#but that was cuz i was under anesthesia for surgery and had only been around a male doctor and five female nurses

[somnolent-scout]

So uhh.. as everyone has probably noticed, I have not been feeling well lately.

Alongside being mentally unstable thanks to the various internet disasters I've been shoved into, I've been feeling very physically sick. For the past three days, I've woken up with a sick stomach and extreme queasiness. I have yet to actually lose it, but it certainly feels like shit. My throat has been sore, scratchy, and has a weird waste taste to it. My vertigo has increased with zero explanation or cause. I also recently popped (possibly dislocated) my hip while trying to use the restroom. My head and body have been overheating, but no fever has been recorded. I can't seem to drink a whole lot of water either. I don't know what's wrong with me.

My symptoms have only worsened over the past few days, and they have yet to come to a peak or settle down at all. I don't know what to even test for at this point. I don't have a fever or loss of smell. It's not COVID-19.

Idk

[thewurstgirlfriend]

On: Drugs

So in a prior post I alluded to having a surgery(it was unrelated to my transition) and it was such a wild experience! The only other time I had been put under anesthesia before was when I had my wisdom teeth removed, so that was the litmus I was gauging it by.

I showed up in the early afternoon, I was admitted and shown a bed & given a gown to change into. They hooked an IV up to my left wrist with one of those rolly carts. I had to bring it with me like 3 times to the bathroom cuz of the old t-blocker peeing...and they kept me waiting for almost 2 hours before the doctors were ready for me so I was anxious AF about it too. But they finally wheeled me in and Holy Crap! after never having seen an operating theater before I was impressed by the medical tech on display.

The anesthesiologist was a little firecracker of a Chinese woman, we spoke for a few minutes and she asked me about my meds because she couldn't figure out why I was on such a high dose of a blood pressure medication at my age and there was this awkward moment where I had to explain that I'm trans & that's part of my HRT. I still haven't submitted the paperwork to change my gender indicator on all my ID,and THAT will be another writing unto itself. But the doctor had the nurse put a breathing mask over my face and she told me it was oxygen, after a moment she goes "OK! Medicine now!" and I took about three breaths then gasped awake in a different room.

It was entirely weird! I had been put under for almost 3 hours but when I awoke I didn't feel as if I was missing time, it felt like seconds to me. I was also a lot more alert and lucid then I expected to be, I was hauling my IV cart for a pee just a few minutes after waking up. I thought I'd be groggy and feel almost drunk, and be generally unable to move. They told me they pumped me full of freezing which probably helped a great deal when I took the stairs up to my loft. They had given me a prescription for painkillers but the pharmacy was closed when I got back home so I had to wait. Again, I had the false impression that they'd send me home with the medication in hand. My logic being that even though it was a simple routine surgery, an open operation is still a major surgery. I was anxious about the entire ordeal, I expected things to be entirely different.

The next morning I hobbled down my stairs and to the pharmacy across the street, I was in pain but not excruciatingly so. In classic doctor shorthand, I had no idea which medication I was waiting on. They called me over for a consult & it turns out it was hydromorphone! It came with a giant warning package with it about all the associated risks and I took it quite seriously....I have been closely affected by the opioid crisis several times, as recently as 6 weeks ago a friend passed in a questionable overdose. And I know all too well the power of addiction.

In addition to the statistics surrounding mental health disorders and self-harm behaviors in the trans community, addiction rates are also disproportionately high, and I am no exception to these numbers. Waxing honestly, coming from a troubled childhood home I've been linked into the mental healthcare system for most of my life. I have been diagnosed with dysthymia and Cluster-B characteristics in addition to having ADHD. I have struggled with alcohol for most of my life, I was introduced to it by family at a young age & became a problem drinker in my teens and early 20s. I had been sober almost 6 years when my marriage ended just a few months before the first COVID-19 lock-downs...around this time I was laid-off and had my car repo'd because I could no longer keep up the payments. Now, I know I'm not the only casualty of the pandemic but I did NOT handle all that disaster in my life all at once and I relapsed into drinking for about 2 years. I'm currently 10 months alcohol free, and I stopped smoking cigarettes. I still smoke a fair amount of cannabis but it's legal where I am and just as hard to avoid as booze. I occasionally use psylocibin mushrooms but I approach that more therapeutically, as does my therapist. She's a beautiful soul, I owe her my life. I've worked with her closely for 3 years now...she's helped me get sober & help me work up the courage to live honestly. And 20 years ago my counselor would have given me proper crap about "eating shrooms" and I would've been kicked out of the program. Now I tell her and she's curious about how helpful the experience was....the science is there, I don't make this up. It is what it is, fight me in the comments. But what the hell was I even saying??

