Current mood:	tired
Entry tags:	fitness, la vie trans

(This is a reworked version of what I posted to my original LiveJournal. A few of you will be seeing it twice.)

I'm back home from my initial appointment at Capitol Hill Medical. Wow did that go well. I liked the place and the practice—much higher standard of courtesy among patients and staff than I've become accustomed to, for starters, and the guy who examined me was just fantastic. And he knows two friends with porphyria, which let me save a lot of explaining.

The punch line is that I am as sick as I think, but not in quite all the ways I'd guessed. First off, my blood pressure has gone ghastly high. High enough that he said it was genuinely surprising to him that I haven't had a stroke. I've got a prescription for medication to start tomorrow. He also feels very sure I've developed diabetes, though he won't know for sure until the blood work comes back; I find out about that tomorrow. Beyond that, he said that they've found a strong correlation between too-low testosterone levels and some of my major symptoms of recent years, including the worse-than-usual weight gain and mood loss. Again, test results pending (and I've got a follow-up visit for a week from Friday).

The hormone stuff in particular is going to be a pain. He was upfront about it, saying, "We have a problem here." They are quite willing to work with me on the medical aspects of transition, but he explained that getting my testosterone up for the duration of getting out of this particular crisis (he thinks my 2004 collapse was an environmentally triggered failure in T production) isn't incompatible with reducing it again later once I'm no longer critically obese and depressed and deficient in energy. I buy that. It just means delay at a time when delay is not really what I want to hear...but I am not surprised, to tell the truth.

It also turns out that what I thought would be a case of dermitits is in fact almost certainly venous stasis and some associated edema, so I also need to check out vascular consultants and expect to spend time with some sort of compression system.

I am, um, overwhelmed, a bit. I mean, I knew I have problems. But there's something about seeing them so directly laid out and approached as matters both needing treatment and susceptible to it. It will indeed be the years of work I had guessed to get things under control. Please pardon me if I have some whiny moments along the way.