot, the tattoo appointment fell on the actual first week on T. Far out, eh?

Anyhoo… I thought I’d write down a bit about how I went about this because I had a few questions via facebook last week when I wrote a brief filtered post about what’s going on.

I went to go see a new therapist when things weren’t improving at home because I really needed to talk through the steps I had to take to kickstart my physical transitioning and my last therapist hadn’t really known much (heh fun fact: I’ve been “cleared for transitioning” with a letter from a therapist three times in my life. Once in [squints] 2004… oh man, reading through old LJ entries… once in 2015, and finally once in 2017). New therapist was a great therapist. She gave me a number for a doc who prescribes T… but he was way far away. At the same time, I had just put myself back on the waiting list for a family doctor (my old doc is MIA) and though they told me it would take up to 6 months, I got a call 2 months later for a shiny new family doctor just near here. And! She’s awesome. She’s just as excited as, if not more than, me about my transition. She’s never followed someone through the whole process (she does volunteer at a trans youth centre) and she’s really looking forward to seeing how everything goes with me. I’ve also got other things to take care of (bum knee being the top of that list) and she gave me a huge list of tests for the vaccination clinic next to my place. Then, I booked myself an appointment at the endocrinology clinic with my referral and he was very happy to see that my doc had already asked for the blood tests that he needed me to get (heh and he even read to me the results of the MRI on my knee because I was curious). I have a small lump on my thyroid that is nothing and my health is great (phew!)… so he put me on delatestryl and I go back for blood tests and then to see him in a few months to see if the dose is right. *thumbs up* Next step? Top surgery! I’ve already been through boob surgery before so I know what to expect (last time I wanted to go down to nothing but the guy wouldn’t go smaller than B).

I still haven’t told my parents. I know, right? What’s the holdup? Well… hang, lemme show you something I found in my LJ when I was looking up dates earlier:

Private stuff – opens in new page

I’m going to record a little 30 second video before I take my shot each week to sort of document my progress. Heh.

Weekly observations:

• I’m not cold. I don’t know if this has to do with the shots or something else has changed but usually when the weather drops below 20ºC I get cold—cold feet, cold hands, and, as if to compensate, I’m hot at night. For the last week my temperature has been weirdly even and I’m comfortable.
• Oily skin. Ugh, no comment.
• I feel good. Like, really good. Like, I keep smiling to myself and sighing contently.
• Libido. Hel-lo, dreams. As someone who’s always had a libido dans l’tapis, it should be fun (eesh) to see how bad that gets. Vrooom vroom.