A life past transition with my hubby, my cat and myself.
Author: Disaster Unicorn
A middle-aged transgender gamer woman who grew up so poor it was only po. Who works in a white-collar job, graduating late in life. The most important part is I am married 30+ years to a wonderful husband and I have a pretty cool one-eyed cat named Tally the Pirate Queen (or Bitchy Princess depending on her day).
I am trying to post pictures regularly, and I figure this is a good place to do it as well, besides no one can stop me here haha.
This is pictures of the hubby at breakfast after taking me to appts, then later in the afternoon he was building me a side stand for our bed (both sides, also he is an awesome wood working person – shhhh garden rat you have no power here). Then the next pic is me sitting in the gazebo he built me while I was sick, while he worked.
Mostly I am not helping him is because I am a threat to all humans when I am around power tools, plus I am so damn weak compared to where I used to be. This isn’t bad as it’s mostly a result of transition and is vaguely affirming.
I was making frosting for sugar cookies today when at the age of 53 when I realized that i developed a habit of eating a spoonful of powdered sugar whenever I used it.
Thinking about it, i realized that it was because granny (who is holding me in this picture) was responsible. I remember after she got out of prison (this was before her sentencing) she had taught me that it is required to test it every time.
I thought it was super important to do it, until she passed when i was 11ish. Then i just continued it without thinking for the next 45 years until i realized it today.
I have been a little remiss in posting here, but I am starting pictures again so I will upload them here as well :). I will set up the organization better for this as well.
Me and Tally recovering from surgery, hanging out and being cooked awesome food by my hubby. #disasterunicorn #surgeryrecovery #mtf #selfie #transselfie #nomakeup #roughbutliving #trans #transgender #menothecatbutmaybesheistoo
Sorry reposting from social media, this was more in depth in my previous post I think:
Ok starting to feel centered. As this hectic summer wraps up I found I missed my whole summer, not that I was bored haha….
Spent the whole time in and out of hospital since June 1st, including a full week in stay at hospital for emergency room/surgical prep. I was told I had metastasized stomach cancer for almost a month (3 different surgeons prepped me, meaning to make sure I got my shit in order for Wolsey to bury me), finally they believed me when both Wolsey and I kept telling them to double check (dad got false positive diagnosis at least 6 times for cancer).
Turns out it’s just a very bad no good gallbladder, and weird marker indicating cancer when there was none there. I finally got that gallbladder removal healing and the only thing left its to go back in a few weeks to remove the stent they put down in my common duct area when they did think I had stomach cancer (and then a follow up procedure for the other side of my digestive tract)..
Apologies if I have been distant with friends, responding to ladder games, or just talking and shit posting (and definitely there was no mood for any selfies). Things are returning to normal. Means hopefully within next couple weeks you will be back to very inappropriate memes, observations and photos.
Oh and special thanks to dad for genetics to survive so much shit, but also the genetics to give warning signs of deadly cancer that I don’t have….fucker, always going to get the last word in aren’t you!!! <3.
Oh and don’t worry I have a bunch of stories I am going to post about this whole thing here, but I didn’t want to write about things until I knew what my final prognosis was haha. So hold tight for it.
The last few weeks I have been quiet mostly due to health reasons. For years I have always had a problem keeping my food down when I eat it. The doctors have sent me to stomach specialists, I have been scanned, tubes up all orifices, cameras, etc, with no evidence of what causes it.
They even gave me this $1,500 nuclear powered plain egg only sandwich for a radiation test in my esophagus/stomach in 2021 with no results except a sticker shock at the insurance bill (I didn’t have to pay it). This is the most expensive plain egg only sandwich known to humanity
Fast forward to this year, and especially last 6 weeks. The vomiting has gotten worse, I would spend days in bed feeling like crap, and eventually it got so bad that beginning of June I went in to see if I had a kidney stone (real pain had started). They booted me out and said I was fine.
Me and the cat spending a weekend in bed with stomach pain.
URGET CARE VISIT 1
Two weeks later it was five times worse. During this time the hubby had done research on my symptoms and was sure it was my gallbladder, so this time the hubby was on it before me and pushed me to go into urgent care when I was hit for three days with pain I couldn’t get out of bed from.
We went to urgent care where I promptly puked in the lobby (I have never used a puke bag before, that was gross.
