Real Man Adventures (13 page)

One time I got a tick bite, right where the sun don’t shine, in a thigh fold—no, lower,
closer in.
Because I had contracted Lyme disease years before, and because I was still in Lyme tick country, and because my wife was able to remove the tick only partially from the bite and it was not healing, I went to the local ER to have someone experienced in such things take a look at my by-then infected bite area.

I checked in, gave them my ID, my insurance card. Waited. Got called in, waited some more. A nurse took my vitals: all good. Waited still more, in the middle of an empty row of chairs beside the nurse’s station. After a while a young doctor came over, casually taking one of the seats beside me and flipping through my chart: “What seems to be the problem, Mr. Cooper?”

I told him the basics. He said he needed to take a look. I said it was located in an “embarrassing” spot. He said there was nothing
that could possibly embarrass him. I hesitated. He found a free room, we went in, he pulled the curtain; I bent over, pulling down my boxers just far enough for him to see the wound, cupped some fabric in a palm between my legs while he examined me. He got up real close, picked at the bite, pulled a little something out of the skin, likely whatever was left of the tick’s head, then suggested I should probably take an antibiotic, prescribed me one, and sent me on my way.

In this instance I decided I didn’t necessarily need to “come out” to the doctor about my gender status. I was just going to have to be whatever he, a medical professional, saw in front of him. And even after I bent over and he studied me closely, he was none the wiser. It was still “Mr. Cooper” this, “Mr. Cooper” that. (Believe me, you can tell when somebody has suddenly “learned” something—and this wasn’t one of those times.)

But there are other times in the medical sphere when it would be irresponsible (not to mention unwise) of me not to disclose my unique physical situation. By way of example: not too long ago, as I was driving upstate from New York City on the Taconic Parkway, I suddenly got chills, my whole body vibrating out of control. Acute back and stomach pain. Head throbbing. I could scarcely see the road ahead of me. I pushed through for about an hour more of this, driving at least twenty-five miles over the speed limit the whole way, my condition steadily declining, all the while dreading the psychic—forget the physical—discomfort I knew would be awaiting me at the small regional emergency room I was trying to make it to. This time when I entered the ER (the same one I had visited with the tick bite, in fact), I was doubly fretful, as I had no clue as to what was going on with my body. I just knew it was likely not good.

At intake my temperature was 104 and I was starting to grow delirious. I called my wife to see if she could come meet me, since it looked like I was going to be there for a while—but it was the evening, and she couldn’t find anybody to watch our kids last-minute. For the time being, I was on my own. In my delirium I started to envision the worst (something akin to my go-to motorcycle-meets-car scenario above).When I was brought into the ER and given a room, I tried desperately not to close my eyes, not to fall asleep or be otherwise unconscious for even a few seconds. A CBC showed that my white count was alarmingly high; even an army of younger white cells was out in force, trying to knock out whatever was fucking with my system. I had a significant infection, but the doctor didn’t know where it was. More testing, intravenous drip, and a little something to bring the fever down (they didn’t want to administer antibiotics until they knew what was going on). My lower back and practically all of my muscles were killing me; I couldn’t stop shivering no matter how many blankets the nurses brought.

I don’t have any use for sharing much more detail about my health, but I can say there were minor complicating factors, some stuff I had recently been tested and treated for that might or might not have had something to do with my condition (plus some garden-variety stress on the side). So I knew I had to tell the doctor about all of it. And I mean
all
of it. And he had to tell a couple nurses, and even though I had asked for discretion and sensitivity, had asked that the door be closed when I was delivering the relevant information while the nerdy information dude was typing everything I said into his computer on wheels, it was completely unnerving and humiliating, and I could sense it as the information spread fast
throughout the ER with each new person who came into my room to do something.

Not to sound like a baby, but the worst part was probably having to give “the talk” without my wife present. To educate someone who’d literally never treated a patient like me before, even if he’d read a little about it in a medical journal once. To use words like “in this population” and “you can imagine this is a sensitive subject.” To be on my best model-minority behavior—while I was feeling my worst. (Just when it seemed like the doctors and nurses thought I was making her up entirely, my wife called to say she’d finally found someone to sit on the couch while the kids slept, and she was on her way, arriving in time to accompany me to the CT scan. SEE, I TOLD YOU: I’M NORMAL AND NONTHREATENING AND DESERVING OF YOUR EMPATHY BECAUSE THIS NICE LADY CAME TO MY BEDSIDE.)

I am lucky, likely because of my class, my race, my education, and ability to—even in the worst of times—sound like I’m not crazy. But I have heard of medical encounters, both emergent and routine, going horribly for transpeople. I have heard of doctors letting their personal feelings about transgender people get in the way of treating them. I have heard of their recording conditions in a way that insurance—if any is carried in the first place—gets canceled, things deemed preexisting that aren’t. I have heard, though it’s getting more rare, of transpeople being forcibly put on psych holds and admitted against their will, of transpeople not receiving adequate care and treatment, their basic rights not only as patients but also as humans violated.

