Friday, the day after we met up with Dr. Meltzer and Dr. Ley, we headed into the one panel I was interested in. It dealt with surgery options for Facial Feminization Surgery, Breast Augmentation and Body Contouring. I realized I would probably know most of the stuff they would say, but I wanted to double check.

The commute into Seattle from Tacoma wasn’t the worst, but I slept poorly from my anxiety of meeting the docs the day before. I am really excited to do this, but it does make me anxious to think about them cutting open my brow and front of my sinus, cutting it into pieces and rearranging it, along with grinding my brow and jaw down and moving my scalp forward.

We arrived at the convention and I will admit I was intimidated. I am very fortunate to know some very awesome trans people, but I had never been around that many. That brought up a whole slew of anxiety that maybe I will talk about later, but this isn’t the time.

When we got there, just a few minutes before the panel, we found our case manager Raeylean… she is fantastic. I had brought her a flower to thank her, and she seemed overjoyed. She is incredibly huggy as a person and we got to talk for a little bit until it was time to go in to the panel.

The panel itself was very informative actually. Some of what I thought was no longer the case for surgical techniques, and even more importantly I found out that before coming to Meltzer’s office, Dr. Ley had been a pediatric craniologist who specialist in working on the skulls of small children… I have a huge head so that means I should be easy for her. Way more reassured I am going to be ok. The panel was worth it just for that.

We left and visited a little more with R, then headed out to pick up our friend straybits. He is as close as any family and we have been friends for decades. He just got back from Southeast Asia/India for the last year and will be going back for a few months. He was heading back up to Bellingham, so we told him we would take him up.

On the drive up we got caught up on everything and just enjoyed being with around each other. It was a nice drive with me, hubby and straybits. We got some food in Everett and 3 hours later were in Bellingham. During this time I came out to him and he just gave me a hug. I am not sure what I was worried about.

In Bellingham we dropped him off. We are really hoping we can see him before he leaves again, but if we don’t we know we will always be there with each other.

We then got to go see my brother. He is doing really well, sober and thinking straight. He seems to be accepting my transition and was very positive. We stayed with him for awhile before we moved on.

Hubby and brother

brother and myself

brother felt the need to give me a kiss.

By now it was about 7pm, but we wanted to stop by my parents grave (both of them are together) and pay our respects. That only took a few minutes, but I realized we need to clean it up when we come back up in a few weeks.

We then drove the 120 miles home and went to bed. It was a really good day, but a really exhausting day. We are still recovering now, a week later from the trip. It was worth it to see family and get reassurances about my surgery.

This morning is going to be big, I am giving my notice to the Department of Defense. I am probably committing career suicide with my changes. Transitioning even at its most successful will reduce my privilege by a lot, and if the transition isn’t as successful as I want then it will impact it even more.

That being said, I can’t work for the toxic Department of Defense. I listen to fellow auditors talk about “guys in dresses”, make fun of Caetlyn Jenner and Chelsea Manning and just talk shit. I am fortunate, they have never talked shit about my husband who is FtM and they knew it, but “he was different then the rest” is how it feels coming from them.

My hubby got harassed a lot by certain members of management. They even sent out an email to there management saying that the hubby was “crazy because he had the lower surgery”. Hubby was brave, he filed a complaint and three weeks later the person in charge of the “investigation” said there was no proof it was harassment. The things that supervisor did would have gotten anyone fired anywhere (and it didn’t help that they were already under investigation for racist harassment of others).

That told me all I needed to know. I have been on hormones for a little over two months, and I can’t be here. If nothing else I need to stay sane, plus I am tired of participating in the production of weapon systems designed to kill others (usually in an unjust war on top of that). 

So the decision is good. I am going to have my soul reclaimed by doing this. However I will lose my seniority and probably not make that much money again. I am hoping I can earn half that with any jobs up coming (now there have been some frustrations on interviews as well, but that will be a different post).

We are moving to a cheaper apartment, and soon the husband will be the only one working. I am going to cash out my retirement and come close to paying off all our short term debt. If this occurs (the DoD/Fed government takes months to cash you out) it means he can support us, actually he can support us with only part of it paid off with my vacation payout.