They got me in, but within an hour urgent care told me that they didn’t see any kidney stones, and especially didn’t see any gallstones, but my labs came back and my liver was 7 x higher than it normally is (and my liver is normally slightly high). They immediately told me as soon as a bed opened up they were transferring me to a hospital (those numbers were evidently past what they worry about liver failure for). The nurse had already put up an NPO sign indicating no food or drink due to probably surgery needed.
After a few hours they explained it would probably be the next day before a room opened and I would be spending the night in urgent care. The third shift nurse was nice, and tried because she realized I had sat in there all day, no food. She dug around and found me a frozen Alfredo dinner and heated it up. I took a small bite and within minutes I was wracked in pain, so the food stopped.
URGENT CARE VISIT #2
A few hours later they told me they could get me into an observation ward (shared ward with curtains) and they transferred me at 10pm at night on June 30th. The hubby came over and visited me, and there was a whole funny thing where security guy was so lazy he didn’t want to take my husband and couldn’t get hold of a nurse, so instead told him that it was probably not allowed for him to come.
The hubby stayed strong, forced the issue and made that lazy ass walk to my wing where the security guard was corrected by the medical staff who told them that absolutely my husband can visit. It was a funny deserved moment that security guard got.
They kept me the next day and at the end of the day they gave me a specialized MRI and confirmed, and this is the actual professional term used, that my gallbladder was “filled with innumerable gallstones” and I also had a stone stuck in the common duct (shared by pancreas, liver, stomach and gallbladder I believe). That is what was by far hurting the most. So they scheduled me an ERPC the next evening to remove the stone, put a stent in and wait for gallbladder removal the next day.
HOSPITAL WAITING TO GET SURGERY
I went through another full day (this was July 2nd now) and hadn’t eaten since June 29th. I was on IV’s and not super hungry but it was awkward and even with not eating I felt so bloated and distended. I went down to the ERPC where they cleanly removed the stone, inserted the stent to prevent another stone rolling into it before my gallbladder removal, and they sent me back to my observation ward (packed, loud, and everything was sticky around my bed area). Evidently my gallbladder was “packed full” and I was also told my duct was scarred and they sent a biopsy off, obviously this has been happening for years and years and I had passed a LOT of stones without knowing what was happening.
The next morning on July 3rd, both the hubby and I are excited, my surgery is scheduled at 1215 to remove the gallbladder, I would be going home later that evening with a new lease on eating… except at 1205 the surgeon comes in and is surprised to see me ready for surgery.
He explains very kindly that my surgery is canceled and I can’t have surgery because they found a shelf sign in my common duct. A shelf sign is a sign for stomach cancer and at no point can they remove the gallbladder via laparoscopy because it would spread cancer cells everywhere. I would have to wait for the biopsy to be tested and then if it was confirmed as cancer I would need a different surgeon who could fully open me up and possibly take bits of stomach/liver/pancreas (I learned this later that evening from the hospital doctor).
I need to make clear that Dr. Conway was obviously upset no one had told me this was found the night before, and he was incredibly kind. I feel like he is a great guy and a surgeon no less with an incredible bedside manner.
We asked how likely it was, and both the hubby and I tried to explain that my father was told at least 6 times that he had cancer, and when biopsies came back he never did, his body was just weird. All three doctors I spoke with at the hospital assured me that this was not the case.
Between him and the next two doctors to talk to me in the next four hours they all make it clear I probably have stomach cancer (best survival rate at 5 years is 36%).
AFTER DIAGNOSIS…
At least I got liquid diet dinner
I waited forever there before they discharged me after making me wait seven hours to get out. To be honest I had just shut down. No screaming, no crying, no freaking out, I just did what I do in a stressful situation and disassociate while I consider what I needed to do to get the hubby my life insurance and how long could I make it to pay off as many bills so the insurance can go to him taking time off.
Cancer, not cancer, the thing I hate most is watching my husband worry and be upset.
Stomach cancer is the one weird fear I have had my entire life (well that or lung cancer, stomach is painful, lung is long term drowning). My family doesn’t have a history of it, it is just something as a literal 9 year old child had read about and have been terrified of since.
Fast forward almost two weeks and I read the report and it looked like I might not have it, but the doctor wouldn’t confirm on the phone and I had to go in, so I figured maybe I read it wrong.
I figured I would at least dress up to get the stomach cancer diagnosis…
I was prepared to hear the words, figured I would do the whole stoic route and they officially say it, but we were right to begin with… NOT CANCER and even Dr Conway seems really surprised. He mentioned it probably was scar tissue from the repeated stones and that is what the pictures caught.
