I sleep here now

Pre-op appointment today went fine. The surgeon I've got continues to be very cheerful and smiley, despite also being very German. I continue to surprise myself by not feeling very anxious about this.

There's nothing like a private clinic to give you a measure of reassurance that you're in good hands, and they're handing me back to D who is lovely, and then we'll go home to V who does so much support, and who now is being supported by angelofthenorth while we're away, and so on and so forth.

I am at the center of this network of care, and I'm well aware of my role in it. Soon that will be to not get impatient to do too much. For now, it's to pack the things I need for an overnight stay and try to get some sleep.

I have done this before, as one of the support people, and I've had this central role when I broke my ankle. This feels straightforward to me.

Having been so stressed about earlier stages of this process that I literally wouldn't have persisted without help from D and others, having always had a lot of medical trauma and triggers, I can't say why I've been so calm ever since I got the surgery date, a couple of months ago. I assumed I was just dissociating, my brain trying to protect me from this, but my counselor said I didn't sound like it when I speculated thusly. I said then is it possible that I've just used up all my intense emotion on this in the first, oh, two years of trying to get this far, and I just don't have any left? It was a joke and not a real question, I know that's not how emotions work, but also I don't have any other theories.

I am not in need of any, though. My lack of perseverative anxiety on this topic might be an anomaly but it's a welcome one!

By the time I was asked if I had questions, I had very few (I thought of a few later, of course, but nothing too consequential). I did end up asking one that D had asked me, which can be boiled down to

how many nipples will I have this time tomorrow?

(I have three! And while it's a normal part of the procedure to reduce the size of the nipples, D asked me a little while ago if this meant I'd still have the situation I have now which is one normal nipple and on the other side two squished together, like the mitosis diagram where the cells are first starting to separate, or just one. "If it's important to your personality," the surgeon laughed, "you can have all three." I was kinda taken aback at this, I've never thought about it! I've never had a different number of nipples; they've always been like this!)

And in other TMI news:

The surgeon suggested I trim my chest hair.

Not shave, he was very clear. Just trim short. Shaving would sting a lot when they have to cover my skin with disinfectant because, he explained, shaving causes lots of micro-abrasions on the skin. But he didn't have to tell me that; I already know from the chili sauce! Anyway, I was very grateful for D's help in the shaving: we got a cheap beard trimmer and he did it this evening. Such a weird thing, to be sitting next to our dining table with my shirt off... He is so conscientious! I liked watching his face while he did it. "I've never shaved boobs before!" he said. It made me really miss Bat, who out of all the people we know is the one who'd probably most delight in hearing about D shaving my boobs. The poem I wrote for him doesn't really have a name but when I read it local pride's trans open mic last year, I called it "the hairy boob poem." I do not like this stubble-y chest hair, though! I had a shower right afterwards, just because that was next on my list, and I hoped it'd calm down the itchiness but no.

I won't get another shower for a week now, and I'm really going to miss them!

I learned how to use the pourover and made coffee this morning! (I had a rough idea of how they worked but was still experimenting a bit, and this one makes the coffee in a little carafe where what a friend has made me before is just a filter that you put over a single mug.) And I made croissants; I couldn't resist them after I spotted that here you can get the kind in a tube that you pop open. I was so excited to see them in Lidl last night, it was practically a religious experience.

Sonntagsbrötchen, the package called them: little breads for Sundays.

It happened to be Sunday, which is nice, but I'd have made them even if it weren't. We're on vacation!

After my terribly civilized breakfast, we had a very vacation-y day; going to the Rheinturm (Rhine Tower), which reminded me a little of the Space Needle. After tea (for me, who'd had museli and fruit as well as my croissants, before D woke up) and lunch (for him), we found ourselves with some time to kill before the next boat tour that we got a discount on with our Rheinturm tickets, so we went up to the Gehry Bauten (Gehry Buildings), which are a) made by a famous architect that I hadn't heard of even though I've seen one of his buildings a bunch of times, b) has a name that sounds like "Gary" (the way we say it anyway) and c) one of which is actually home to the clinic I'll be in! There's a white one, a brick one, and a shiny steel one, and I'm going to the shiny steel one which is also my favorite of them!