Oh yeah, opiates...So I took 2 doses of the hydromorphone, exactly as prescribed, and that was enough to make me itchy if you know what I mean. It's a powerful drug omg, don't get me wrong it does what it's supposed to. It dulled my surgical pain beautifully and I slept better than I had in quite some time. And there's the rub, just like that I felt I wanted to use it every day. Not to get high of course, but that deep rest was alluring.....I'm not alone here & it's crazy because we're talking about single-use event addiction pathways!! I ended up bringing the pills back to the pharmacy because I never really needed them in the first place, plus... in a low moment after 3 days in bed, I realized there was enough drug in that jar to make ALL of my problems go away....not that I'm any more sad than usual but that's how readily I can think like that.

This experience opened my eyes, bearing in mind that this is all IMHO, and knowing that everybody's unique experience is exactly that....perhaps physicians are over-prescribing and over-medicating? Should there be a better screening process to ensure these drugs are the most appropriate for the correct circumstances in the right patients? Absolutely, there are legitimate conditions for their clinical use, and one of the bigger factors is non-pharmaceutical grade drugs infiltrating city streets. What are we to do? I'm left perplexed, all I have is questions and more questions where no answers are coming.

Going forward, I had a sweaty, sleepy day after I took the pills back... I was able to manage the pain with plain old acetaminophen. A few more days in bed and I was back on my feet. Its been 11 days since the surgery and I feel great and I'm healing well! I've had more time to pull this girl together and a more permanent transition into womanhood is on the horizon in the new year. My writing is going to be a huge part of my healing, and my becoming whole. Make sure you like/follow/subscribe and do all the things! Talk soon!

Much Love

Genni Bee

[canaryatlaw]

OKAY. so my entire day post is going to be put under a cut because the entire thing is WAY TMI, but there’s way too much shit that happened that I need to process and I already gave the sanitized language version of it on twitter but I can’t fully process it without getting into details. you have been warned- WAY TMI. 

