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After my experiences in the Fall of Nineteen Eighty-Seven, with my
mother's primary doctor having fabricated notes about me and
subsequent doctors having openly disregarded their own test results
concerning me, I had fantasized that I would one day find A
Champion. This champion would discover that I had been
mistreated by the medical community and stand up to the medical
gossip mongers who were more interested in passing around imagined
stories about me than doing their professional best to look into my
health issues and resolve them. The champion would make them feel
ashamed of what they had been doing for all these years and they
would cower in response. And my new psychiatrist counselor, Jude,
had made a phone call to one of these doctors and confirmed the sort
of things I had been going through over the years. During that call,
he had taken that first step as that champion...
And he decided it wasn't a road he wanted to take.
Still at our second appointment, and after that phone call, Jude was
shaken as his plan of revealing to me my delusion of mistreatment
had turned out to be his misimpression of professionalism on
the part of medical doctors. Trying to salvage the appointment he
said that going through medical school was an intense & grueling
experience and that when budding doctors reached the chapter about
mixed-sex people, they took it as the 'comic relief portion' of their
education, at least that was what he had witnessed at the time in his
own education. He now suspected that the emotional laughter response
his colleagues had at that time permanently colored how they
saw people suffering from an intersex condition and that was why
doctors had not been taking my other medical issues seriously.
We ended the meeting with him suggesting that, even though the
doctor's response had been unprofessional, I should probably not wear
my ear studs to future doctor appointments and also take up wearing a
three piece suit & tie when seeing them so they would more likely
think of me 'professionally'. For the ear studs I noted that I
couldn't take them out without them quickly closing up, but I had
clear plastic spacers I could use instead. As for the three piece
suit I thought that it would likely make me stand out more for
suspicion given that I was going to the indigent focused community
health clinic. He agreed with that last point and felt the plastic
spacers would probably be good enough. We'd talk more about it at
our next appointment.
Between appointments, I reflected how my pierced ears had never
worked out as I had hoped given how they attracted household dust
particles, which I was allergic to, and thus forced me to
clean the studs and the ear holes a couple times each day just to
keep the itching at bay. I concluded that, since I hadn't been
enjoying having ear rings and medical people were using them as an
excuse not to provide me treatment, that I would just give up on
them. I removed my studs one night before going to bed and by the
end of the week they had closed, just leaving a red dot where each
hole had been.
At our next appointment we discussed my mother's primary doctor and
his need to rewrite my test results in his records. Jude concluded
that, as that doctor had laughed out loud upon seeing me at my first
physical examination, he had his own issues with my intersexed
condition but couldn't bring himself to admit it and thus when
subsequently seeing me his mind read 'psychological issue' and he
assumed it was a problem I had rather than his own.
His need to discard my actual medical test records and to instead
replace them with narrative notes showing the results he had
wished to see was a defense mechanism which affirmed my health
issues weren't 'his problem' but a problem in somebody else's
field. The subsequent stories he had been creating about me and
spreading around the medical community were just a way of defending
his own ego and ensuring that others never reconsidered his own
opinions about me and perhaps find him out.
With this information, I assumed we could do something about it,
perhaps through the medical board, but Jude pointed out we couldn't
as this was just his guess of someone who had never come to
him for treatment. Effectively it was the medical community that
needed psychological counseling to gain enough comfort to look beyond
my intersexed issues and see my other medical needs. While I had
hoped Jude could call other doctors who I suspected of disparaging me
over the years just so I could directly hear more of the junk they
had been spreading about me, he didn't want to do that sort of thing
again as he didn't think there was anything constructive that could
ultimately come of it.
The best he could do was teach me some techniques I could use, when
seeing medical doctors to treat my health concerns, that would reduce
any psychologically adverse reactions they might have when seeing me.
Effectively, I was going to become their unofficial counselor
during my appointments with them so that in return they might
be better able to be my doctor during those and future appointments.
In the meantime he was going to talk to various people in the medical
community, I hadn't yet met, to see if he could find one that might
be comfortable enough with the intersexed side issue that they would
actually work on my weight loss and bathroom bout issues. With
little other option, I agreed to this plan.
As we had now established 'a rapport' he asked if he could order some
tests of his own to look into my biological background. Not my
weight loss issues? I asked. No. As he didn't actively
practice physical medicine he felt that was best left to those who
worked that field every day. What he wanted was to order some test
to address his own curiosity in my intersexed condition. As I had
some curiosity there as well, I agreed. To keep news of these tests
from the hospital my mother worked at, I went to 'the other hospital'
in town to have my blood drawn for them.
The following visit there had been some curious findings from those
tests. The first one was that the lab tests had me noted as being
registered at the hospital as 'female'. Had I told them that when
I registered? I told him I hadn't, nor had I ever been asked,
they must have just looked at me and guessed or concluded it must be
the case based on the tests that were ordered. Regardless, the
genetic test he ordered showed me with the male 'X/Y' chromosome pair
and the testosterone test he ordered had also surprised him. He had
expected that to show me with an under performing level of
testosterone to explain why I had never developed a meaningful beard,
instead it showed that I had a surprisingly high testosterone level,
more appropriate for a boy in early puberty rather than a male ten
years after the fact. He had originally thought that perhaps he
would prescribe me some testosterone to see if it would make my body
'more manly', but given the level I already had in me, that made no
sense. He had exhausted his level of expertise when it came to mixed
sex issues and we finished up with more discussion of how to handle
medical doctors having issues with me.
While I felt we were still months away before we could make any
progress with that goal, I left his office at least musing that I had
a testosterone level in my body that would make Arnold Schwarzenegger
blush!
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