I went to [REDACTED] for my 3-month checkup today. The trip there went fine, but the voyage home was a rolling demonstration of Murphy's law. First, I couldn't get the safety belt to extend. You know, why is it that backseat safety belts always refuse to extend unless you fully retract them? Like, if you make the tiniest mistake, you've got to start over again from nothing. Moreover, fully extended, it's always just too short for fat girls like me. What, this is supposed to be some kind of message "hey lose some weight"? Maybe you could give me that message after I've strapped myself in and am actively protecting myself from ejection in the case of a crash? Maybe I've already been told to lose some weight by several hundred other people and I don't need to hear it from a car manufacturer?
Getting ahead of ourselves a bit though. After talking through some of the hormone-induced existential problems I've been having lately, my clinician and I both decided that I'll get used to it and to wait a bit longer for the progesterone. I really was trying to wait for another year to start it anyway. Basically, what progesterone is, is like a hard-limiter for your girl hormones. In audio production, hard-limiters are used to clip off excess audio from the waveform in order to fit it into the buffer. Think of oestradiol like raw PCM sample data; when you start HRT, the amplitude spikes pretty high, and that's what makes me cry and get weird nesting urges. If I apply a hard-limiter to that waveform, it's going to stop the spikes getting any higher than -5 dB, and right now, I'm still checking the waveform for production errors. If I take progesterone now, it'll start to regulate the effects of the oestradiol, and I might not see the results that I want—not just in physical appearance, but in my brain and my perception of the world. An artist needs conflict to create art, and I've written some bomb-ass short stories, poems, and music since I've been on E. I can live with the weird nesting urges if it means I get to keep my "teen girl" brain for a little longer.
After my appointment was over, I did some garbage-collecting in my text messages and accidentally deleted all the texts from the medical transportation's automated system, telling me when and where to expect my ride home. Now, obviously, the "where" is easy; the clinic I go to is in a pretty small building and there's only one carpark. But the "when"... I was standing around for 25 minutes. Then we get to the problem with the safety belt, but the driver says he's got to use the loo, so that's helpful, since I doubt that I was going to get my safety belt on while the car was in motion. Was it trying to strangle me? Of course it was!
As soon as we got underway, the driver's phone chimed and he announced "whoa wait, hold up, I gotta backtrack here, 'cos someone else is going back to [PLACENAME], too." He afforded me the option to object and carry on directly back home without picking up this other passenger, which was considerate of him, but I said, "sure, I got nothin' else going on today". I figure being a cab driver is pretty hard, so I'm not going to make his life any harder. Well, little did I know that we had to go about 15 miles into town to get to Absurdly Expensive Teaching Hospital and Research Laboratories, Inc. just so the driver can spend 5 minutes circling around the wrong door. An aside—this was the place I was going to have to be on the waiting-list for if my current gender care clinic didn't exist. For reference, if there hadn't been another option, I would still be waiting to see a gender care specialist! Thanks a lot, Dave Heineman, for ignoring urban Nebraska and forcing Planned Parenthood into hiding. Can't thank you enough for throwing all us queer folk under the bus like that. Anyway, fortunately, I didn't have to wait and I've been on HRT for just over a year now, so I shouldn't complain. Well, the driver did eventually manage to find the correct door to the correct building to pick up the other passenger and we were underway again while I continued to try and work around the fact my safety belt had ratcheted me into the seat so far it was cutting off the circulation to my right boob.
At least until traffic inexplicably slowed to a standstill on the motorway. 16 minutes we were waiting there, ambulances and police going this way and that. It turns out someone's van caught fire and the traffic jam was due to the police parking across all three lanes to block access. I took the opportunity to fix my safety belt... or try to, anyway.
Finally back in town, the driver's GPS gave him a very strange route to Numerically Named Street and we got stopped by a train that was doing a bit of shunting. Odd time of day for that, but I'm sure they had a reason. I could think of 3 different routes that would have been quicker just by default even if there hadn't been a train. But, instead, we gotta sit there for 7 minutes as they clear away the trucks and let the school traffic through the level crossing.
My appointment lasted 23 minutes. I was sitting in that cab, being smashed against the seat by the safety belt for 63 minutes. In case anyone needed verification, Murphy's law is still being enforced. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to collapse from exhaustion now.