Escape to Planet Parenthood

Hooray! I visited the local Planet Parenthood while up in my hometown, and had a lovely time with my doctor. Of course dealing with the PP environment is never ideal, the people at the counter seemed to still have my boy name in their files, though they had plenty of other paperwork including my name/gender change docs. They mentioned that my sliding scaled was based on "what I was born as", something that confused me, because I'm female in every legal way. After some confusion, fumbling with bills, they accepted the deposit I had and I was able to see my doctor. After telling her about that, she politely excused herself to basically harang the staff people into respecting their patients gender identities. It was kinda awesome.

And holy wow is my doctor awesome. She's been seeing me for a while now, though I haven't seen her on about a year and PP doesn't allow her to do much in terms of "normal" doctor stuff, I'm not sure if "doctor" would even be the proper label for her, she may be a Nurse Practitioner or something. I should probably know that. Regardless, she takes care of my lady needs and it's exciting, I made this appointment to get my tests and to update my prescription, but my intent was mainly to obtain a referall for injections, to see if she could write me a letter or something that I could give to a doctor in LA to get set up for injections. As far as I knew they couldn't give out injections, as I had tried to get them before. I started talking about a reference, sort of stumbling over my words as I don't really know how that all works, I realized I sounded pretty silly. My little speech trailed off, she looked down at her papers and a smirk grew on her face, one of those pixie side-smirks... "Well, I could write you a prescription for the injections."

My eyes lit up, bigger than when I realized I had a couple bitcoins lying around a few weeks ago. I responded with grace but as soon as she left the room I turned into a cute girly version of Tiger Woods, I was embarrassingly excited, pumping my fists, going "yes! yes!" using my inside voice. Why was I so excited you ask? Because I suck at remembering to take my hormones. I fear for my liver and I want the hormones to work better, simple as that. I've read up on the injections, seen them given and given them myself to others, but to be honest I'm still pretty worried about the actual administration of the injection. It's something I'll get over, but I've never put a needle into myself and that's sorta scary. Totally worth it.

I'm hoping this jump starts my transition. Last night I went out to a local tasting room, met with some friends and helped brew beer all night. I sorta expected to be back home that evening and had forgotten my hormones, therefore, another missed dose. I have a terrible batting average with them, I maybe miss a handful of doses a week, and I've tried everything from daily pill planners to iPod apps to setting alarms all to no avail. It mainly has to do with eating also, my life lacks any consistent schedule so it's even harder to plan the pills around meals, the injections are once a week and I can just take my Spiro in the evening (until I get a much desired orchiectomy (this link is awful)). It's all very exciting, a new step in my somewhat stalled transition :)

I'm going to finish off my pills and hopefully at the beginning of the year start the injections. They're significantly more expensive than the pills which makes it difficult, but I'll just have to be more austere in my spending. I'll end this post with a pic from when I first started transitioning, I had a little photoshoot in a friends apartment, I was just starting to feel good, open up. I have had ups and downs in my time identifying as girl, and i'm looking forward to this being the last up, onto the awesome plateau of the rest of my life as me :)