META: These series of posts are collated reposts from a dedicated twitter account: https://twitter.com/kybele_deployed that document, specifically, my experiences from the point of preparing for SRS, then experiences in hospital for said procedure, then the recovery process thereafter, followed by some discoveries in new embodiment and the followup surgery. As such it spans for now the mid-2020 to mid-2021 time frame, overlapping largely with COVID-19 lockdown. The original posts are still up as tweet chains. Their relative order has been preserved, but not their exact time positions. The first operation took place November 10 2020, the second June 21 2021. For purposes of being possible to upload sensibly, the collated accounts have been subdivided thus preserving, again, relative time order but not relative time position, and the time stamp of these blog posts therefore does not correspond to the actual times of the tweets.
Knowing myself, I risk flooding my regular account with way too detailed surgery-related content now that my SRS finally is scheduled, throughout preparation and recovery. Rather than alienate regular followers, I therefore make this alt for that content. Read at own discretion.
Actually preparations are soothing escapes from other stressors. In part because it leads concretely towards something I have longed for. (Maybe I should get a good freezer before Nov 10 so I can keep food stocked more easily during period of low mobility?)
Just as deciding on SRS was almost as slow and complex as deciding to transition in the first place, so is there an analogy between coming out and letting people know I will be away for this. However, at this point no real worry over the process, rather this coming out I enjoy.
Perhaps not least due to my sadism wherein I _know_ people, especially men, will be uncomfortable thinking of what the operation entails, and one side of me delights in causing this discomfort. I am, apparently, a troll.
(Increased priority: do not catch COVID-19 before November 10. Should probably start isolating even more diligently. I wish there were even clearer strategies that I knew of!)
It’s really quite absurd, in a way. Just seeing a needle used for blood draw makes me tense. And in 52 days I’ll have IVs, surgical drains, catheters and probably like several blood tests per day. Not to mention deep surgical incisions through core musculature, removed organs and microsurgical repair surfaces. It’s hard to even imagine. I certainly have no real frame of reference. It feels surreal. But on the other hand… maybe everything is surreal? We just think some things are not because we have a system of habits where they are expected. From those sisters and other siblings who walked this path before, I know it can be done. And once I know that, all the rest is just pain and instinct and fear, and my will ranks beyond each of those. So much of what I did these past years was in order to make it so, to steel my will so that I can have conscious agency, and on some level, having this in mind. I know it will be fine, because I know I am much more than that frightened path, who amuses me now more than anything else. I have learned to take pleasure from pain and excitement from at least some forms of fear. Still, it’s pretty wild. And you know? I bet I’ll _still_ be scared of having blood drawn even after going through vaginoplasty. It would be on brand for me. I… am going to handle this. Beyond the habits and expectations of that small-town child, I am intellect and burning desire for new sensations. Always within me the desire to face the world and be liberated and improved by it, following its dance. That is what I will do again.
Things are getting real. Now have a checklist of documents to bring on day of admission – which is 48 days from now OMG – and a list of blood tests to get before then and I am asked to also order my dilators. I think I will name them Kirk and Spock, in ascending order of size.
Example of problematic but interesting thought/response/emotion. In continental Europe and internationally, unlike my Scandinavian past, women often perform femininity by greeting each other through mannerisms like cheek kissing. Not during COVID of course. But otherwise. When being invited to these, I feel validated, but also always extremely self-conscious, worried that I overstep boundaries somehow simply by accepting, worrying I will somehow commit a faux pas and be revealed as impostor. I would never initiate these, because one thing from my experience as awkward AMAB person is the fear of being read as predatorial, even where there is no reason whatsoever for that fear. Somehow this fear is also jumbled up with my sense of body and body as seen by others. There is some part within me that feels hope and expectation that ridding my body of a genital configuration that is coded male to many will make it so that I no longer worry about being read or perceived or interpreted as such, by others or myself. And I recognize this whole complex of thoughts and associations and expectations as deeply toxic and problematic and uncalled for, and I can see through it, but I still somehow feel this is one of many small facets by which changing my body might make me feel less uncomfortable, less out of place in my own perception as well as in others’ perception of me. Not rational. But one strand in a large bundle of both rational and irrational needs and yearnings and fears and hopes. Our bodies are flesh and constructs interwoven and there is a myriad paths they can take and this is one of many of those facets, one way in which it shall be interesting and to see how and if the surgery changes how I feel, where and how I feel comfortable. Which is also a regard in which I possess agency, and I shall exercise this agency. All is love!