I don’t mind being poor, but he is stressed, I am stressed and his car that we still make payments on but doesn’t have a warranty is having problems. I gotta figure something out. Maybe I can work from home if I can’t get hired on somewhere.

Well this is the start of my “Freedom Day”…. maybe? I will report back on how good or bad it went.

I have been incredibly quiet, but not because I forgot to post here. There is a lot of things happening and to be honest I haven’t had the time.

Physically I am doing great. I feel so much better then I did before this process started. The hormones don’t seem to have any ill effect except the expected results of testosterone blockers (but nothing overall bad), just caught off guard, this will be a future post.

I have lost more then 45lbs since March, and not from any specific diet, purely because I stopped eating junk food. I also think this ties into my mental state as well as I have way more energy.

Mentally the transition is also spectacular. I haven’t felt this good since I was a teenager. My depression symptoms have left and I feel better about everything. Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of stress about quitting my job in three weeks and the fact I will at the minimum lose 30k a year for whatever job I do get (if I get one).

The job loss though I think is also contributing to this better feeling in its own way. The Department of Defense is incredibly toxic in general. The election of Trump and Pence has given informal permission to every bottom dwelling conservative who wants to discriminate a way to speak out about their hates.

I think leaving this job makes me feel better in general, and especially makes me feel better concerning the transition. There are a ton of other reasons I am glad to leave (pretty much everything but money) but that is the biggest one right now.

The other stressor is our move. We already have a place lined up, we should be ok financially to do the move, and if the hubby gets cashed out like he is supposed to it might even pay the car off. We even have it figured he can just break even supporting us both if I am unable to find a job.

It is a cheaper place, but with nice amenities, and close to the hubby’s work. I think it is a good place to start on our journey out of here both DoD wise, and Seattle wise.

There is a lot more going on, but that is enough for one post, will have to post about the other things separately.

Until then, take care.

It was a seemingly innocuous dream, but for some reason it bothered me a lot.

The hubby and I were with a group of people, some of whom we know from other larping events. We were all discussing a new larp and we found that it really wasn’t a very interesting thing. The weird thing is hubby was still my hubby (yes still Wolsey), but I can’t remember if this was pre-transition hubby or my new improved hubby. All I remember was he had short blonde hair and I still remembered him as my husband, not my wife.

Then all of us plus a bunch of new people were sitting at a restaurant, it appeared like some sort of Denny’s or Sharis. It was sunny outside, not super warm, but warm enough that no one was bundled in hats or heavy coats.

Hubby was still there talking, and I was working on something about a larp, or maybe it was tabletop, but I do think it was a larp with a map. I was marking a map indicating how we the group should travel. It started somewhere southwest, went west to the coast, then up the west coast and into Canada.

I couldn’t tell you why but I was so pissed about something. Nothing had happened in the dream, but it was there.

All of a sudden hubby got up with a group of people and started walking away down the street. He hadn’t said a word to me and I was confused. I started to get up but he indicated not to make it a big deal and let him walk off.

So I just grabbed my backpack and started walking the other direction super pissed. Even in the dream I wasn’t sure why he was walking off, for some reason though I absolutely hated the group he was walking off with, no explanation in dream why.

That is when I woke up.

Overall the dream lasted most of the night, although I did get a good amount of sleep. The annoyance I felt in the dream was reminiscent of some of my larping times. Mostly it was when the hubby (pre-transition) would wander off with a specific player/character at a game. That player, let’s call him E, was a douchebag to women.

It wasn’t that I was jealous of my then wife roleplaying dating someone else at the time, it was specifically him that set off everything.

Wolsey had in-game dated others and it never bothered me, but for some reason this dream set off the feelings of dislike I had for this one gentleman, even though there was nothing about dating at all in the dream.

I think I will unpack this today and maybe post something reflective later.

I woke up this morning with not a horrible dream, but there was something urgent to it. I think it was mostly me processing the hubby’s surgery.

