The path for finding comfort in your body after learning there are solutions is lit up by ads. As you research what worked for others and what didn’t, you can tap “yes” or swipe those ads away. You can decide if you have the means and the time to pursue comfort, health. It feels strange to be living with a torn rotator cuff for over a year and not having the financial cushion to take 6 weeks off of work unpaid after surgery, so for the time being, I tap yes on more affordable ways my body needs to heal. As for my shoulder, it only felt excruciating for three/four months after I slipped down the dusty, crooked stairs to the basement in my apartment building. My body has seemed to adjust and compensate, and I’m slowly building muscle around the affected area. It doesn’t hinder my painting work all too much. I can reach, I can stretch, but I learned not to f-in rotate my arm while doing any of that. Ow.
I had top surgery in July 2023 and about 3 months later, I could see that my chest was healing in a certain pattern that would result in dog ears under my arms. I contacted my surgeon to let him know and he said, “It’s impossible to know this soon. We’ll know in about a year.” So we scheduled a check up appointment in October 2024. At the appointment, right away he said, “Yes you have dog ears. We’ll need to touch those up. It’ll be a quick excision right here in the office. The receptionists will give you dates for the next available appointments when you check out.” I reminded him (for the second time) that in our initial consultation, he said touch-ups are free. He said they only ask that I pay $150 for the materials. Okay, that I can do. I chose their soonest date, January 13, and they asked that I make a one-time payment two weeks prior. So, as they asked, I called them two weeks ahead of the date and paid over the phone. I said it was for my January 13 appointment and they told me they’d text me a time one day before the date. I planned ahead, took the week off of work, had someone lined up to look after me for the week.When Friday the 10th came around, it was getting to be late in the day with no text, so I emailed to ask if they have a time for me, not sure if “one day before Monday” meant business day or not. I didn’t see an email response, but over the weekend, I got the text that my appointment would be at 9am.
My friend, Sarah Sue, drove out from MA to drive me to my appointment and stay with me for a week while she worked from her laptop so that she could help me with tasks that I would otherwise struggle to do while healing. She drove me to the appointment, but excitement and readiness flatlined at check-in. The receptionist said in a confident and condescending voice, “I’m sorry, Liam, I don’t see you anywhere on our schedule for today. It says here that your appointment is on the 24th.” I said, “I have a distinct memory of selecting the 13th.” Little does she know, that’s Orlando Bloom’s birthday and I fixated on that beautiful elf when I was 13. She responded with, “We would see any changes to the date here on the screen” (pointing at her desktop) “Maybe you got fixated on the 13th for some reason.” The pushover in me started to wonder if she was somehow right and I wish I had remembered in that moment to mention that I paid for the 13th two weeks ago. I went back in my texts to prove the appointment date and that is when I noticed that the text confirming my appointment time also said 1/24. I was sinking in self doubt and defeat as I asked questions about the possibility of having the appointment *this* week since I took off of work, and there were no available appointments. That’s when another receptionist walked in and said, “You should have gotten an email from Kelly on Friday about changing the appointment date.” When I replay this in my mind, I fantasize another universe where I turned to the gaslighting receptionist and gave her a knowing glare. But what I really did was go into my emails on my phone and scroll and scroll. Could not find a response on Friday. I then found the email response in the inbox for my old email address. It read, “Good Afternoon Liam, I apologize for the delay I was holding off until I knew for sure but we have to reschedule for Monday, Unfortunately we will need to move Monday’s cases to Friday 1/24/25.”
What a fumble. What an assumption that picking another random date would work for me. Why would they not call me about this? I was later told to disregard “9am” on the text because they won’t know until the day before the 24th. It’s all muddy and confusing, they were covering something up. I asked for other future dates and had them schedule it for Monday, February 17. This would prevent further interrupting my current painting project and give me the space to heal between projects. In an email, they said they’d let me know the surgery time for the 17th a week prior, instead of a day. Maybe they’re trying to make up for the neglect? I just hope this goes smoothly.
The assumption that trans people have too much access to affirming healthcare is a myth. I have stories and I have heard stories from friends about how complicated it is. We don’t get prioritized when we’ve taken measures to secure appointment dates or medications, we get misgendered, gaslit. At the time that I was choosing a path toward top surgery, I didn’t have health insurance. My best option for affording it and having it done before our rights start to fall away under a new administration was to schedule with an office that doesn’t take insurance and to have a fundraiser to help with costs. There was a couple-month-long wait for a consultation and then a ~5 month wait for the procedure. I sacrificed having a neat and more expensive surgery through insurance (much farther down the line) so that I could just have the procedure as soon as possible with the risk of it not being perfect or needing multiple visits. Aside from the dog ears (which do cause physical discomfort at times), ultimately, the surgery provided me with comfort and satisfaction with how I feel and look in my body. For a good while, I was so ready to have the boobs off that I would have been satisfied if I had one sloppy scar across my chest and no aesthetic resemblance to a man’s chest. It was conversations with other trans people and loved ones that convinced me to raise the bar for myself. I can have them gone AND be picky about how it looks in the end.
Learning to be assertive and take no shit is weird at 36 years old. I realize I was bred to be submissive and non-confrontational. It’s hard to unlearn expecting everyone else means well just because I know I mean well. Some people only mean well to their own benefit, or to their paycheck. Learning to prioritize my health is weird at a stage in our society when I’m not sure I’ll always have access to my health. Two months after having labs done for Planned Parenthood, they called to tell me that according to my tests, I’m anemic. Two months!! I’m taking iron tablets daily and now wondering if I have an auto immune disease, as it runs in my biological family. I’m just taking it a day at a time, juggling many things, feeling so tired a lot of the time. I’m grateful to be learning. Grateful to be working and making money at the moment. Grateful to be alive and make a home for the shadows that always followed me, cause I used to fear them and push them away. This caused me to escape myself, existing out of body when sharing space with others, cause the shadows I was pushing away were *me* all along. Being trans is no reason to wish for death before being truly known.
Today marks 7 months on low-dose T. I increased my dose a smidge on Christmas Day.
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