Insight: This current box of androcur tablets is probably my last, because in 47 days I will no longer need them and I will taper of them in 26 days.
Given two offers to do academic career talks/panels at about a week into planned recovery. I wonder if it is a sign of my deeply flawed judgment that I am considering accepting those invitations anyway, in part because I will want the audience at that time.
Class privilege in transition care: Happening to know a senior cardiologist who can casually arrange your pre-op ECG tests.
OMG 41 days.
“Being ready” might on some level just be realizing that the need to “be ready” is as illusory as “being ready” is. This is going to be surreal and heavy and major. I should prepare that ritual I have been looking to do. And ensure all is in place. Well, that is what I am doing.
I dreamt in several long sweeps tonight how I was in recovery already (but in social context still) and I want back to those dreams rather than wake up. This is new for me.
Also I am panicked about either catching COVID or my surgeon doing so before we get there. But I can do nothing but continue to move.
38 days. This is doing heavy rotation and may the last I choose to hear before going under: https://t.co/Auiqsnnezd
My dilators were delivered now, to my office. Tomorrow I pick them up to see them for the first time. I believe they are very different from the most common designs – they have some yield, for example. Soft bois to keep my garden in shape? Foam-based dilators as per the Combined Method of SRS. I decided already to name the smaller Kirk, the larger Spock, but what about the intermediate? They will boldly go where no man has gone before, but my knowledge of TOS characters is still quite shallow. Sulu? Chekov? https://t.co/0xuiPhtJqE
My nutritionist colleague kindly offered useful advice on how to handle the stages before, during and after my hospital stay. I suppose simplest to say is: vegan high-fiber DASH diet is good, 16/8 or 5/2 is good, do not calory restrict while in hospital, seek antioxidants. Realized while talking to her that not everyone calms down and sleeps well on coffee, or drinks the amounts I do per day without feeling the slightest bit agitated. Given the same applies to other stimulants, this is yet another point in favor of me maybe not being neurotypical. “Bones”. Middle dilator is the doctor, the real McCoy, “Bones”. I believe that both “to Kirk”, “to Spock” and “to Bone” are verbs.
Giving birth to myself. I fear essentialists would deny me the analogy, call it appropriative, but it rings true for me in many ways, including scope and impact and also in several very bodily senses. I am pregnant with myself and I feel some form of fatalist serenity in this. One of my major papers I finished final submission of because the lead authors both gave birth just before we were done. With my own lead author papers now, it seems very likely my collaborators in turn will need to do the final submission as, by that time, I will be in hospital. Knowing I will not be fully ready, that no-one ever is, and that it will have to be as it is, that it is all right that it is. I have until rest of the year still with my therapist before she leaves the praxis. We will schedule a few remote call sessions for the time I am in the hospital and in recovery. In case I am hit harder or weirder than I expect. In particular to look out for post-op depression. My OP date is now within the timeframe by which my meetings are scheduled so I get to tell all my collaborators. Enjoying bc it makes it more real, bc my troll ass enjoys causing mild discomfort, and bc this feels like a teaching opportunity about trans existence in academia. Part of which, honestly, is about more of them knowing concretely that anatomy can and often does change in transition. I want people to know I will have had surgery because I want them to see my body as not so different from that of any other woman’s. How I feel about myself is affected by what I believe others believe about my body. I recognize how this reflects my particular binary modality, perhaps, and must again make clear it is a despicable transmedicalism that states any trans body needs this to be what we say it is. At the same time I need this, and inside me is happiness I almost fear letting myself feel that it finally happens, I fear relying on anything until certain, will worry until I wake up reconfigured. Yet it is now giddy, excited worry… it’s a month away only. Holy shock. This is big and it is time for Feelings to come along, I think. 31 days. Less.
After 32 months, gonadal volume has shrunk to less than a third of what it was pre-HRT, so I hope there has been enough atrophy that three weeks without suppression won’t come with any testosterone spikes. Hopefully, I will just feel as nervous and excited and scared as I do now. So this blister of Androcur pills is likely the last I will ever take; after it is through follows a three-week pre-op washout period. I wonder how that will feel? My hope is, not much, because I hope my endogenous production already may have stopped. Will I Instagram from the hospital 27 days from now? I think it very likely that I will yes. May the Lady have mercy.
I am not sure what it says about me that one major thing I look forward to during recovery is to somehow get to take a break from everything for a while. And that nothing else appears to let me.