The hubby and I were wandering around, getting him dressed in new clothes. This was post bottom surgery in upcoming November (2017) and he was looking good. As we wandered around the store the looks only got better. I am not sure, but at some point it time I realized it was a bodega that sold clothes he liked. Which is ironic since he hates bodegas.

After a lot of walking and talking that I don’t remember now that I am posting, we wandered up to the cash register. Before we got there to pay, I heard a car pull in and looked out the window to see a pickup truck come rolling in to a stop. It was a rattle canned Mazda pickup that we owned in the mid 9os, but it was the color of our GMC pickup we gave to my dad 10-15 years later. The truck was a conglomeration of two different time periods that we owned a truck (we have owned a truck three times in our relationship).

Out of the car stepped the hubby, pre-transition. He (appearing as a she at the time) was wearing boots, a red dress and had bleach blond hair. I looked back at my hubby and was really confused, as was he. It at least reassured me that my hubby was still beside me, and that he saw “her” as well. The young lady form of him walked up to the counter in a spastic manner that the hubby does even now, paid for something and walked out. I grabbed my current incarnation of a husband and said something about a time loop, or maybe a parallel world (yes, I guess a gamer might think that).

I stepped outside yelling one of Wolsey’s old names (the dress was before our mobile home which means it was 2000 but he looked like when he was 34, which was 2005-6, both of these facts were when he had different names, the dress was before he had taken my last name, the person inside the dress was before he changed his first name to what it currently was). 

We ran out there, but that is when the dream sort of fizzled out. I felt like I couldn’t catch up with my pre-transition husband to tell him something important, and it really was making me anxious.

I think it was to tell him it was ok. Not yet determined specifically what “ok” was, but now I get the impression it was to tell him it was ok to transition. This would be about 10 years earlier then he did judging on how he looked in the dress. I felt like I was failing that person in the dress by not catching up to them, thus failing the person beside me. That is when my eyes opened up and I was awake.

It wasn’t a bad dream, I am sure it is me processing his surgery, but I woke up anxious. Not angry, scared or upset about how he is looking currently, he looks great, I find him hot. It did wake me up though anxious that I am not able to run quite like I did 20 years ago to catch up with him.

The red dress was one of two dresses he wore that have always stuck with me. The red dress in that picture above, and a purplish/tie-dyed sort of effect krinolin dress he wore when we originally got together. Both of those dresses always stuck with me in dreams when he appeared as himself pre-transition.

I guess I still have a whole lot to unpack.

SaveSave

The first full day in Scottsdale and I woke up and wandered around outside. It was a chilly 78 degrees (sarcasm) but a beautiful sunrise.

There are a lot of businesses around our hotel. The Lo-Lo’s I talked about yesterday, a Denny’s, a horrible Albertson’s that didn’t have anything we needed and an old school Safeway. The most unique thing I forget is in other states is the over advertisement for guns. Especially when they offer to sell you guns, and give you loans in the same place. Seems weird to be desperate enough to need to get a loan, but hey, while you are here go ahead and buy a gun. I realize this is in Seattle area as well, but not nearly as common.

We then went to the hubby’s pre-op appointment and spoke with Dr. Meltzer and Dr. Ley. It was great to see them again. The Doctors both checked the hubby and everything was good to go. We then got to meet Dr. Webb, the OBGYN that will be doing the hysterectomy, oophorectomy, and vaginectomy. I was amused by Dr. Webb, he seems pretty laid back. Overall seeing all three doctors really reassured me.

We didn’t do much the rest of the day. We went back to the hotel room, napped a bit and waited for the hubby to start his prep for surgery. While we were there, our friend Torie was kind enough to go feed Ghost (our cat). Here he is waiting in the hubby’s computer chair, disappointed we haven’t come home.

Finally at 5pm it was time for the hubby to start his preparation for the surgery, it involved a very uncomfortable drink and a long night. Here he is looking anxious about the process,

That was it for the second day. Tomorrow he goes into surgery, and things will progress. I am both excited and terrified for him. I also love him more than anything in this universe.