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prev.cont."Bro, you gotta see what people are saying about Dr. M––– on Reddit," my classmate said. He's the plastic surgeon who performed the top surgery on the trans man earlier this year. The Reddit post was from another of his patients. They'd gotten a botched top surgery, and now their insurance won’t pay for the surgery to be corrected.
To see the cruelty of medicine, you have to give yourself to it. You have to trust it enough to fix you to see how it destroys you.
What a special kind of torment it is to be slighted by a system that promised to help you. We’re not telling the truth when we tell people that surgery is the solution to their problems. Maybe it can be, but what if the surgery gets botched? What if you die on the table?
There are trans people who say that surgery saved their lives. It's not that I don't believe them; it's that I don’t trust medicine to take care of them.
I read something by a doctor who lives far away and does research on psychedelics. On a whim, I sent him an email to the effect of “I’m struggling to find the motivation to keep going.” He told me that I should “seek help.”
Fuck that. The weird year is a wash, and medicine sucks. This year sucked. Whatever happens in these last five months isn’t going to be enough to make the year not have sucked. No amount of "help" will resurrect the parts of my soul that died this year.
Anyway, the thing that matters most in the whole world right now is the crickets chirping outside my window.
exit