i’m at pride family medicine in austin. there is a needle in my hand and it’s frozen over my thigh. the needle is a 23 guage, inch and a half long thing. drawing the estradiol valerate suspension into it took a few seconds and a bit of pressure. it’s a viscous substance, and you draw it up with a thicker needle than what you’d use to inject. If you do it right, it plunges all the way into your thigh, penetrating into the muscle and depositing enough to slowly absorb into your blood over the course of the next week. Not much pain, and no blood except for maybe a little drop after you remove the needle.
once a week, for the rest of my life.
i wonder what it’ll be like when i’m 70 or 80, or if i’ll still have enough of a mind to do it at 90. what would i look like? who would i be living with? if i forgot my own meds, would someone else remember for me? I’d hope that someone would know or care.
Last I’d checked my levels, I was at about 75pg/ml of estrogen and 75ng/dl of testosterone, which is too high testosterone for a woman, but too low estrogen for one as well. I started taking Bicalutamide to push down the testosterone, and now that I’m switching to shots, my estrogen levels should be going up as well.
0.2 ml, 20mg/ml concentration once a week. sterilize the cover of the vial with alcohol wipes, grab a 21g needle and push 0.2ml of air into the vial to maintain pressure, draw out slightly more than the 0.2ml, then depress the plunger to exactly 0.2ml, pull out of the vial, swap to a 23g needle without contaminating the syringe, pick a site on the vastus lateralus, stab in at a 90 degree angle until the needle is at least an inch deep, draw up, check for blood so that you know you didn’t hit a vein, then push down to deposit the oil into the muscle.
i’m stuck at the stabbing part.
the nurse is really trying to be nice and encouraging and i keep bringing my hand up, then back down again, hovering half an inch away from the skin. piercing my body with a foreign object has a certain horror to it. I just watched Crash a couple days ago and i’m thinking about twisted wrecks, flesh and steel fused into each other, an undifferentiated heap bathed in blood.
Every day, my body continues to change. It changes because I introduce exogenous hormones into it. It would change anyways, but this is different from normal aging. my skin looks softer. hard lumps of flesh formed behind my nipples, then grew into soft breasts. the surface of my body feels different, electric — even the sensation of clothing against skin is new to me. my face looks younger, and i feel myself becoming supple, undefended, easy to bruise or to penetrate.
And now, my body is intertwined with the pharmaceutical products i introduce to it. I’ve inserted the needle, i’m pressing the plunger down and it is becoming part of my flesh. the injection molding machines that produce the syringes, the factories where steel runs through a tube drawing process to form hypodermic needles, the estradiol powder, the oil suspension, the sterile glass vial and its steel and sealed rubber diaphragm, the cargo ships and trains and trucks and airplanes that have brought each of these parts from one side of the world to another, then another, then another until they’ve landed here, in my trembling hand.
i am formed in this crash. Needle after needle will collide with my body, then find its way past the edges of myself, through the barrier that is supposed to distinguish between what is and is not me. layers of skin, fat, muscle.
Once a week, for the rest of my life.