Since yesterday, no longer taking androcur (CPA; testosterone blocker) as surgeon recommends going off them for three weeks pre-op. So I might have taken the last of them. Curious on whether that will mean any more changes long term from being off non-bioidentical progestins.
Songs that reference SRS, even extremely indirectly and in weird fashion perhaps only in my head, that used to be somehow very important to me for this reason but without me contacting the dots or even realizing I was trans, just that it was something which made me wistful. Thinking that it was something which… somehow would be meaningful but that wasn’t something which I could be wanting or having. Even the hardships seemed appealing, yet unavailable. Several songs on Forest Families. Zeigeist songs. Others. And now finally I can start moving those images and thoughts and emotions out. Alchemy of lives, of finding ways of becoming ourselves, of moving from dreaming into being. I’ve grown and I am, more than anything, happy with whom I’ve grown into. And I will continue to evolve further onwards.
Not sure which surprises me most: that I could navigate a dermatologist followup in German (understanding ~65%) or being asked about my transition direction by someone who saw ~98% of my bare skin already when I explained I needed the followup done before my imminent SRS. Like, he literally has seen everywhere but front under magnification. Between buttcheeks even, with panties pulled down. And remembered me well, yet still seemed genuinely surprised I was transfeminine. I started HRT at 37. Yet somehow I pass as cis to healthcare providers? My schedule for next two weeks is packed full with items to somehow finish things up or hand things over. It will be intensive, and all of it aiming to be able to move my various projects from a state of requiring immediate attention. Exciting and tiring and… real.
Two weeks.
Scheduled a meeting with my gynaecologist for a week post-release from hospital. Like the parabolic ant, I try to prepare all I can so it can fall into place as well as it can. I hope all will be well.
I think I have 1) ca 30% higher libido and 2) ca 30% higher dysphoric anxiety, these days now. I wonder very much if it is due to being off the testosterone blockers, as both of those things changed in the opposite direction when I started HRT. Curious! Won’t be for long though.
The experience of buying pads, without any idea what size I actually need or what brand is good, so playing it safe in the middle. Not for any uterine lining, but in preparation for substantial bleeding and discharge during healing. I’ve thought many times wistfully of that expectation of coming to bleed a whole life’s worth of periods during a year of recovery. I realize none of this (cis or trans blood) is anything to romanticize, but still there are Emotions surrounding it, by way of symbolic anchoring. Less than two weeks now.
So hard to tell what is nocebo. But while off the T blockers, it really does seem the few strands of facial hair that remains are a little thicker, libido more intrusive, and my anxiety is not great. It latches on to the fear of COVID, that either I will be infected and denied admission, or my surgeon be unable to travel to the city or even catch it himself, or that there will be shutdowns, or that after will become very complicated, all of it. Of course this can just be regular anxiety, but as anecdotal data, it is absolutely at an uncomfortable level right now. However the causality looks, I very much look forward to when this will be over and any elevated T levels will have subsided. I am very anxious over more delays and postponement, so will try to bury myself in work as a distraction.
Really, I am going to believe there will be postponing for whatever reason until I am in the clinic and they put me under. Near unable to believe in a good thing until I am certain it cannot be taken away. I wonder if this masks apprehension I have for what is to come?
Privilege is having a friendly cardiologist effortlessly setting pre-op checks for you. Still waiting for blood tests though so still nervous. And I really do need to deal with this hypertension, else minor valve regurgitation will not stay minor. But so far. And ceasing 60-70h work weeks on stims and salt overdoses should help. But that is for later. For now just noting that dressing down for echocardiogram my breasts looked awesome in the mirror. Frivolous? Sure. But still made me smile a little to see.
Not liking my parts and tucking them out of sight means I only notice now that there is some very dry skin in my groin area. After worrying it might be some form of fungal infection (but probably just dry from tucking), I embark on a project of remoisturization to make the skin material as supple and useful as possible for its soon-to-come origami. Looking at my body for the first time in a long while, using a makeup focus mirror for new angles, it does not look as bad as I feared (dry and flaking) though still will take and follow any recommendations the surgeon makes in response to my email. I can also see how, I suspect, my vulva will look, what stretches of skin will go where, and that is another emotional thought, plus an interesting prediction to try to later assess the accuracy of. Moreover, there is a region of skin noticeably darker since starting estrogen which I suspect is precisely where the vaginal opening will be, and which makes me very curious on what sort of E2-responsive cell differentiation that reflects. It seems like it might be overlaying a void in the musculature, an opening into the body’s inner space. Very much like sensing a sculpture inside a block of stone.
