Updates

Well another fun (?) colonoscopy has come and gone and I promised an update.  I have a partial one. 

Since I had to have a driver, my wife Liz came along. I needed to have a driver because I would be put under anesthesia for the procedure. I had the work the same place I had the last colonoscopy at the Cincinnati Veterans Hospital so we knew the way and arrived at the required appointment time. After signing in, I was encouraged the wait was only approximately ten minutes, so I thought I would be moved along quickly. As it turned out I was wrong.

Once I was taken back to the intake area, the gender fun started to happen. As I said in my last post, I knew the VA was attempting to do better with their treatment of transgender patients. So I was curious how my treatment would have changed over the previous year when grumpy staff called me "Sir" several times.  This time, to my amazement, the intake person asked me if I was born female since it was what it said on my VA paperwork. Because of the requirement to have a pregnancy test if I was born female. At that point I told her I had transitioned my gender to transgender woman in my early sixties. She didn't say anything else and we moved on with no other problems and I answered the million other questions she needed to ask. 

Shortly she left and another nurse came in to start my I.V. and take my blood pressure, which she did and left. Then, within a short period of time, the nurse came back in and asked how I would like be referred to, a woman or a man. I said woman and again we moved on. At that point I was encouraged I was going to complete everything fairly quickly and finally would be able to eat again after two days. Then the wait started. To make a long story shorter, I needed to wait an extra hour until the operation room would be open and ready. For all of you familiar with the military, one of our most memorable sayings was we had to hurry up and wait, suddenly I was back to my Army days as I laid in a hospital bed and waited and waited and waited. 

Finally, I was wheeled back to the operation room and the the operation happened. In fact the main surgical nurse remembered me from my last visit. Something I wasn't so proud of. In a way having frequent flyer miles in a colonoscopy operation room is not my proudest moment. But she was nice, the anesthesia kicked in and I felt nothing and I was wheeled back to my room.

Sadly, they found another polyp  which is defined as a tissue growth in the colon which could be or turn cancerous. Again they cut it out and sent it away for testing. I was told I would have the results in a week or so. 

In the meantime, I needed to get dressed and leave the hospital. Fortunately they let Liz come back and help me because I was feeling a little unsure of myself. So unsteady I needed a wheelchair and an aide to get to our car. It was at that point when the only person who miss-gendered me stepped in to ruin the whole experience. The man who wheeled me quickly down to the car called me "he" when talking to Liz. Of course at the time Liz quickly corrected him and away we went.

So overall, my assessment of my health care visit was one of improvement. My gender was correctly displayed as female on my paperwork and I feel it is always OK for caring individuals to question me. Especially if the process leads to a better experience for me. Which is what happened to me. Maybe I helped make the experience better for the next transgender veteran who takes advantage of the health services. 

So now I need to wait and hope my news comes back as "non-cancerous."   

Facing Medical Care as a Trans Person

Image from Anton on UnSplash

Perhaps I should lead this post off with medical care as referring to myself as a "pre-opt" transgender woman. Since I have never had any of the gender affirming surgeries so appealing to more and more trans women, when I go to the hospital for any sort of a procedure I face the reality of being called a "biological male" as one gruff nurse called me years ago. At this point of my life, not undergoing any major surgeries at all is my final decision and I am sticking to it. For any number of reasons, having a vagina has never been that important to me to define my gender which resides firmly in my brain. 

Regardless I will face another gauntlet of doctors and nurses when Monday I go in for yet another colonoscopy. Which, if you have been through one, you know the prep work and fasting you have to go through is much worse than the actual procedure which is done under anesthesia. 

The last one I had was a year ago and the doctors found enough potential problems to schedule me another fun filled visit in a year. This time (again) I will have the work done at the Cincinnati Veteran's Hospital so I will be interested to see if there is any progress in how they handle transgender patients. The last time, I encountered one in-take nurse who couldn't or wouldn't attempt to use the correct pronouns with me. Even though I am listed as female on on my paperwork at the VA, she called me "Sir". I know in the last year, the VA has made a concerted effort to educate their staff in Cincinnati in the proper pronoun use, all the way to having a question specifically for transgender patients when you are visiting. I have seen improvement in past visits.  

Another problem I have is, because once I have arrived to when the procedure is about to happen, I am so hungry and sleep deprived from the prescribed prep (as well as being a little scared) I just want the whole deal to be over with. Call me anything you want, just get me out of there. By the way, my fear doesn't come from going through the operation itself which I barely feel, it comes from getting the results. Last year, the doctor cut out a polyp growing in my intestine which fortunately turned out to be non-cancerous.  Hopefully, I will receive a clean bill of health for at least another year. Even though I know the prep and procedure isn't the most pleasant thing in the world to go through, the fear of having any sort of colon cancer is much worse. 

Also if you are familiar with the colonoscopy prep, in addition to fasting, the remainder revolves a day and a half of a rapid "clean out" of my intestines'. In other words, the toilet will become my best friend on the next couple of days so I may not feel like posting. 

With any luck, I will be back soon with an update.   

  

Transition within Transition

Image from the Jessie Hart Archives

Along the way down my gender path, I often considered each change to be the final transition I would ever need to suffer through. I was wrong and it turned out a few of my transitions were pleasant, some not so much.

Perhaps I should refer to my many changes more than just transitions within my gender issues. The prime examples I could use are when I needed to break all my home ties out of high school and enroll at an university one hundred miles away or the time I was forced to go away to Ft. Knox to fulfill my military obligations during the Vietnam War. Two major life changing transitions to be sure for my male self. Then there was the human transition I went through when I became a parent for the first time. I remember it as one of the profoundly life changing experiences ever. 

Before you think the only major transitions I went through were on my old male side of life, you would be wrong. I have always considered crossing the binary gender border, is one of the most difficult journeys a human can undertake. My feminine transitions include when early in life I determined I wanted  to do more than just wanting to admire myself in the mirror as a girl, somehow in my dreams I wanted to be a girl. In order to do so, my path ahead became very difficult. Initially, the mirror was very kind to me and the world much more scary to negotiate. 

Plus, there was always the question of how my strongly entrenched male self would react to all the gender changes I wanted to go through. In many ways, he was allied with my wife against the survival of my inner feminine self. Both of them strongly wanted him to survive not her. Secretly, she won out as she continued to transition herself when she took advantage of the times she had to be in the public's eye. It wasn't so long after she started her public explorations, she decided she wasn't a cross dresser at all but fit into the newly adopted and publicized transgender category. Her long standing dream of living a feminine life as a trans woman was coming closer. At the same time, my true self was exploring the world's reaction to her by meeting new people at parties and mixers and learning how to communicate with them mostly woman to woman because very few men would have anything to do with me. Forcing me to develop myself more completely as a new person at least on the feminine side. I still had plenty of questions to answer. Was I gay? Was I a trans-lesbian? So much to learn.  

In the midst of all this new life skill I was learning, it seemed at times, enough was enough and I had achieved most of my goal. Of course I learned enough was never enough and there were always new discoveries in life to make. It at times was not easy when I was bounced out of restrooms or even entire venues for simply being trans. Ironically, one of the managers who made me leave his venue one night got fired and the crew found me in a neighboring venue and invited me back. I had my revenge. The manager was wrong because all I was doing was minding my own business, spending good money and tipping well.

Looking ahead, which I do quite a bit at my advanced age, I see many more transitions ahead. Some are as big as they come. Transitions such as elderly life care and even my final transition (death) are now real possibilities. 

When it all comes, it will just be another transition within a transition. I have managed to survive to this point and at times had a good time doing it.