okay, so. backstory, I woke up on Tuesday with stomach pain and ended up spending most of the day on the toilet. By the time I finished (like 7 hours later- yeah it was BAD) I noticed there was something weird going on down there, but I wasn’t really paying attention. Wednesday morning I was having a lot of pain and it occurred to me that maybe because of Tuesday I had a hemorrhoid (it only gets worse from here, so if that makes you squirm you should bail out now), but like, idk because I’ve never had one before and idk what they look like, so I googled it and shit and did their home remedy stuff, sitting on a ice pack helped, I did a “sitz bath” (which is basically sitting in four inches lukewarm water for 15 minutes), aloe vera, and really nothing helped. Woke up this morning and it was still bad. I showered because the warm water did help a bit, but I was getting suspicious at this point that something else was going on here, so I asked my mom to look at it and she was like WOW OKAY WE’RE GOING TO THE DOCTOR. And here lies the problem of trying to diagnose and treat your injuries off google, because I wouldn’t have known that other than my suspicions that hey there’s this giant bulge in my ass crack and it probably shouldn’t be there. my primary care couldn’t fit me in today but they recommended we go to the walk in clinic, so we do that and the doctor takes one look at that and is like “yeah this looks like a rectal prolapse and a hemorrhoid and you need to go to the ER right away” OH JOY. so if you’re not up on your scientific vocabulary, a rectal prolapse is basically when part of your digestive tract comes outside of your body and usually requires surgery to fix. wonder-fucking-ful. Thankfully we’re close to the local hospital that’s like, the number one trauma center on LI (it’s like two miles from my house so that’s always been convenient) so we go there and the urgent care people gave us a letter to give the triage people, but we still ended up waiting in the hallway for like an hour and a half, during which I was in pure misery, but the male nurse who drew my blood was sweet though and slightly flirty but in a nice and not a creepy way so there’s that at least. he left the needle in my arm because it sounded like I’d be needing it at some point. So eventually we get called, and taken into a section called the clinical decisions unit, where I guess is where they figure out if you need surgery or not. So I get in there and someone comes to look and is like OH YEAH LEMME GO GET THE DOCTOR because everyone seemed to agree this was high key bad, so they got doctors, and more doctors, they even took pictures and sent them to the head guy of the department, but the consensus was oh yeah, this needs surgery to fix. and at this point I’m just like fine, just get it done. they did give me some pain medication around 3 or so, which ended up by 5 mg of morphine, which took pretty much all my pain away and I only felt slightly woozy lol but that perked me up significantly and I was actually like talking and stuff instead of lying there looking like death. there was a bit of a wait for the OR so we had to chill for a while, then eventually I get brought in there and the surgeon comes and like, I had been thinking all day about watching The Resident and just how ridiculously easy it is for them to just straight up kill patients in routine surgeries and they have the one chief of surgery who’s got a hand tremor and is just like slicing organs open, and then in comes this guy who’s like the #1 in the department and has gray hair and I’m just like FUCK MY LIFE I hope I survive this lol (I know the show isn’t very realistic when it comes to that subject). So we’re getting ready, their general idea is that they’re just gonna cut the damn thing off because it looked infected and shit, so they go to check and the doctor is like “oh, uh, it’s gone” and I was like......”really? are you sure????” cuz apparently it slipped back in because that’s a thing that can happen, but they were like well we should still probably go ahead with the surgery because the hemorrhoid is still there and could pop back out, so we go for it, they decided to not do general anesthesia but do sedation, whatever the difference between those two is, so I was out anyway and I woke up after and they were like “yeah so turns out it wasn’t a hemorrhoid and he didn’t have to do any cutting or stitching” and I was like “....so then what did he do?” haha and I’m still not 100% sure about that one really, but they were more than happy to send me home which I was very thankful for because I did not want to spend part of my spring break in the hospital. so they got me out of there pretty quickly with a giant bandage on my butt that I’m not sure is serving any purpose at all really, but they told me to leave it on there until I shit again so I guess that’s what I’ll do. We got home, my mom went to pick up the percocet they called into the pharmacy for me but they were closed, a little while after my dad and my brother got home, my dad was speaking at this big thing tonight that he’s trying to launch at churches across the island about understanding the opioid epidemic and how to prevent it, and he said not quite as many people showed up as he would’ve liked but it was still good so that was good to hear. As far as how all this craziness started, I’ve in the past had episodes of like scathing stomach pain that make me feel like I have to go to the bathroom, but I usually end up cowering in pain on the toilet with nothing coming, until eventually something will give and it’ll all just pour out as liquid (again, I told you this is TMI) and like, it used to happen a lot more frequently when I wasn’t eating much and my regularity was thrown way off schedule (like once a week) but I don’t do that anymore and I take a fiber supplement every day because I’m on a high dose iron supplement thanks to me being super anemic, so it’s usually not an issue, it happened the night of my sister’s sweet 16 at the end of October but I think it’s only happened maybe once in the four months between then and now? And I did bring it up at my last gastroenterologist appointment but he didn't seem to think much of it and said it was probably just another muscle spasm (because he had just said my chest pain issues were probably caused by a muscle spasm). The doctor from the hospital tonight apparently recommended I get a colonoscopy done at some point to make sure everything is alright and in place, but idk if I’m gonna do that because I have a pretty good idea of just how this happened, plus I have a lot of like, traumatic memories about that stuff from when I was little and they thought I had Crohn’s disease (when it was actually just nightly cramps for an entire year before my period showed up) and being subjected to a bunch of really invasive stuff that I was not at all comfortable with so that’s not exactly gonna be on the top of my to do list. Other than that they said not to strain when going to the bathroom and eat a lot of fibre, so I’m gonna try harder to eat actual fiber and not just the shit in caplets, and try to make that work out better. and yeah, that is about it, after all that I chatted with friends for a bit then started getting ready for bed with this absurdly large bandage on my butt 😂 We’re supposed to go out to dinner to this super schmancy place (because my parents have a gift card to it) tomorrow to celebrate my brother and I’s birthdays (his was today but because of all the crazy we’re gonna celebrate this weekend) so hopefully that will work out. And oh yeah, since I turn 26 in 11 days, if this happened 11 days from now I would’ve totally FUCKED because I would’ve had no health insurance thanks to getting kicked off my parents plan at 26!!! Lovely *sigh*. And as much as it does suck to get sick on vacation, I am at least glad I was with my family and not in Chicago where I had nobody except like, Jess (and no offense to her in the slightest, because I’m sure she would’ve been great, but with this kind of thing a mom is just better suited for it), and that sounds kinda miserable. Okay, that’s the end for real now, I took my pills a while ago and now my eyes really want to shut and I’m going to listen to them. If you made it all the way through, thank you for suffering through all that TMI to find out how I’m actually doing, though I kinda doubt many of you will actually reach this far, lol, but I cannot blame you for that. Goodnight my dear friends. I hope your Thursday was a hell of a lot better than mine.