(Oversharing too much yet?)
Just over a week now. Remaining gates to pass: be approved by anaesthesiologist, test COVID PCR negative on Friday, mostly. Still scared to near paralysis that something will block me from this, but I learned over decades that there is no way around fear, only through it. Most preparations are either done or I accept they will not be done. My flat may or may not be cleaned. The hot water may or may not be installed. I will pick up the vaginal douche and my medications, and may or may not get painkillers preemptively prescribed. I expect to resolve the major projects – give my comments on five manuscript drafts with various collaborators I expect to be submitted during my absence, set up funding for my PhD student, and bundle and document some code for my poor coauthors in case they need to rebuild figures. Supervision for students and group meeting schedule is set up, and my postdocs deputized to handle most matters. Setting up email autoreplies for the first time in my life. Scheduled therapy appointments via phone for time in hospital so that if I end up with post-anaesthetic depression, at least someone will notice and we can intervene. Will squeeze in a few more things including meetings for future planned projects also this week. Praying silently to Goddess that I will not get sick, but the way my immune system seems to work, so long as I avoid getting cold, and stay sufficiently high on adrenaline, and sleep enough, I hopefully will avoid that. It is out of my control. Preparing playlist (collaborative! let me know if you want to add songs) to listen to during waiting and waking and recovery, and preparing in my mind the ways in which I hope to make use of this all as a way to work on my issues – largely centred around trust, in a widest possible sense – within scope of what I hope to undergo, and the mythological overlap I create to try to make the most of that, templated on the story of Inanna and the Huluppu-Tree as a woman’s coming of age story and first resolution of conflict with her lack of self-esteem and confidence. I believe within this framework, and linking it to my conclusions from therapy that I could try to consciously learn to stop expecting so little in some ways, learn to be less wary, less afraid, more able to receive and accept all those things the world wants to give me. This I will do. Sorted my moving boxes for first time since coming to Berlin and found a pile of books I have been meaning to read since I got them, and have not made time for. I have not been off work for several years, this will be the first in a long time that I will be unable to stay responsive and I need it and long for it so much. Surgery is no magic bullet for anything, but I hope it can be the opportunity, for how it is placed in my life and in place and time and symbolism and materiality, to let myself finally do the work in my own heart and habit that I need to undertake. I should blog about this, to make my journey of more than three years visible in case it can help others in my situation, but feeling it easier to tweet these days than write on the wordpress site. Perhaps eventually I will collate these tweets as blog entries however. Finally, so much love to all of you who see me and support me and who share this world with me, in all its grotesque glory and hilarious hope.
Met with anaesthesiologist and consented across language barrier. No risk factors or contraindications but realized filling forms: I would have denied them if there were. I am wholly ready to risk my life for this procedure, which surprised me a little. I suppose I am ready now.
First filling of my HRT prescription without the androcur. Having Emotions around no longer needing it (or possible side effects, too) soon. My friend suggests I might be in a dissociative state, given I don’t really feel nervous, but it might also just be that my default state now for a while has been a sense of chronic urgency and swimming in place to stay on top of things. If anything, I feel a dull longing forward and a sense of impending peace and a sense of wanting to dissolve into the process and be cradled for a while.
It’s probably not a great idea to work at this high intensity the week before surgery, but it keeps me at least from worrying something will block my access because my mind is occupied, and if I know later that all my projects and expectations are on track for the rest of the year, then perhaps I will actually succeed in taking time off. First vacation since I don’t know how long. Using 45 unclaimed vacation days from 2019-2020 I would lose otherwise. Time if nothing else to read papers for general curiosity or strategic learning instead of tactical searches for something supporting one point or other. Or just be still and absorb fiction, or be present in my body and see what emotions come to me unbidden. Or something else. Any or all of those things. But so far these last days don’t seem like they will be particularly calm in and of themselves. Though at the same time, I don’t feel stressed. I feel in control, because somehow it will be OK either way, and I recognize my own achievements, or some other mechanism still is operative. I can observe that intensive focus must be followed by some time doing nothing though, before I can be relaxed enough to sleep. Hence why this night of grading a PhD thesis and of commenting on a surprisingly powerful manuscript I found myself involved with now must be followed by something else before I sleep, despite how late it is. Well, these things work. And then we will see what my habits turn into when I don’t have to be so intensely effective. We don’t change our habits easily even when they don’t make us happy. These habits do make me happy, but they are a local minimum in the energy landscape and I hope to find eventually a lower such. I think I will.
