#complain posting

[surprisinglyironlibrarian]

Happy freakin' fourth of July. The USA doesn't deserve to have its birthday celebrated anyway, we're in a heat wave, fire risk is high, and it's happening on a Saturday so people are going to get drunk off their ass and be wild. Don't ask me why I'm grumpy.

[woofchest3rs]

tech runs my be-neutral

[davidaddington]

“Why don’t you talk to us anymore? You’re un loyal” you JUST said I HAD to be retarded and explained why I had to be between yourself’s less than five minutes ago

[murielcook]

After a birth control that's a cousin to spironolactone nearly took me out, and the coming off it felt like coming back online and alive, I've realized I would probably benefit from testosterone supplementation.

Problems:

Doctors bad. Which is to say hard to vet for understanding ahead of time and likely involves a long wait.

Procedures bad. I am unlikely to encounter a simple informed consent model. Again, hard to pre-vet, really depends on who you get on the phone.

I'm not a man. If I were, the lack of informed consent model would trigger months to years of psychological profiling, potentially. Since I am not, the methods become even more opaque. Doctors are more risk averse than ever and if you can't lean on established, albeit fragile, precedent, you become vulnerable to shut down from both doctors and insurance.

T is black market, not gray market. More difficult to get info because people have to be more careful about who knows what. So if proper channels fail or become unavailable, that's the ballgame because I'm simply not willing to absorb the risk. Too many people depending on me. And frankly I'd hate to feel better then have it taken away. A "devil you know" sort of thing.

And it's small potatoes but I do think I will be less loved if I try to change. Which means I'm already not loved enough, so the change is worth it. And it may be the fear of not knowing what I'll be like if it does work for me talking entirely, making me think uncharitable things about myself and my loved ones. The binary notions of gender have been imposed on me one way most of my life and I felt a miserable failure for much of that time. I don't want to invite new comparisons I have no desire to live up to, no fresh guilt at under performance. But if time has taught me anything it's that I don't have to make those comparisons even if others insist on doing so, and I can't control other people being incredibly incorrect no matter how badly I'd like to.

I guess the only solution is to try anyway but I feel pretty frustrated and alone! It's easy to lose days because all your hopes, dreams, and fears have to be worked out during business hours.

Que sera sera

[surprisinglyironlibrarian]

"Why don't people just desensitize their dogs to the fireworks?" That is like saying "Why don't people with PTSD just go to therapy" or "Why don't autistic people just wear earplugs?" Nobody is saying these things aren't helpful, but it's not that simple, and what works for one person or dog doesn't work for every person/dog. Desensitization or therapy or earplugs are not magic cure-alls that fix everything.

Desensitization and counterconditioning take a long time and are very hard to do with something like fireworks. You can play firework sounds all day long but it's not the same. It's a sound being played through a speaker. It may help, but not all dogs will generalize that training to the real thing. Fireworks are more than just a sound. They have a smell, they sound different in person than over a speaker, they cause vibrations, they may even shake the house. The only way to replicate that is to set off actual fireworks outside your house. Which most people are not doing. Fireworks also happen at the most random times, and the sheer surprise factor can cause anyone to get jump-scared even if they normally don't mind them. Keep in mind you KNOW what a firework is and why it happens, and other animals don't. It's normal for them to get scared! Maybe instead of blaming dog owners as being "lazy" and assuming they haven't even tried to desensitize their dogs, and shaming them for taking measures like medication, white noise, etc. "instead of" training (which you don't know, they may very well be training in addition to that), we could accept it's normal for animals to get scared by random explosions?

And also? Everyone gloating that "My dog doesn't get spooked by fireworks because I trained them," know that noise phobia very often doesn't start until they're older, and it get worse with age. My dog didn't give a damn about fireworks until she was 5!

Every year people say "just train your dog" and every year it gets more annoying. Unless you have something useful to say, STFU.

[surprisinglyironlibrarian]

It's been one of those days and I'm heading to work with a granola bar a tangerine LaCroix and a prayer and it's hot as hell out here.

[murielcook]

It took a really long time to first gain the ability via insurance to talk to someone about my various reproductive problems, then quite a while to work up the courage to actually ask for help.

The doc was pretty good about listening to my tale of pcos/pmos and pmdd woe and taking it seriously, writing up a detailed set of notes that I do appreciate having in my chart. And I broached the subject of oophorectomy and hormone replacement, from the standpoint that I have no desire to reproduce and store bought hormones are not only fine but preferable because they can be monitored and tuned. From here it went to shit.

I was told this was very risky, very high risk indeed unless my ovaries showed signs of cancer it was just too risky. I could get a second opinion but it was just so high risk so risky. And I said well I simply know too many people on long term hrt to believe that but she did not understand what I meant and we talked past each other for a bit.

Not wanting to walk out empty handed and wanting to make a show of good faith in the process I simply do not believe in, I left the office with a scrip for drospironone.

Now, I already have problems with needing salt more than the average bear. And this has potassium sparing diuretic properties. This also meant to ibuprofen or naproxen for pain, since drug interactions increased potassium risk.

I had headaches. I was cold from the inside out. I got constipated instantly. On more than one day I couldn't stay awake during the day. I got itchy. I got bitchy. My muscles hurt especially after simple tasks. I got so hopeless I cried (which was maybe more out of frustration than a psych side effect). I got confused and easily frustrated in a way that evaded my normal ability to spot that and deal with it.

This started on day one and got worse as it went. I quit before a full week was up because I reported these things and it was suggested I stay on for 3 months because it might get better.

The idea of 3 months of bad days and no good days just to prove it was no good, while increasing my risk of clots and fucked up potassium? A non starter. My goal was very clearly to not feel like that, not feel like that 24-7 with extra pain and increase of serious potential problems whose early warning signs are often these things I was reporting.

And honestly I wasn't told that I was likely going to feel like shit at first!

So to recap:

I was given a BS line in response to my reasonable desire to take control of my body. (no risk was described that could not be controlled by a good hrt regimen)

I was offered a drug with a risk profile that wasn't a good fit for my existing health issues without going through the process of asking about said issues.

I wasn't warned about the likelihood of side effects or how long I should expect to have them or what serious versus uncomfortable was, other than was was in the handout with the drug.

I lost several good days to this process and it was painful and humiliating and infuriating.

I'm fairly heartbroken and still physically sore. I had a good, productive, focused day immediately after stopping it even though I had a headache and pain still. So it was really doing a number on me, brain-wise. And what worries me is I didn't realize how bad it was until someone called me out for being kinda rude and nasty about something and I hadn't even realized I was being snappish. I usually know when I'm feeling mean.

I don't want to go back there but now it just feels like what's the point? Why go through that again? Why get it on my charts that I'm uncooperative or whatever?

I could make an appointment with th. Lgbt center but it feels inevitable that they just say "no🌈" instead of just "no (standard misogyny)". A side order of nonbinaryness being fake is not what I need right now.