DISCLAIMER: I have been on HRT for 13 months now and have had little to no progress in my transition, so some of this might seem like a rant. It won't hurt my feelings if you ignore this post.
tl;dr : Doctors suck. Anyone else having trouble?
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Three months ago, I got a tracheal shave, and in my opinion it didn't go particularly well. Leading up to the surgery the surgeon discussed with me where he would do the incision so the scar would'nt be visible and talked about how he had done the surgery so many times that he wouldn't need x-rays to keep from shaving too much and so I trusted he knew what he was doing. The day of the surgery seemed to go well. I was scared to death because I don't like hospitals and they probably asked me the same questions 12 times by 6 or 7 different people as they got me prepped, but my anxiety was only a little above normal as they wheeled me into the operating room. I can't remember what was said to me in those final minutes, but I still remember them asking me questions all the way up to the room going black. I woke up in a private room of the hospital and just laid there for about an hour totally confused because I expected the surgery to be an outpatient procedure and that I would wake up in the same room they led me to when they prepped me. At some point a nurse finally came in and unhooked me from the IV and by that point I couldn't stand being in the bed anymore and wanted to see the scar on my neck so I headed into the bathroom. I was just dumbfounded when I saw this big ugly gash across my throat. This thing wasn't under my chin or along a fold as previously discussed. They just cut right across my larynx and did their thing. With the swelling it didn't look like they even did anything at all! Once I finally talked to a doctor I found out that the hospital refused to let me check out unaccompanied even though by this point I was wide awake with no neasua or vertigo. There was really no pain from the surgical location other than a scratching sensation in my throat which was probably more from the breathing tube than the surgery. Most of the pain was under my tongue where somehow they managed to tear the ligament that held my tongue down when putting in the breathing tube. It turns out that the surgeon I spent a week talking to prior to the surgery didn't do the surgery and might not have even been in the room as I shook hands with 5 or 6 different doctors I had never seen before that wanted to check on my scar and once I finally did talk to the surgeon I thought was doing the surgery, he looked at it like he had never seen it before and when I asked about why it was straight across my throat or how they managed to tear my tongue, he dodged around the question and only said that if I massaged the scar and stayed out of the sun it would be less visible eventually.
As stated above, I have been on HRT for 13 months but have had little progress in my transition. I recently changed doctors because my old one left (PCSd for those that understand military jargon) and my new doctor admitedly knows nothing about HRT, isn't an endocrinologist, and as the deputy department head of the behavioral health department is really difficult to get in contact with. One good thing that has come from my new doctor though is that she reads through the military's transition instructions with me so I now know exactly where my hormone levels should be at this point. As it turns out my previous doctor was either incompetent, or blocking my transition for whatever reason because while all this time he has been telling me that I'm about where I should be the actual truth is that my testosterone is about double what it should be and my estrogen is 1/3rd what it should be. My new doctor didn't give me any theories as to why my old doctor did such a bad job monitoring my hormones, but she's now reaching out to endocrinologist trying to find out if there's a quicker way to get my hormones closer to a female level without inhibiting my transition. This whole situation seems pretty crazy to me because I could have probably done a better job by just self-medicating and getting bloodwork done every month.
At first the surgery and the HRT helped with my gender dysphoria because while the swelling was still there I just kept telling myself that the swelling will go down and it will be less noticeable, and as for the HRT, I knew that it would be a slow process and would take years to do its thing. Unfortunately based on all anecdotal evidence where I am at the 13 month mark is about the 3 or 4 month mark for basically everyone else. That has certainly had a detrimental effect on my gender dysphoria and now that the swelling is gone and the scar from my surgery has had a few months to heal, it has had a devestating effect on my chronic depression because before I always had hope that things would get better no matter how bad things were at the moment. I stopped caring about my appearance at all and when I wasn't at work I was usually asleep. I would have stopped HRT completely but a small voice in the back of my head kept me going to work and taking my medication with the belief that things would get better and I had to keep going until it did. I've struggled with depression my entire life and I've managed well enough, but I've found it to be far more treacherous since starting my transition. Where there was once hope that I could get a good job and be able to pay for my transition and maybe be happier with myself, now I am spending just about everything I make on my transition, getting very slow or no results due to bad doctors and genetics, and finding it much harder to continue to hope.
This is my first real sociable act since I basically shut down following my surgery and I'm curious has anyone else had so much trouble with doctors?