The river tour was fun (if chilly for someone whose nice warm hoodie doesn't zip up! I wore my medium-weight one today and it was mostly okay but let me down here!). It's nice to see how a city that clearly grew up around water makes so much more sense from the water.

We left the boat near the Altstadt (old city) which is also home to one of the things we were enthusiastically told to visit: a brewery that serves altbier (old beer) in small glasses and just tots up the total on your beer mat. The beer was nice but we couldn't quite see our friend's devotion to it, but the "bar snacks" we eventually hung around long enough to order definitely made a difference: I had bread with a cheese like Edam or something, and I added lots of the mustard we were offered along with the salt and pepper. D had raw pork mince and raw onions, and really enjoyed it.

We staggered home for a rest, no need for dinner now as such, and did some laundry. D had a nap and I read a book. It's been a nice chill evening after another busy but great day.

The first thing I tried to do once we got our suitcase was go to the toilet.

D found me a disabled one with a weird door: it slid open when you pressed a button (like the ones I'm used to on trains). But when I walked in, the door didn't close! There was no similar button. Nor could I see any other way to activate it. It was a pocket door, it'd disappeared entirely so there was no way to pull it closed or interact with it.

I just stood there in this open room, feeling like there were cartoon question marks above my head.

A nice lady happening by (this door was opposite the entrance to the ladies') helped me out. First she asked me something that I didn't understand of course, which made me feel even more helpless. Then she said "You want to close?" Yes! Why could I remember the word for open right now and not close??

She pointed out a weird switch, like a German light switch which I find confusing anyway...

I pressed it, a red light came on but the door didn't move. I reset it, tried again, said something stupid and obvious like "It doesn't work," she came in and tried it, she went outside and tried the button that is there right under the perfectly functioning one I'd used to open the door. I was a little worried about that one because I didn't want to be stuck in there if I couldn't operate the door from the inside! But it didn't matter because nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen.

"This is Germany," she said to me finally, in an inscrutable tone of voice. And we went our separate ways.

(I had to use the regular men's room, which stank of stale piss even through my Flo mask, had tiny indicators on the cubicle doors of whether they were vacant or occupied that I had to just push on all the doors anyway, and was as quiet as the grave despite how crowded it was, because no one washed their hands apparently.)

In the next half hour or so, D had to carry our suitcase up a non-working escalator, the transport app didn't have signal in the station so we couldn't use it, the correct train we eventually got on was 15 minutes late, and it was almost impossible to both find and then open the door to the apartment that we've booked.

We finally got in but after a very cursory look at the place because it was almost 9pm, we got some food from a nearby Greek takeaway, walked around a little to see what's nearby, and had a drink outside a bar. D called my gin-based cocktail a Gin & Teutonic.

We're here! We've got plans to see friends of mine from the internet the next few days, before my pre-op appointment Tuesday. Turns out I know a few people who live in the vicinity of Düsseldorf.

I had such a ridiculously busy day today.

I started with knocking over a plant next to my desk so the time I intended to spend on making coffee and breakfast I instead spent trying to sweep up the dirt, grit, and actual rocks (for drainage) and getting them back into the pot -- luckily the plant, a big old yucca, is fine. But the floor was gritty under my shoes and my chair wheels for the whole day and I didn't have time to do anything about it.

Because, after a brief team meeting finalizing the details, my team went into a big Teams meeting where we were showcasing policy to our whole directorate (which is over a hundred people, though they didn't all turn up of course).

It's a big deal ( work stuff )

until at 12:30 he said "anyway, enough, we need lunch!"

I'd not long since eaten my breakfast!

I did take advantage of a chance to just stare into space and play on my phone a little though, which was soon interrupted by ( surgery logistics [brief mention of weight] )

So it was nice to get that out of the way! Handily I'd been sitting right near D's laptop when the call came, so he could not only look up how much I weighed but make notes while I talked on speakerphone. But my goodness, how exhausting.