Maybe it is nocebo, but after two weeks being off the testosterone blocker pills to reduce thrombosis risk during surgery, I feel stubbly itch in my armpits for first time in forever, and am followed by a whiff of body odor which slightly nauseates me. Very uncomfortable. I am surprised to find that even after 32 months of suppression and visible atrophy, gonadal production still starts up so quickly after suppression ceases. I can’t wait to be rid of this permanently. Less than a week now.
I think that one of the goals I have for personal growth facilitated as side effects of what I plan to undergo, and the opportunity for self-reflection and -adjustment the next months will enable, is to gain the ability to more deliberately decide which fucks to give/not give.
Just one of those things: when you use first name with the really senior clinician because he is not also your treating endocrinologist but simply your collaborator, but feel awkward not doing “Dear Dr X” with his subordinate, who IS your treating endocrinologist. In a conversation about starting up a study on the treatment you are undergoing with them. Mixing almost all roles at the same time (let’s leave aside how it could get even more complicated for now) with resulting confusion on how to address your emails. I assume something similar must have happened somewhere to someone at sometime, but I don’t think it will have occurred often. The surreal experience of being a trans researcher into something relevant to trans health and not leaving well enough alone. #EmbraceYourHubris
I have a slight throatache. I think this is just the kind of microcold I get like all the time, but I am panicky it might be COVID, not because that worries me (though it should) but because then my operation would be delayed. The requirements, with increasing numbers of infection, are to COVID test within 48h (but they say they accept 48h of working days at least) of hospital admission, and warned me now laboratories are getting overwhelmed. So today went physically to testing clinic (because due to bugs could not do it online) to shift my Friday COVID PCR testing appointment to Thursday, which clinic says they will accept. I am calmly frozen fearful over somehow having mild or asymptomatic COVID, but I guess I will know either way. And I feel a weird sense of surreal unrest permeating which I suppose is the beginning of the overall nervosity and emotionality, including the lower layers masked to me, having me dissociate. But it may be just as well, for my way of dealing with this is to work and that means I can address the remaining things, the handover of main long-standing projects mostly, all of which requires a degree of focus and effort that usually comes to me at a cost, and which now forms a welcome distraction and are possible to handle well enough if I bring to bear this numbness in combination with enough (legal) stimulants, for now. Ceasing any alcohol intake at this point. I got all my prescriptions filled, and the only supply I have not yet gotten is the vaginal douche, which required them to resend for it, so that will still happen this week. More of an issue is, no visitors now allowed in the hospital, so my girlfriend cannot accompany me going in (would have liked to hold her hand as they explain the procedure to her, as moral support – will know that she will think of me, at last), and cannot be there when I wake up. However, this is no difference from what, say, someone giving birth in COVID time experiences, not being able to have one’s partner close for important support. I will sense her, and my other partners, there in my heart, and hope for Discord with them after I wake. And with all these emotions and challenges, I long for it like I find myself longing for pain, or for large sea waves – I want it to wash over me, carry me outside my control, and let me change and adapt with it. With all other burdens temporarily set down, I want to see what feeling all this with no way of escaping can do to me, if it can help me become yet more real and present emotionally, as well as facilitate learning to access the embodiment the surgery will give me. Hence the need to be sure everything else that scares me is for a time handled elsewhere, because between the panic zone and the comfort zone, that is where the learning happens. I anticipate coming out of this protective numbness to be faced with something that does not just happen because I keep choosing it, but which has become an independent reality of my situation. I look forward to all of this, including pain, fear and loss of dignity. I look forward to see how I can evolve when exposed to it. And while certainly there is also fear _of_ the surgery masked by greater fear _for_ the surgery, I am secure in the self-insight that right now, and for a long time, I fear being denied this more than almost any other outcome. And so I am smiling calm in the eye of the storm, and I prepare as I can.
Douche arrived. I shall have to ask the nurses for how to use it, and size looks a bit daunting. Interesting times. Waiting for COVID PCR results now. https://t.co/CZozL6P4Ri
COVID antigen test negative but PCR will take a few days to be processed. I am zero chill but this shows only as weird tiredness and body sensations. I suppose this is an example of some form of dissociation. I have rarely felt this way. It feels remarkable.
