I feel bad for having written so little here, lately, but I’ve been running around like crazy trying to wrap things up at work and getting everything ready for leaving for my surgery. One of the things which was out of my hands, however, was the referral letter, without which there would be no surgery.
Well, that letter arrived today!
Those of us that read my post will know about the brick wall I’d run into with the German gatekeeping and referral system thanks to my new surgery date, which caused me quite some stress. Luckily, I found a very professional and sympathetic psychiatrist who was willing to do a rush job for me, with several online sessions to allow him to get enough information about me to feel safe writing the letter. Any of you who heard a huge sigh of relief coming from the direction of Hamburg, that was me! 
So, I have my letter, my flights are booked, I’ve done all the medical tests and have my visa sorted. All the key bits and pieces are there for me to be able to head off for my surgery! So, now I’m counting the days to that flight and then the operation!
I’m rather excited, if you hadn’t guessed!
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This week-end, my sweet girlfriend flew over from the UK for a week-end at my place in Hamburg. It’s always so wonderful when we can spend some time together and I relish every second I can spend with her. We had a lovely time, doing little bar talking and eating foods we like. It was grey and cold outside but warm, cozy and oh, so lovely inside!
Come Sunday evening, we had our normal, sad task of me dropping her off at the airport. We both hate this so much and have joked about how lovely it would be if something happening to make her miss her flight. This time, however, it actually happened. A fairly small crash had blocked the access road to the airport in a place where I couldn’t turn around and after sitting in a traffic jam for half an hour, we were too late for her to check in. An hour later and €80 poorer, we set back off to my place, with a little problem: I had to fly to Paris for the day, yesterday, and I would have to leave her alone for the day. I wouldn’t even be able to get back home in time to take her to the airport. The dream of us having an extra day didn’t really work out.
Hamburg Airport - A gates
So, off I went yesterday morning, saying a tearful goodbye to her at 5:30am and made my way to the airport. We exchanged sweet SMSes and had a few Skype chats during the day. I missed her so much already and was already longing for the next time we’d meet. My trip home should have been at the same time as she flew out, but when I landed, I got an excited SMS:
Have you just landed, sweetheart? Just saw an Air France plane go by… Ours isn’t here yet! xxx
My girlfriend’s plane hadn’t arrived yet and I was at the airport! Could we maybe catch a few seconds together? The bus from the plane was slow and took a tortuous route around the airport and I was sure I’d miss her and then, I arrived at the other end of the airport from her. I dashed across the airport as fast as my heels would allow me (I was dressed in my full corporate look) and she was there!
We couldn’t actually meet because my girlfriend lives in the UK and was already through passport control1, but we stood, separated by a glass partition, talking excitedly on the our phones. Gosh, it was lovely!!! Those few extra minutes felt like a gift from the gods, a stolen time where every second was priceless!
I drove home with a bitter-sweet smile on my face. She was gone again and I was missing her terribly, but we had those few extra minutes. Oh, how they counted, how they helped!
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- For those that don’t live in Europe, the EU’s split into two zones, the Schengen countries and the non-Schengen countries. Travel in the Schengen zone is done without passports, but the UK is outside of the Schengen zone so one has to go into special parts of the airport to catch flights for there and these are behind passport control. [↩]
Tags: girlfriend, romantic, Travel
It’s impressive how much damage an exploded truck tyre does when you hit it at 200km/h! I now know this from personal experience!
I’m OK, but my car’s a bit of a wreck.
It’s been interesting the past few weeks and brings to mind the Chinese curse ‘may you live in interesting times’. Can I have some boring times now, please?
UPDATE: All is OK. I got home late to an annoyed and hungry cat after the leasing company sorted everything out and got me into a rental car. My car might even be repairable, which is lovely, because I’ve become rather attached to her!
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The last few days, I have been in what amounts to a state of complete and utter panic, which is why I’ve not managed to write ‘Big Smile Post No. 2′. I’d had a few health problems at the end of last year (including one rather dramatic episode which ended up with military intervention! Yup, seriously!!! ) I’ve been working with my doctor trying to understand this since it may have ended my chances to have my operation and been a bit of a dampener on this long, prosperous life thing if her take on things was right.
Last week, I got some results back and they weren’t good and I’ve been waiting this week for a second round of results of some more in-depth tests as well as a blood test and I was scared, and I mean really scared. The last few days, a count-down to getting my results today, have been horrible and I’ve made my poor girlfriend’s life a real mess with my panic.
Today, I got the results and the blood test was clear and the results from the second round of tests show nothing wrong. It seems my problems were stress related (it was a stressful time) and the bad results were nothing more than anomaly, but cripes was that one scary anomaly! I’ll have some more tests over the next months to help ensure I don’t have such problems again, but there is no underlying condition which has more serious consequences.