So no cancer is a good thing, although the last two weeks I had spent setting up the hubby for my eventual demise (which wasn’t super imminent but I was planning on how to maximize the time left to work). Dr. Conway went over all the stuff about the surgery, once again the best bedside manner anywhere, and the best part is he is doing the surgery. So I go in July 30th to get this bad girl removed.
The next day the hubby seemed relaxed, as did our daughter Tally…
Even now I am feeling better than the weeks before, I should post about how my pain is less and eating has changed my vomiting situation. But this post is already too long, so will do that later.
First, wow I didn’t realize I hadn’t posted this year, so sorry if it’s weird that I start here.
I have always had a love/hate relationship with M. Night Shyamalan and his movies. My first movie I saw of his was Sixth Sense, and absolutely loved it, was surprised, etc. My second movie was Unbreakable and it was a second hit for me, great surprise, at the time the only real “superhero” movie I liked (long before MCU).
Then it was a series of movies that just got worse and worse, each time trying to have that “surprise”. I absolutely hated his surprises, and I hated even more his interpretation of other people’s works such as Avatar, The Last Air Bender. So basically I have ignored his stuff for years and years.
This means I ignored Split and Glass because I didn’t want him to fuck up my feelings about Unbreakable.
For whatever reason though, this weekend I decided to give Split a try. I like James McAvoy (even if I don’t really like him the best as Professor X). I knew the basic plot line already, I knew that it was set in the Unbreakable universe and I figured it couldn’t damage my feelings of Unbreakable too badly.
Turns out I was surprised, but not in the surprise way I had assumed. I found I liked Split. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think its a high piece of cinema, but it was enjoyable, written well enough for me to forget my anxiety for a couple hours and after watching the little twists and stuff I felt like he made up for some of his other bad movies.
So this morning I took a hard gamble and watched Glass. Supposedly the second sequel to Unbreakable, and it got rid of any sort of misdirection attempts about what it was. Turns out I liked Glass a lot too. It was entertaining, it was nice to see superhero type movie that was gritty and was not just a set piece of destruction. The way he filmed to reduce the amount of special effects I was pretty fond of.
I thought the acting went well, all of the actors brought their A game, and it was really nice to see Bruce Willis in what appears to be the final movie in his career that didn’t have the changed feeling of his acting style.
I don’t want to spoil it, but I did like the ending and the little bit of surprise that Shyamalan always needs to put in. I felt he wrapped up the current storylines and I was even a little emotional. Better yet I liked the world he set up better than I like Marvel right now.
Don’t get me wrong, I suspect if he put out 10 movies in that universe they would start degrading and not be worth it, but he left it open. It felt more like a superhero world that I might run as a game for my table top. It left me more interested about new stories in his superhero world then in Marvel itself (full disclosure I have never been a huge superhero buff, not even as a kid in the 70s/80s).
Kudos to him for wrapping up the trilogy, and I just had to say I take back some of what I have said about his filmmaking. It just shows me that people can be good at a niche part of their profession, but that doesn’t mean they are good for all of it, and sometimes its best to stick to your lane.
I have been meaning to post for a few weeks, but work, mental health and physical health have all sucked so I guess now the reason I am posting is because of a dream. Yesterday we bought a new Subaru Forester for the hubby so we didn’t have to rely on his Kia not getting stolen (its one of those that can be broken into easily) and we don’t have to rely on my car which mechanically was just starting to fall apart, I hope to post about that actually later today.
However, it was a stressful event so by 6pm I kept falling asleep and had a horrendous set of nightmares on and off when I did fall back to sleep until I finally got up at 2am. My watch says I got 4 hours sleep in that whole time, I feel like less, but it was the same dream, just continuing the whole time. Below is not the complete dream, most of the individual little things that were horrifyingly banal are already slipping my mind, so here is just the general beats.
START DREAM
The dream was in vignettes and started with the hubby and I coming across a dark roiling cloud like thing on the ground, being near it didn’t seem to cause any problems, but you could feel something in the air had changed, something bad had happened.
I couldn’t tell if it was the atmosphere had a hole poked in it right there and it was leaking the earth’s atmosphere, there was no suction, no rush of air, so while that was the closest fear a lot of people in the dream had, it felt more like a swirling thing that was maybe corrupting things, sort of like the swirling blackness from the old movie with Donald Pleasance and Alice Cooper, “The Prince of Darkness”.
Sort of like the inky blackness, but not confined to a prison.