I really did go and have some lunch after that.

And before too long it was time to start getting ready to go out to an in-person meeting this afternoon, just in town again. I was tagging along with a colleague to a pan-disability forum which like all the other ones I've been part of lately was accommodating of the loudest and most demonstrative people's access needs, so I had to sit in the dark which was especially hard on my eyes considering how bad they've been lately (I don't know if the stress is "going to my eyes," the way my mom used to say colds did when I was little, or if it's just a coincidence but my god has my nystagmus been flaring lately), and usually more than one person was talking at the same time so I stayed quiet. Luckily the person who said green light was the worst color for them and blue was best was sitting across from someone who was the opposite, so I didn't have to try so hard to make my There Is No Correct Color to Make Everything point quite as strongly as I usually do as they'd already done that for me.

This evening I've started packing the things I won't need beforehand into the one suitcase we get to check. And I've made a list of the other stuff. Because we fly to Düsseldorf the day after tomorrow! Wild.

Whenever I get asked what kind of work I do, I kinda dread answering because I work in policy.

I love it, but most people don't really know what it is, or maybe they have a feeling that it's something boring or abstract or remote from their lives.

I'm met with a lot of "Oh..." and similar reactions. Real conversation killer.

But in one of those books I now have from the library, Stories Are Weapons, Annalee Newitz has paid my line of work a great compliment (transcribed from the audiobook as I was getting off the bus, so it might not be exact):

I would argue that policy is a type of applied science fiction. Policies are visions of possible futures.

I'm gonna start telling people I work in Applied Science Fiction.

I just wanted to say thank you so much to everyone who commented about D being banished from transgym. Writing that entry felt like a throwback to the heyday of LiveJournal, where I was regularly pouring my heart out but more importantly trying to figure out what I think about something -- I've always needed to talk it out, or write it out, to even have a chance of knowing what's really going on in my head.

But reading all the comments as they came in, and trying to answer them with the care and nuance that they demonstrated, was really a callback to those heady days, when interaction and community were really what made that/this place the best it can be, for me anyway.

I was dithering last night on whether to set my alarm for this morning at all, and I might not have if not for all the processing I'd been able to do here.

For all my good intentions to sneak out of bed this morning without disturbing D who hadn't come to bed until late, he woke up when I did, and immediately offered to drive me. I told him he didn't have to, but I could hear the rain and the wind outside and I wasn't exactly looking forward to having to dress for both that and the gym (I'm a sweatmonster even in shorts so there's no question of me covering more of my body than necessary in the gym, and this is the awkward time of year when the best clothes for me to wear outside and the best clothes to wear in the gym start to diverge). I was happy, and grateful, to stay warm and snuggly with him a bit longer.

And when we did leave the house, we were treated to the coincidence of our neighbor and Teddy the dog walking past. I'd just sat down in the car when I heard D say "Hello Teddy!" so I jumped out again and Teddy ran between us for pets, tail wagging madly, and even tried to jump up on me a couple of times which I've never known him to do! It was lovely to see him, and the neighbor (who caught us up on their recent trip to Crete during some really awful weather).

When I got to lift club, I felt weird and subdued, but of course I expected that. With the notable exception of our friend A (who's good enough friends with us to have heard about what happened right away), a lot of the people I would normally talk to or expect to ask after D weren't there, which suited me: I didn't want to talk to anyone.

There were three new-ish people there today, and I couldn't help but wonder if it was one (or more) of them who complained. I am trying very hard not to be bitter about this. I can truthfully say that it's my fervent hope that whoever complained, I hope they hang around for at least as long as D did -- three years! -- and get at least as much out of it as he has, because I'd really hate for it to be less meaningful to them than what has been taken from him and from me.

