State of the Rey.
Mar. 26th, 2017 11:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
reymonkeyWow. So maybe it's part of my own issues, or maybe I'm just not cut out for the modern world of social networking, but I get overwhelmed and allow certain forums to slide when there's too much on my plate. This time, Dreamwidth was the casualty, which included the vast amounts of RP I used to do on it.
I am, tentatively, making a comeback here.
So here's the state of the Rey, and I checked my last post just to see where I was at then. My health issues are not magically gone, but there has been some vast improvement. After super expensive visits to the cardiologist (which we are still paying off and have put us financially behind for a lot longer than is reasonable), I was put on a blood pressure/heart palpitation medicine, but still having issues, and my thyroid was looking weird on the bloodwork. I'm used to interpreting lab results at work, and my T4 levels were hovering around the bottom end of normal, but the thyroid stimulating hormones were climbing at a ridiculous rate outside normal. For the layperson that means my thyroid was working super hard just to eke out a bare minimum of normal production. Knowing I needed an endocrinologist for T anyway, I finally got set up to visit him in October last year. He looked at my bloodwork, checked my thyroid on ultrasound, and promptly diagnosed my with Hashimoto's. I am still unclear what that will mean for the long term, but since he put me on thyroid medicine my blood pressure has dropped to not simply normal, but super amazing normal to maybe a little low. Might need to recheck with the doctor on that, actually.
The endo also started me on Testosterone. I have been on T since October. It is magical. Periods stopped immediately. Facial started to make an appearance by 3 months, although I have a 15-year-old's patchy sad mustache, but still. I have seen muscle and body fat changes, more in the past few months on T than I did in 9 months of going to the gym previously. My voice has dropped noticeably, and now I've hit the point where it cracks and breaks at a pitch that used to be completely normal for me, but I can sing bassline stuff I never could before.
My face in the mirror, sometimes, looks a little like it might actually be mine.
On the work front, I ended up working 54+ hours a week for about a year before we hired help, and the first guy we hired for help... well that's a post unto itself. He still works there, for a given value of work. A month or two after him, we hired a girl who is awesome, and thanks to her I now work around 40 hours a week. This has honestly been a boost to my physical health as well as mental, and in addition I felt it was time to come out at work. My boss has been fine with it, even though she can't get gender pronouns right (for anyone, ever, it's not personal) to save her life. New girl has been super supportive, and basically I am now out to everybody in my life as trans, apart from the clients themselves because it's just not an issue that comes up much. A few of them know, and I've had only warm receptions.
And in other news, my girlfriend's mother is cancer free, and doing vastly better overall. Which has helped us to time and plan our wedding. In just a couple months, now, I will be a married man. I say man because I'm hard at work on the legal process to make everything official, barring the current political regime screwing it all up. The politics and things in the wider world have sucked, the end of last year and beginning of this one. Everything in my personal life has been moving in a fantastic direction, so I almost feel guilty about that, but there you go.
This post is long enough already, but my art shows up on DA periodically, and I have been making vlog type videos to track my vocal changes and general stuff here.
I am, tentatively, making a comeback here.
So here's the state of the Rey, and I checked my last post just to see where I was at then. My health issues are not magically gone, but there has been some vast improvement. After super expensive visits to the cardiologist (which we are still paying off and have put us financially behind for a lot longer than is reasonable), I was put on a blood pressure/heart palpitation medicine, but still having issues, and my thyroid was looking weird on the bloodwork. I'm used to interpreting lab results at work, and my T4 levels were hovering around the bottom end of normal, but the thyroid stimulating hormones were climbing at a ridiculous rate outside normal. For the layperson that means my thyroid was working super hard just to eke out a bare minimum of normal production. Knowing I needed an endocrinologist for T anyway, I finally got set up to visit him in October last year. He looked at my bloodwork, checked my thyroid on ultrasound, and promptly diagnosed my with Hashimoto's. I am still unclear what that will mean for the long term, but since he put me on thyroid medicine my blood pressure has dropped to not simply normal, but super amazing normal to maybe a little low. Might need to recheck with the doctor on that, actually.
The endo also started me on Testosterone. I have been on T since October. It is magical. Periods stopped immediately. Facial started to make an appearance by 3 months, although I have a 15-year-old's patchy sad mustache, but still. I have seen muscle and body fat changes, more in the past few months on T than I did in 9 months of going to the gym previously. My voice has dropped noticeably, and now I've hit the point where it cracks and breaks at a pitch that used to be completely normal for me, but I can sing bassline stuff I never could before.
My face in the mirror, sometimes, looks a little like it might actually be mine.
On the work front, I ended up working 54+ hours a week for about a year before we hired help, and the first guy we hired for help... well that's a post unto itself. He still works there, for a given value of work. A month or two after him, we hired a girl who is awesome, and thanks to her I now work around 40 hours a week. This has honestly been a boost to my physical health as well as mental, and in addition I felt it was time to come out at work. My boss has been fine with it, even though she can't get gender pronouns right (for anyone, ever, it's not personal) to save her life. New girl has been super supportive, and basically I am now out to everybody in my life as trans, apart from the clients themselves because it's just not an issue that comes up much. A few of them know, and I've had only warm receptions.
And in other news, my girlfriend's mother is cancer free, and doing vastly better overall. Which has helped us to time and plan our wedding. In just a couple months, now, I will be a married man. I say man because I'm hard at work on the legal process to make everything official, barring the current political regime screwing it all up. The politics and things in the wider world have sucked, the end of last year and beginning of this one. Everything in my personal life has been moving in a fantastic direction, so I almost feel guilty about that, but there you go.
This post is long enough already, but my art shows up on DA periodically, and I have been making vlog type videos to track my vocal changes and general stuff here.