It would be nice not to be terrified of falling ill all the time, nice not to have to fly to a New York City clinic every time I need to see
a doctor. I mean, being sick and at the mercy of others to make you feel better is already harrowing enough, of course; it might also be nice not to have to worry about all of the things most people who walk into an ER or doctor’s office take for granted: that you are presenting with something that your health care professional has likely read about in textbooks, has seen in a class, actually encountered on a rotation or two. It might also be nice not to worry about losing my insurance, nor coming up with the money for costly procedures and medications not ultimately covered because “The diagnosis submitted on this claim is incompatible with the patient’s gender,” as I have read a few times on paperwork sent my way (including some that came in after the above visit to the ER—it was a kidney infection, by the way, which cleared up after a night of intravenous antibiotics, followed by a few weeks of oral ones).

In countries with some form of socialized medicine, like Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Canada, among so many others, medical treatment for transgender individuals is covered— everything from surgeries and hormones to standard health care for both the routine and abnormal circumstances that arise over the course of human lives.
¹
I’m not saying those systems are
always perfect. (Some require patients to essentially “go all the way” in order to benefit fully from state-covered services. That is, you could not, as a transman, say, elect to have top surgery but choose not to remove your uterus or eventually have some sort of genital procedure.) That being said, in these countries, there are ample places to seek medical care where you don’t have to feel like a freak, where you don’t have to be afraid of saying the wrong thing, where people have seen thousands of others like you. Where you don’t feel like you have to march your pretty, “normal” wife into your hospital room because it actually does put everybody at ease.

In the U.S., transpeople must get notarized permission letters from therapists for surgical procedures such as breast enlargement or reduction even if they want to pay for the procedure entirely out of their own pockets. The exact same surgeries regular old people can wake up one morning and decide they want and then go schedule, transpeople must visit therapists for a considerable amount of time to prove that they are not crazy for wanting to cut off their tits, or for wanting bigger ones. Across this country, nontrans women can pay doctors to attend to their lips, chins, cheeks, eyes, noses, necks, thighs, stomachs, and more, as many times as their bodies and pocketbooks will allow. They can walk into a plastic surgeon’s office and get the largest boobs on record put in,
I mean, so big they cannot walk without seizing back pain that will then require subsequent surgeries to put in incrementally smaller implants… but they do not need letters from psychologists saying they are not crazy to want to do all these things and more. On one plastic surgery TV show I saw years ago, a lady tried to convince a surgeon to implant a giant fucking GEM STONE beneath the skin in her forearm, because she wanted to have it with her always— and nobody asked her whether she might have some other issues she might consider “unpacking” in therapy before embarking upon her THIRTY-FOURTH PLASTIC SURGERY PROCEDURE. She did not need precertification from a psychologist; she just needed the idea and the money. She had
run out of things to do to her body
, so she invented a surgical procedure and sought a doctor to perform it.

Truthfully, I don’t care what people decide to do to their bodies so long as they are of age and not hurting anybody else in the process. And I understand it might be a good idea to live in your preferred gender for a little while before you do something irreversible, like cutting your dick off. But I also think it might be cool for people like me not to have to be considered abnormal or as having a “gender identity disorder” just to exercise the same rights and spend my hard-earned cash like everybody else.

Maybe it will get incrementally better with every ER visit like mine, each health care worker slowly educated on a case-by-case basis. But I don’t necessarily want to be the guinea pig every time, terrified of needing something and relying upon the kindness of doctors in order to get it. Because even though they have taken a
vow promising otherwise,
²
doctors do not always exhibit kindness, or even indifference. (Several years ago, a primary care physician in New York City was in the process of examining me for a sinus infection or something, and about halfway through the exam, per routine, he asked me to lie down and lift up my shirt. At which point the hair on my stomach and chest was revealed and he visibly blanched, stopped talking to me, and immediately retrieved latex gloves and put them on before continuing the clipped exam and hurrying me out of his office with what turned out to be the wrong prescription.)

I hate feeling embarrassed by and apologetic for the paradox of my existence. With doctors is the
only
time I am afraid to continue on the path I’ve chosen. I want to be the boy in the bubble.

_______________________________

1
. Did you know that doctors in Iran of all places perform more sexual reassignment surgeries than anywhere else in the world (besides Thailand)? I know, crazy, right? In a country of no homosexuals! Actually, the reason there are so many transsexuals is likely correlated to how illegal it is to be gay in that particular country—that is, a lot of gay men (fewer, if any lesbians) transition in order to avoid a punishment of death for committing homosexual acts. And the Iranian government gives them money to do it, and makes it rather simple to change all documentation such as birth certificates and IDs.

Imagine being born male, and when you become sexual you find yourself so attracted to men that you are forced to transition into a female in order to be with men legally in your country. To make yourself heterosexual through surgically changing your gender. I want to write an entire book about
that.

2
. “I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug” (from the modern version of the Hippocratic Oath).

ME: W
HAT’S ONE OF
your strongest memories of me? I’m going to guess it’s the story of when I was about two and tried to stab you with a scuba diving knife. Or was it an abalone knife? And did I really try to stab you? Did you really kick me across the room? And why was I holding an unsheathed knife in the first place?

MY BROTHER: Yes! That is it. I don’t know why that is such a strong memory, but it is. The way I remember it is we were fighting over something, and there was an abalone iron of mine that you picked up. You were crazy, really mad, and I could see you were way out of control, even for me, and you came at me with it over your head when I was lying on the floor, so I just push-kicked you. I think I nailed you on your chest and you went flying into the closet door.
I also remember a time when you stabbed me with a pencil in my thigh but I don’t think I did anything that time. I think we both just stood there looking at the pencil sticking out of me. I was surprised that a pencil was sticking out of me, and I think you were surprised that you did it.