Flash forward to another vignette and the world was dark, almost like the whole nuclear winter thing except it wasn’t freezing, it was just dark and everything living was dead and barren, and society/cities/government had collapsed. However it had only been a few days, it was more like the world was transformed and not decayed.
Meanwhile most people were already dead or dying, as if the eternal night that was happening was sucking the life from them (maybe Ravensloft style?). The hubby and I were traveling, but it still wasn’t far from where we live. There was some sort of quick rush by humans, seemed like an attempt to “save the world” a very movie like feeling when the exciting climax was going to save us all.
Except it didn’t.
After what felt like the climax failed, there were several small vignettes of seeing things and people that made the world seem to age and fall apart, even though in the dream it was only a few days. The entire time there was a globe we kept looking at (one of those standing world globes) and it had some feature that would show the area of the world still getting daylight, and it was shrinking to a strip around the globe that for me was closes south of Portland. It wasn’t like the sun itself was restricted due to a nuclear winter, rather it was more like marking the strip of the globe still habitable (?), or wasn’t corrupted evil.
The final vignette was sadder and much more low-key horrifying. The world was getting darker and more desolate (but not ice age cold with the no sun), and my hubby wasn’t in the last vignette. I just remember being sad when I thought about him. I had been traveling for a bit with a younger blond girl (younger for me is probably early 30s) when we came across someone dying, and they just had this clear liquid coming out of their mouths as if they had drowned (no water was around).
We saw the strip on the globe had shrunk into very tiny line across the world of what seemed like there could still be light, we were in that strip though and no daylight so obviously we figured out it was measuring something else.
A little time flickered ahead in the dream and I came across that blond woman I had been traveling with. At some point she had raced ahead of me into a building. She was lying there, no physical damage on her body and she was scared. I was consoling her until she passed, with a bunch of clear liquid coming out of her mouth right after she died. There were no obvious wounds, and she was in far better shape than this old girl, so it just made it obvious whatever was happening didn’t care about the health of the individual.
The small group I was with looked at the globe we were carrying in the night, the strip of light was completely gone on the globe and we just looked at each other. We knew it was over, no heroes were saving anyone and all I could do was miss my husband, and my family that had already passed before all of this, and wonder if it was going to hurt. The worst part is I knew the world was dead, and I was just sad at the loss of everything about humans, all because something stupid happened that none of us knew about, but we could feel it.
STOP DREAM
I woke and sat up, and for whatever reason was sad, and just sobbed for a while. Tally came over and laid against me until I got up. I wish I could remember more of the details, that always feels important but I can never quite do it. I will remember bits of it later, but even now it’s more unclear, so I will leave this dream recounting where we stand.
Pic of hubby actually asking to marry me. August 25, 1992
FLASHBACK FRIDAY AUGUST 25, 1992 – DESCRIPTION
FBF 8/25/92
Snapped this of hubby when he asked me to marry him. The biggest decision of my life, and not once in 31 years have I ever considered it anything but the right one.
This is a day 2 post following my TBT post yesterday. I mentioned a picture of him actually asking me to marry him. It was funny though, the picture was an accident in timing. This wasn’t something I intended to catch on camera. I always wonder if he remembers it much differently than me, maybe I will ask him after this post goes up.
We were sitting on the couch, the hubby had been talking with me and had been asking me leading questions. I was a dumbass 20 year old who wasn’t sure which way was up so I didn’t catch it (much like when he first got me to date him).
We had broken up for six months and had only been back together a couple months at most. I had never even considered he would ask me to marry him. When we first got together, while I was still an asshole and we hadn’t figured out how to be best friends and be romantic, I had asked him to marry me and he had turned me down. I don’t even think it was a no to me, but rather to the whole idea of being married, and honestly it was the right choice.
So I had been taking photos of him all day, just enjoying being with him when he leaned over and asked if I would marry him. I don’t even remember taking the photo, I just felt myself freeze on the other end. It only took me a few seconds at most to say yes of course, but it was one of those movie scenes where everything slowed down to a crawl for me.
One other funny thing I remember, I was told we needed to buy big rings for each other by several couples to show how much we loved each other. We bought each other $20 silver bands from the Silver Source in the mall and never even had engagement rings.
Funny enough same couples sort of derided the fact that our wedding was done by a judge, and they spent a lot of money on theirs. Now I look back, 31 years later and we are the only couple still together that was involved in those conversations, and I can’t say there isn’t a bit of, “bitch we knew what we needed to do” in my head about that.
Once again I love you garden rat. I love you more than anything, no matter what.
Tales From The Little Blue House 