I think that saying I am relieved is a huge under-statement!
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As you may have noticed from my last post, I hit a bit of a trough when my psychiatrist didn’t want to write me the referral letter. I was really rather sad with that. She seems to really believe in me and did make it clear to the gatekeeper at the hospital where she works that she really feels surgery is something I need, yet she felt that not mixing the therapy and the gatekeeping was more important. To a certain extent, I admire her strength of conviction, but I feel a bit let down by the ease with which she did that.
So, I managed to keep things together during the day at work (a crazy day as usual) but when I came home, I was in quite a state. To cut a long story short, I ended up spending the last hour of my nightly Skype session with my lovely girlfriend in tears (and I feel guilty about that because that meant she worried far too much about me). During the day, which included a 270km trip to my other office, meetings galore and a return trip of 270km, I’d had lots of opportunities to think, but not many chances to really find a solution. Yesterday was different, though: I was in the office in Hamburg and had the chance to do some Googling.
I’d already found an online therapist the evening of hearing about not getting the letter, but I was a little worried about her since she used a very unorthodox system with self-made online tests costing some $1,100 for the full process to get a GRS referral letter. I was worried by the unorthodox tests and by the fact that I knew so little about the therapist that spending $1,100 not even knowing if the letter would be accepted was far too risky.
Then, yesterday, I changed my Googling method and found another online therapist, one who showed all the right credentials and one who followed a process I believed in. I connected to his site and we had a good 45 minute chat (whilst I was at work) and I left that feeling I could work with him. We agreed on working together, I gave him a lot of info about myself in a biographical profile document and set an appointment for 7am this morning.
So, rather scared, I got up this morning and connected to his online chat server and we started talking. He’s very good, actually! He showed a lot of concern for actually helping, not just getting me my letter, and we had a good hour of talking where he explored my background and my life. Then we came to the agreement that we’ll meet twice a week for the time being, but he already felt comfortable enough to suggest that he’ll get me my letter during the first week of February so that I can relax in the run up to my operation! It will still cost me $700, but I’m not complaining… That letter is worth that and more then that when I think about it!
So, I’m huuuuuuuuuuuugely relieved! I’ll still be worried until I have that letter in my hand, but it’s so lovely to be working towards a solution!
I’m smiling, in case you can’t guess that!!!
PS. I won’t share details about either online psychiatrists online, but have heard good things about both and will share details privately if you’re in need of them.
PPS. “Big smile post 2″ will be coming tomorrow on a completely unrelated but terribly sweet subject.
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Tags: GRS referral letter, online therapy, Trans
So, I spoke with my psychiatrist this morning, all very nice and pleasant, but she won’t write me a referral letter because she “doesn’t believe in mixing the therapeutic and the gatekeeping aspects”! She’s been kind enough to push the two gatekeepers we have here to write me a referral letter, backing me up very nicely, but they won’t do that until they’ve worked with me “for several months”. Lovely.
Naturally, I’m rather frantic with worry at the moment. I quickly need to find a psychiatrist somewhere who would write me this referral otherwise my surgery won’t happen that’s going to be really, really bad. Eeeek.
At least I know my psychiatrist will back me if I do find a psychiatrist willing to write the letter, but seeing how long it took me to find a psychiatrist who’d work with me at all in Germany, I’m very, very worried.
I just have to get this sorted out!!!!
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Tags: GRS referral, Medical, psychiatrist, Trans
As you will know if you’ve read my blog for the past months, I’m due to have the big operation at the end of February and that means I have a lot to do between now and then (and the countdown at the top of my blog shows just how little time I have!) Between now and then, I have to do the following:
- Book my flights (done)
- Transfer the final payment
- Get a certificate of health from my GP
- Get a referral letter from my psychologist
- Return my cat to my ex for safe keeping whilst away and whilst recuperating
- Buy lots of bits and pieces for my stay in Thailand
- Prepare my work for my 6-8 week absence
- Prepare my home for my return (lots of frozen/canned food in case I don’t feel up to cooking)
- Panic a little that I have forgotten something!
Some of these things are smaller, some are larger. The one which concerns me most is getting my referral letter.
I mentioned some months ago how much trouble I was having finding a psychiatrist in Germany. I needed it for two things: Help with the crushing depressions which sometimes hit me and for the paperwork I need to have for my operation. I haven’t written about this, but I did find a psychiatrist in November and had a first discussion with her, coming out with a very positive feeling that she could really help me.
Now, however, with this lovely news of my op being brought forward, I have to get that referral letter from her urgently and that worries me. In general, the medical world takes its time to do things and most of the time, they have to be done to strict rules and added to that, this is Germany I’m living in where things are even more structured than in many other countries. I’m very concerned that the short time I’ve worked with this psychiatrist and the time it takes the wheels to move over here will make it difficult to get this referral letter in time. That’s very scary: No referral letter, no op and because of the short time scale, I will lose a lot of money if I have to do a last minute rescheduling (NOT really an option for all sorts of reasons).