I am incredibly restless inside, and using full-on my mix of semi-illicit anxiolytic/stimulant combos and workaholism to see to the remaining things (getting things ready for coauthors to finish revising and resubmitting two Nature papers) needing done before I can leave. In my body, less than my conscious mind, is some sort of panicked fear that something will go wrong and deny me this. I feel little on the surface but coming to rest feels intolerable, impossible beyond words and on the level of instinct. And probably other emotions in turn hide behind those. I don’t think I fear what will come, or even what can go wrong much once I am on the operating table (except perhaps I also do and that is somehow part of this too? It would make sense I would be nervous after all) but I am a complete bundle of nerves. Dissociated and distracting myself. It is so rare with emotions like this for me. I am fascinated observing myself, in this stage of pre-op craziness. I am increasingly tired, erratic, feeling my head is full of clouds. At the same time focused anchored. I wonder what will be my new normal? When did I last know “normal” actually? Have I ever? I don’t know. I just know that every fiber of my being right now is an arrow aimed at the moment I have worked for so long, prepared for so long. The moment that I can finally start processes of healing and growth – and mourning, too, I think – that I have denied myself. Nothing is ever a single moment. Nothing is ever over. Everything is a process. But this, if I can make it so, can be a turning point in the road. All of me long for it, and I am held over room-temperature fire on a spit while I wait with bated breath. Great Inanna, Lady of Heaven and Earth, look kindly with grace upon your priestess and grant her your Rite of Head-Overturning. In your infinite love, grace her with your blessing, and she shall bring you glory by making immanence that which you embody in transcendence. May her nervosity and fear and pain and blood and anticipation all be gifted you for sacrifice.
This has stayed on my mind since I read it. https://t.co/eKQEv1nSro
COVID PCR test negative. Slowly, gradually getting obstacles out of the way.
I now started listening to the playlist as my nerves are beginning to sense the realness of it all. Thanks to all who contributed so far! ♡
My validity as a woman does not hinge on my anatomy. That said, I intend to use this much-anticipated change in anatomy to help me lay to rest, gradually more and more, lingering feelings of inadequacy, impostorship, illegitimacy. The two are not directly connected but I wish for the change to remind me saliently that I can and may put those emotions at bay, a symbolic message to myself that I don’t need to hold back, to deny myself space or to think of my inclusion as conditional, by invitation that at any point can be revoked. Others will do and feel and speak as they will. But I can start in myself, my own heart and will and body, and root myself there regardless. I could perhaps do so without taking this step, but I believe one consequence will be to make that work, eventually, easier. There are many other reasons I undergo this, such as wanting to not be uncomfortable with my own sensory input or the input I infer must be in the qualia of those who see and touch me, and those aspects also will follow from internal work I can soon start undertaking more easily, recognizing all internal work happens as part of a whole where also there is an exterior.
I must have listened several hundred times to this song in last three years. Now, en route to the hospital, it feels particularly appropriate. https://t.co/2dmTzH8cgB
(It is of course on the playlist: https://t.co/QS7WclBXwR )
Surreal turning real. The central narrative of my life. I have jumped through so many hoops in the last years in order to get here now. I will still fear it might somehow be taken away until tomorrow morning when they put me under, but today I have hopes of being able to unlock all these emotions more and more. We will see. Emotions were blocked for a long time as the vulnerable parts of me feared opening up to the hope of undergoing this procedure but then being denied, especially now during pandemic.
Arriving at the clinic. Feels like any number of conference venues I’ve had workshops in. https://t.co/xskQNxhLpm
Tonight was first in a long time (years) I woke and could not sleep due to agitation. Used to happen often. Not sure of the emotion. Mostly fear of catching sick and being denied but probably anticipation and spiraling. Made some comfort food and then I could sleep some more.
View from my hospital bed. https://t.co/NtpyBytz3O
I think I am probably going to become more and more nervous and anticipatory as the day and night continues. Well, that is fine.
I am in a liminal state. Operation is sometime the coming afternoon. I am outside my regular and habitual structures in something holding me. I am giving in to the deep fatigue and not forcing focus. It is unfamiliar. Next awaits fear for the body damage itself and the risk of imperfect healing. I accept those risks and that fear but this does not mean they are not still on my mind, now with greater fears no longer masking them. I suppose this is where I, like Inanna in her garden, must learn to trust in that which I do not myself control directly.
Cannot sleep, and here even moreso, cannot comfort food myself to sleep. Despite being too tired for anything complex. Only had this with fever before. Tomorrow hopefully little needed from me though except be present. It will be fine.
Asked to put on gown and wait. Soon now.
Tired, high, good.
lost in transition 