Solderer Of Fortune

    One Year After, and it's been a long year.

    One year after what, you say? Last year I came back from the BornHack hacker camp in Denmark, to find that my family were making me homeless out of the blue. In the middle of the second wave of a global pandemic, and going into the UK's second lockdown.

    I never knew how unpleasant my family could be until last year. It's difficult to write about, because I have no frame of reference. Sure, some family members have their moments, but to have them all conspiring to be as nasty as they were through those few weeks last autumn is something else.

    So with the help of some friends I got my stuff together in a storage unit, and disappeared. Since then I've been functionally homeless, without a permanent place to live until now when I'm pleased to say I have something lined up. I slept on a friend's sofa for a few weeks while I sorted out what I was going to do, since then I've rented some spare rooms of other friends. I've now found a nice town to live in, and I'll put down some roots. I am very worried that my family will still try to come after me so I'm not going to reveal where, suffice to say that I've put a reasonable distance between myself and Oxfordshire.

    Sadly there are some effects that will not be fixable in the same way. With a diagnosis of complex PTSD and severe depression along with severe insomnia, I'm a wreck. Maintaining my work has been a struggle, and I am very lucky to have secured appropriate therapy. Getting out of this will be a long road.

    I'm left wondering what the hell happened. I realise that living as I was prepared to be around for my dad in his final years they've probably relieved me of the huge amount of stress that would have caused, but it's hardly something to take pleasure in. Even though he signed all the papers that ruined my life I don't think he was the instigator of the worst things that happened to me, and that I realise I am unlikely to see him again is hard. I'm probably disinherited and whatever other legal crap they can dream up - they had a serious case of power tripping because they could get a lawyer to write lots of letters I never bothered to read - and the thought of not seeing the rest of my family again is not a problem at all, but still, I've lost a lot more than the place I called home.

    So it's a mixed bag, really. In one sense I'm having a second childhood, no ties, no family, able to do what I want without having to take anyone else into account. I've travelled this summer to hacker community events in Denmark and Belgium, staying with some of my friends in the Netherlands on the way, I've gone wild swimming, danced under the moon in a forest bathed in laser light through the mist, cycled halfway across the country, and hung out in a load of interesting hackerspaces along the way.

    But behind all that I'm a mental health wreck, relying on medication to sleep properly and perpetually stressed at trying to keep up with my life. I've lost everything and survive as a solderer of fortune on the London Underground, and sadly there's no A team to swoop in to help. I am lucky enough to be able to support myself, but I can see climbing out of this is going to be difficult.

    There's nothing like a crisis to move you on from transition woes and get you working on life, is there.

Learning to be body-conscious

    As you get on with your life years after transition, you reach a comfortable point of socialisation that has little to do with medical matters, you are just Getting On With Things. A point at which you are left with the impression that there are few more surprises, you've got it pretty much down.
    So, boobies. It's not been something at which I've expounded on at length here, but yes, as you might expect for someone several years down the line, I have a bust. Not the world's largest, but not the most insignificant either, and even now it is showing signs that it has not yet achieved its full potential. I've been through the need a lot of padding to the need a little padding and the don't need any padding stages, and even the maybe you need a bigger bra stage. I like having them, I like the way they look, I like the way they feel, and I still find wearing a bra to be one of those experiences that just makes things feel right.
    For all that, they haven't really figured much in my interactions with the world. Never been ogled, never been shown off, never been paraded. I didn't wander around without a top on before transition, and not a lot has changed.
    It's been a little odd, one of those surprises, then, in the last month to find myself twice unexpectedly being made aware of them. The first time was for my doctor, who needed to give them a routine examination. No worries, I said, and pulled my top off. To which she reacted with horror, it seems this is something to be done on the examination table with loads of curtains around. Heaven knows why, given that we're in a private consulting room without an audience, but that's the way it is.
    And then a couple of weeks later, I went with a few friends to a small tech/activist camping weekend on an organic farm on the edge of Wales. Very basic camping, inadequate shower, earth loo you have to chuck sawdust into. Back to nature stuff, not too far away from my ethos, so not bad. There I am then, thinking I need a shower but can't face the facilities. The campsite water supply is a cattle trough, it's just after dark on a summer evening, I have the place completely to myself because everyone else is knocking back the cider, and it's sufficiently rural that I can't see any lights. Sod it, I think, I'll just wash myself at the water trough. Which I proceeded to do, a surprisingly pleasant experience. Standing there baring my meagre assets to the darkness, had it been lighter the sheep would have had an eyeful. I should be all ashamed of all this or something, shouldn't I, I thought, but the need not to be all sticky trumped the need for modesty in the face of a rural night.
    I was left pondering the whole thing, where the boundary lies between not attracting untoward attention, and being ashamed of our bodies. Of course I don't want to flash my boobs at people who will give them untoward attention, but the thought of my doctor looking at them or even their briefly seeing the cool air of a summer night in a Welsh field does not perturb me at all.
    What does perturb me is that I am expected to be ashamed of them in such harmless situations. Is it just me who stands back for a minute, and remarks "That's just not healthy!".