The instructor, S, did ask me while I was doing leg press "How's D?" Sad, I said. They said they were too, and I believe that. They said they'd forgotten all about D being a cis guy and I said that didn't surprise me (he's lovely and respectful and conscious of his minority status!), but he never forgot: he always made sure to let new people know, he only ever booked on at the last second if there were still free places because he didn't want to take up a space that a trans person could have used... I said I was proud of how gracious (thank you haggis for getting that word to me just in time!) he was about it, and S said that they'd cried reading the short e-mail he'd sent them to say thanks for letting him be a part of this and talked about the difference it'd made to him. I wasn't surprised at that either.

S asked how I was doing too, and I said I'm sad too. I didn't want to get into the complexities of "what if future trans people who'd like to participate need/would benefit from non-trans carers, so I just left it at that, and said I was touched that they'd checked in on me as well.

They said we should sort out some queer-gym thing generally, perhaps at "their" gym (where their actual personal-trainer work happens), and I meant to talk to them about Jacked Fruit, which D & I found out about at alt-Pride, but I didn't get a chance today. The trainer who steps in when S is unavailable is a trustee or something of Jacked Fruit so I think these connections might already exist but it's something I want to check because I was already excited about that as something with a wider scope (LGBTQIA+ and neurodivergent) that other people will also benefit from.

And, driving us home, D pointed out a nearby gym that's part of our ex-council-gyms membership, so he can go there while I'm at lift club, much like he's already been going to the gym next to where I do circuits because he'd rather do that than circuits anyway. And of course the two of us can go to those gyms together, as we already have on occasion.

It wasn't my best day at the gym anyway.

details with numbers

I struggled to even do 40kg bent-over row, and I've been doing closer to 50 lately; I couldn't be bothered lifting more than 45 on chest press, I only had 120 on the leg press instead of 150-160, I didn't even try to do plank taps without sinking my knees to the floor...

That could just be that I slept poorly -- I was awake in the middle of the night and thinking/feeling all the expected things about the prospect of going this morning. But normally I love all this shit and this morning I felt more like how other people talk about going to the gym: it's a miserable chore that you do out of a vague sense that it's better for you than not doing it.

The other thing that I don't want to attribute too much to is that my eyes were so sore I had to keep them closed a lot of the way home, which is really unusual. Normally they get tired and are sore like, well, a tired muscle is sore (because that is basically what's happening) but this felt awful, more like I did when I had a bad eye infection as a young kid. I knew it wasn't that, but it was unusual. I didn't think I'd done a bad job at lift club of navigating around machines and not missing things I needed to pay attention to, but I think I was extra aware of having to do all that work myself this morning, which might have tired my eyes out unusually? And again the tiredness could have played a role too. But I'm used to those things, and this felt worse. By the time we got home, there was some of the familiar facial pressure I associate with my sinuses reacting badly, and lately that often seems related to the weather, which has been wild lately -- windy and changeable.

Luckily, it didn't last once I'd gotten into the shower. It could've even been something about getting my hair cut yesterday, by a new guy who wasn't the most careful about keeping/getting the hairs off my face, or the gel he put in -- normally I love those but this one didn't feel as good.

Now, there's nothing I love more than an after-lift club after-shower nap. And this time, D had already laid back down in my bed so I gave in to the temptation to join him instead of to go to the pharmacy and the post office like I would've done in an ideal world.

We slept for a couple of hours. And normally I love a little after-lift-club nap and wake up excited about the rest of my weekend, but today I woke up feeling groggy and exhausted, and I spent the next three hours willing myself not to go back to sleep. But it's been a kind of miserable day: I did manage to wake myself up enough that I wasn't just daydreaming about going up the stairs and back to bed, but I wasn't awake enough to read much, or listen to a podcast, or watch anything. Everything felt impossibly hard, or else so easy that I kept getting distracted from it.

It was a miserable afternoon. I don't know if this is fallout from lift club, or just the effects of my sleep being a mess now that we're in the autumn where it's always a mess, or subacute sinus problems again, or what. Luckily D made an easy dinner and it's one I really like, so I ate well this evening. And we have a nice plan for tomorrow, friends and food, so there is reason for optimism.