Back in November 2016 when I was in the early part of my transition I made a deal with the psychiatrist I was referred to in order to evaluate my suitability to transition. The rules say you must live in your preferred gender for at least 18 months before receiving hormone treatment. Now I’m sure these rules get bent for lots of reasons but in my case I had a massive excess of female hormones anyway and little in the way of male ones so it didn’t really apply but the rules also say that you must have lived in your preferred gender for the same amount of time before being recommended for surgery. Not only did the psychiatrist bring down the period of time between being officially diagnosed as having gender incongruoence and recommendation to proceed to surgery from three months to one month, she wrote the letter there and then so I could book my surgery straight away. A condition of this was that I receive counseling for a minimum of two years from that date, looking back I would have agreed to anything in order to get my letters of recommendation sooner rather than later and as I had already seen a psychologist in Busselton a number of times since my decision to transition on the recommendation of my GP I considered it a very easy condition. Also, quite how she was ever going to police it I don’t know, it isn’t as though she could send me back to Philadelphia to have the surgery reversed if I didn’t comply, I doubt that they kept the parts they removed!
I have now seen the said psychologist probably twenty times, she has been truly wonderful with me, someone I feel extremely comfortable with and someone I can tell anything without fear of being judged. During my june appointment I was busy telling her how proud I was to have completely stopped taking any opiate based painkillers after almost 11 months. It was largely down to my visit to a surgeon in Brighton back in May but I felt it was a huge achievement. When I had finished telling her how I had achieved it she asked me what other medication I was taking, there was still a number of things on it one of them being Tamazepam, she asked how long I’d been taking it for, I replied most of the last six years. The look on her face was that of shock, as it was close to the end of the session she told me we needed to discuss this in the next session and work out a way of coming off them. I agreed to that and we parted with a lovely hug as usual.
My next appointment with her was not for six weeks and after giving it some thought decided that she was probably right and I should come off them sooner rather than later. In the scheme of things I felt that coming off the opiates was a much bigger deal and so made up my mind that I was going to be off them before the next appointment and just stopped taking them. Getting to sleep was a challenge for a few nights but eventually I got there and felt I had kicked the habit as it were. Then it hit me, I felt really crap, irritable, short tempered and often found myself in tears for no apparent reason. I discussed this with Denise who immediately pinned it on the coming off Tamazepam, she looked it up on good old google and sure enough there are lots of posts about the side effects of just stopping taking it especially after a long period of time. Anyway I persevered, I sent a message to the psychologist to get her thoughts, she immediately sent me a message back saying I should see my GP straight away. I thought about for a while but decided that I could deal with it myself, the GP is a busy person and it’s not as though it was a serious problem and as I caused it myself I felt a little embarrassed about the whole thing. I mean how could I go into her office and say “I feel crap because I’ve come off the medication which you prescribed” as lovely as she is it probably wouldn’t have gone down too well.
As my next appointment with the psychologist approached I thought it a good idea to see the GP first. In a very polite way I felt I got a serious ticking off for not consulting her before coming off the Tamazepam, she went on to explain the correct way of coming off that type of medication, how dangerous it is to just stop taking it and how she could have helped me. The next day I saw the psychologist and got another one! In no uncertain terms she was determined that I knew I’d done the wrong thing. All in all I was left without any doubt of the route I should have taken but it was all done in a very pleasant way, hopefully neither have fallen out with me, I don’t think they have as both appointments ended with the usual heart felt hug which means so much to me.