My paperwork manager (Denise) has been putting in some long hours sorting out all that is needed for the various organisations which need to be told of my change of name and change of gender, the important ones being passport as we need this to travel to the uk in August and driving licence as it is the main form of photo ID. Both of these are done through the post office and I have to say I am not the biggest fan of post offices! In the past I have had a few issues, not major and more so in the uk than here but today’s two visits were just perfect. Firstly, both ladies we dealt had no issues with the gender change thing, it’s easy to tell if someone has, we witnessed it at the name change place two weeks ago, that roll of the eyes says it all but today there was no sign of any bad feeling at all. I guess it helps if you have all the right paperwork and we certainly had that and as a bonus the post office was not busy so we were attended to almost straight away, driving licence first but only the initial part of it as we needed the old licence to do the passport, it all went very smoothly, the lady who did the passport felt she had made an inappropriate comment by saying obviously I haven’t done one of theses before and apologised straight away, I hadn’t even faulted it but she was very apologetic and decided that to be on the safe side she would call the passport office and check that she had done everything correctly before we left, she had indeed done it all correctly and as a lovely parting comment wished me well in my new life as Stephanie which I really appreciated. The second part of the driving licence involved having my photo taken, she actually took it three time before she was happy and was quick to say if I don’t like the photo I can have it changed at any point which I thought was a nice touch.
i have also had a visit to my GP today, she was lovely as always, we talked about both my physical wellness and my mental/emotional wellness as well, I have to admit that before the surgery I was pretty blasé about the whole recovery thing, I wanted it so so much that it never even crossed my mind about how I would feel after it, I had read numerous articles and blogs and some which talked about waking to a world of unbelievable pain but I just thought that i would deal with it as it came and when I came round from the surgery I felt nothing at all in terms of physical pain I thought the rest of the recovery would be a breeze. Sadly it has not quite been that way, the physical side of things is easy to deal with, I have a very good supply of painkillers and thanks to my GP an excellent plan for dealing with it, the mental/emotional side of things has been totally different and I had not even given a thought to how it would probably mess with my head. I am blessed to have Denise by my side to talk about the things which have come to light and the way the surgery has affected me but it’s totally unfair to load all this on her, she has more than her share of emotional issues of her own to deal with to do with my transitioning but in typical Denise form has always been there for me. I hope one day I will be there to help her in a similar way as I simply couldn’t have done this without her, Denise you are pure gold xxx