I have my next meeting with my psychiatrist on Wednesday morning and will get that ball rolling then. We’ll see what happens and what level of panic I’ll be enjoying after that!
This is a fabulous time of my life and I’m so excited and happy about this operation, but cripes is there a lot to get done to make it happen! Heeeelp!!!!
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Just as with corporate research results, I take research results backed by activist organisations with a pinch of salt. There’s too much emotion and disagreement involved for truly dispassionate, scientific research. However, one of the things I’ve been wondering about is how GM crops protect themselves from pests, and now understand that quite a lot do so by producing ‘natural’ pesticides. If they do so, however, that means that yet more pesticides are entering our diet and that worries me.
Now, it turns out that that worry isn’t misplaced. Research from the Universities of Caen and Rouen in France have highlighted gaps in Monsanto’s research of the effect of their GM maize which have potentially masked organ damage as a result of pesticide residues in their products. An article from Truthout (an activist organisation) describes this very well.
So, we already have established concerns about the dangers of GM crops displacing non-GM crops due to their higher resistance as well as identified dangers of the spread of little understood GM crops through natural pollination. In addition, questions have risen about the link between butterfly and bee die-offs and GM crops, which potentially take this question a long, long way beyond the small-scale effects of a particular crop (imagine if all our key pollinators died off; that should worry you somewhat).
Now, we have convincing research showing a lack of research about the long term effects on humans of these GM crops, showing that the research organisations like Monsanto did was dramatically less than the normal requirements for FDA acceptance. That’s worrying.
It’s time that we stopped letting big business and big government dictate what we can eat. First of all, the implications of this are just too large and go as far as potentially catastrophic mass pollinator die-offs. Beyond that, however, there’s too much risk of money and favours passing behind the scenes to ‘help’ research results along.
We need to take responsibility for what we eat and that means understanding the effects of new crops ourselves. It doesn’t mean stopping them, but it means trying to understand what we put in our mouths and no longer letting organisation such as the FDA tell us what is safe. I don’t think we can trust them any more.
It’s time to think and not be led like sheep.
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Tags: FDA, food safety, genetically modified crops, GM
I just came across this fabulously sweet ad on Helen Boyd’s enGender blog. Watch out, it will make you cry!!!
How wonderful! The look of happiness on the face of the father when the son accepts is just lovely!
I guess that things are changing, even considering my last post. There is hope!
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Tags: advert, kids of trans, renault, Trans
I love the BBC programme called QI. It has all the things I love in a TV programme: Great comedy, interesting subjects and Stephen Fry! Last night, it returned to BBC 1 and I naturally watched it and, as usual, it was fun, it was interesting and it pushed the barriers a bit, this time having as a core theme gender discrimination.
As usual, Stephen Fry kept things interesting and in a fun way, they tackled several areas of gender discrimination. Then, they started bringing up the ways of telling a male from a female, neatly dismissing the preconceived ideas that hand size and an adam’s apple are good ways of telling a man from a woman (yes, cis women can have larger hands and prominent adam’s apples), but, hugely disappointingly, Stephen Fry did this referring to trans women as ladyboys.
I know that the trans naming game has been played to death, but I still feel it is important. Ladyboy and shemale both have some major problems with them. First of all, they dismiss the fact that a trans woman is a woman. They frame us in the light of something in-between, something weird and less than normal. In addition, they are words which though not necessarily born in the world of pornography, they have been the terms of choice for decades and that demeans trans women even more. I, as with most trans women, am no more likely to end up in a porn film than Edwina Currie or Hillary Clinton!
It’s important that the dangers of misnaming are emphasised. In the middle of a section which was doing good for trans women, Stephen Fry’s use of the term ladyboy perpetuated the link between trans women and the sex industry. That harms us, it causes prejudice and it creates the environment for discrimination and the extension of it, transphobia and violence.
I expected better of Stephen Fry and the team at QI. Ladyboy is not an acceptable term for a trans woman in the West (it is acceptable in some places such as Thailand, but that’s a long way away from the viewers of BBC 1). It saddened me that an intelligent man on a show centred on intelligence should employ such derogatory and discriminating terminology, something which he would have known if he’d read even the most basic Trans 101 or the media guidelines for discussing LGBT people.
We still have a long way to go when it comes to how the media covers us if even this programme can get it so wrong.
UPDATE: I’ve written a complaint on the BBC Complaints page… Maybe others could do the same?
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Tags: ladyboy, QI, Stephen Fry, Trans, trans women