It pains me to say this

   There's a very old and very stale joke that goes along the lines that the Inuit have fifty different words for snow. It's probably based on highly dubious source data and belongs in the dustbin of history, but at least it's spawned the much funnier joke in the linguistic community that the Inuit have fifty different words for "Visiting ethnolinguist".
    I sometimes feel as if I have fifty different words for pain. I've probably mentioned this before, but I have a periodic chronic pain condition. Atypical facial pain has something to do with a malfunction in your facial nerves, and its effect is that the slightest nerve stimulus is amplified a million-fold and appears as a sensation of intense pain. I'm extremely lucky on two counts, in my case it responds to painkillers and other medication, and for me it's a periodic thing, I get attacks that last for a week or ten days every few months. Some people have it continuously, and for others it doesn't respond as well to medication.
    How you judge the annoyance of something depends on your level of exposure to it. I'm pretty relaxed about noise from trains and other machines for instance, because I grew up under the approach path for a fighter airbase. Sorry people, a high-speed train is quiet compared to a Phantom in reverse thrust. So it was a pleasant surprise last year when the mutt sank her teeth into my hand and I was warned by the surgeon who cleaned it out that it would hurt when the local anaesthetic wore off, that my pain tolerance was pretty high. There I was, sitting with my arm held up in a padded sling, wondering when this pain was going to turn up in my gently throbbing hand, eventually realising that the gentle throbbing *was* the pain. When the time comes that I head to Brighton or Charing Cross hospital for *that* operation I'm hoping the chronic pain experience will stand me in good stead in that way.
    So what are those fifty words then? Not quite fifty, but entertaining as I come off the pills for my latest attack to recap. There is the "Pliers", in which someone with a monster pair of gas tongs has your gums in a death-grip. Or the "Hot needle" in which amazingly the white stuff on your teeth hurts. That's dead, it's got no nerves, it shouldn't be possible! Pain's funny stuff. It's probably the "Full jaw" that's the worst though, the one in which everything on one side of your mouth is turned up to 11. Very weird, the pain stops abruptly right at the centre, the other side is absolutely normal.
    In fact, that's the silly thing about AFP, there's nothing wrong with you. If your teeth hurt the doctor says go to the dentist, the dentist says there's nothing wrong so you go back to the doctor, then the doctor scratches his head and labels it atypical because he can't find the fault. You get given a box of carbamazepine space-out pills, and get on with your life. In my case a week later it's all gone, and I'm left wondering when the roulette wheel of hurty mouths will next come up with my number.
    One thing about having a periodic window into the world of chronic pain has taught me is very important though, I take it seriously in other people. There is a certain type of unpleasant person who imagines everyone ill is malingering unless they are (a)them, (b)have cancer, or (c) are a wounded serviceman. I think a periodic shot of AFP would do some of them a bit of good.

A brush with mortality

    A first for me this week, being admitted to a hospital. It all escalated rather quickly.
    From the dog having one of her infrequent ex-rescue-dog-returns-to-feral moments on Sunday and sinking her teeth into my little finger, through it going septic despite a lot of antiseptic cleaning out, a local NHS First Aid clinic, the hospital outpatient hand injury clinic, and finally two nights on a ward. Surgery under local anaesthetic to open up my hand and clean out the infection, lots of dressings, antibiotic jabs in the middle of the night, the works. Back home now, antibiotic pills, a return on Friday to check up on its healing.
    We are accustomed to modern medicine, it seems routine, mundane even. Truth is though this was something that could well have killed me a hundred years ago. People still lose digits and even hands, as my surgeon pointed out it's no laughing matter.
    So, a brush with mortality. Guess it had to happen, sooner or later.