by Theresa Davis | Dec 24, 2019 | Featured, Health
As the famous opening line to the book goes “It was the best of times, it was the worse of times” and that pretty much sums up this year. I have had some fantastic experiences this year, but also so disappointments, and struggles as well.
It started off good enough with my first visit to the specialist endocrinologist in Tenerife finally getting back on to hormones in late March, lucky I seem to have escaped any serious damage from my years without hormones, just some slight loss of bone density.
I also undertook a top-secret undercover mission, wherein total secrecy I smuggled myself back into the UK under a total social media blackout so that I could surprise my niece Mandy on the opening day of her new cafe.
This also gave me a chance to run around the country like a crazed thing making flying visits to friends across the country, many of which I had only known previously as names on screens.
Then it was the 1st big event of the summer, our daughter Sarah and Billys wedding which came in two parts. The first a fairly standard affair in Leeds town hall, with the normal traditional stuff. Then came the second part, as the following morning bleary-eyed we all boarded the flight for Reykjavik in Iceland, where we had the second Viking wedding, surrounded by earth mounds next to a fjord.
The summer was then filled with Pride celebrations first the second pride in the island, bigger and better than the previous years, then quite literally I travelled from than and the following weekend I was at Trans Pride Brighton which was an overwhelming experience, and another chance to catch up with friends and make new ones.
After that, it was like someone flicked a switch and things started to go the other way, firstly my depression and anxiety started to get bad to the point where I seriously considered self-harm at times.
To add on top of that we finally had to say to goodbye to our beloved cat Meep due to cancer. I finally had to admit that I had issues, and see the doctor about it, by the time I got around to doing so another problem had emerged.
Since the summer my resting heart rate had been slowly slipping slower and slower until it had reached around an average of 40 beats per minute. So when I spoke to the doctor about getting something to help with the anxiety and depression I also brought up the issues with my heart rate, which by this time was making me tired and sometimes a little breathless.
While the medication for the depression has helped and I’m now more able to cope on a day to day basis. But with the heart issue, it’s still not resolved, I’ve had several ECG’s and tests and medication changes, at this point I’m awaiting in January to go to the hospital where I will be wired up to a recorder that will track my heart for 24 hours. Then what will happen I don’t know yet, I know there is no structural problem with my heart, and I don’t have a thyroid issue, so the treatment options are becoming limited, and one of the only things left on the table is the fitting of a pacemaker.
So the last few months have been pretty frustrating and I don’t know what the new year will bring, apart from plenty of upheaval and changes, so I can only take one step at a time, each day as it comes.
by Theresa Davis | Nov 3, 2019 | Featured, Health
I’m heartbroken, not in the sense that I have a relationship that has failed, but the fact that I have a heart that is broken.
It started not long after I returned from the UK, I started to feel very tired and lacking in energy, I have a Fitbit that I have been wearing for a number of years, so I was able to notice in the app a worrying trend, my resting heart rate was heading downwards. Now if I was an elite athlete this wouldn’t be a problem but being an overweight 48 year-old woman it obviously isn’t a normal situation.
The fact that I was suffering at the same time from crippling anxiety, my heart rate should not have been doing what it was, so finally I decided to bring it up with the doctors, the anxiety was easy to deal with and now have some SSRIs that are dealing with the anxiety perfectly, the solution to the heart rate issue, however, has been a little more difficult.
Because of different GPs at times I have been subjected to multiple blood tests, ECGs and various other examinations. I have completely dropped the medication that I have been on for high blood pressure as this was now normal and in fact at times quite low. But whatever they tried the Bradycardia remained.
This hasn’t helped that at the same time work has got a bit hectic again with multiple projects all competing for time and resources, coupled with a general lack of energy has made this very difficult sometimes just to get through the week, and most of the time I have spent the Friday working from bed and all weekend just resting. Most evenings, I haven’t been able to do much either, this had meant that some of the household chores have fallen to Helen. This has meant that work on any personal projects has stopped, this is the first bit of writing that I have been able to do in months, and I’m doing this laid in bed on a Sunday morning flat on my back.
One household chore that we’ve been able to sort out for both of us is keeping the floor clean, thanks to the newest edition to our family, Marvin the Roomba, so at least we have clean floors.
Sadly we have also lost one from our family, Meep our white cat sadly her cancer came back and started to attack her face and when we took her to the vet there was noting that they really could do so we had to make the painful decision to put her to sleep.
So that’s all up to date, now I am awaiting an appointment with the cardiologist at the end of November if they can’t find a cause of the bradycardia that can be treated with medication, and I’ve had tests for most of those already then it may be that sometime in the near future I’ll have to have a pacemaker fitted, and that worries me a great deal right now.
by Theresa Davis | Jun 22, 2019 | Health
Today was just one of those days, not sure exactly 100% why, but I just don’t have the energy both mentally and physically to get out of bed.
To be honest, the trouble began last night, and it’s just developed from there. I received a rejection for my book earlier in the week and after the initial disappointment, I was coping Ok with it. But for some reason last night it boiled over, and I became very despondent about the whole project and posted a very negative post to social media in which I suggested that I might give it up totally.
Now ever since I came back from a recent trip to the UK and Iceland I have been a little tired and suffering from a mild cold that I haven’t really been able to shift. This is probably having a small knock-on effect with my Mental Health, I just wish I could wake up with energy and be able to accomplish things. I have such a feeling of failure when I have these days that I cannot achieve anything, and that only adds further to the cycle of low self-worth that I feel.
I feel torn so much by this, one part is screaming that me that this is classic burnout and if I am not careful it’s all going to come crashing down with something bad happening to me. The other part of me says that I need to push through it and keep going so that I don’t let people down, hoping upon hope that sometime soon I will be able to take a break away from things and truly recuperate.
Then comes the question how to recuperate, I need to work out ways to loosen the grip that anxiety has on me before it overwhelms and consumes me completely, dragging me down to the dark places where I have been before and I don’t want to return to.
So for now…
If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me
And just forget the world?
by Theresa Davis | Mar 1, 2019 | Health, Travel
It was a dull grey day at the end of January when I eventually got to fly to the appointment with the endocrinologist in Tenerife. Having a 10 o’clock appointment meant the only flight that was available to me in order to get there on time was the first flight of the morning at 8am. In order to make sure I made the flight I arrived at the airport an hour before, it’s a rare occasion that you are forced to wait for the security checkpoints to open. When they did it was straight through and on to the plane.
Taking off and climbing above the clouds in the early morning light was an experience, it helped immensely to reduce some of the nerves that I had been feeling about this trip, that had only been made worse by a weeks delay. The downside of the flight from La Palma to Tenerife is how brief it is, before you know it we were preparing to land in Tenerife.
Walking from the plane right past the baggage collection belts and winding my way through the throngs of tourists, I headed downstairs to locate the bus to the interchange, because in a great piece of logic, the tram system in Tenerife does not extend to the airport. This means taking a 5 min bus ride before I could change to the tram which delivers me right outside the hospital.
The next challenge was to figure out which of the many buildings that make up the university hospital was the one I needed to be in. When I had located the building, getting to the right place was easy as I knew which floor as that was on the appointment letter. The first thing when I arrived was being sent down to the nurse to be weighed and measured.
Then it was in with the doctor, most of the chat was going over my medical history, good job I had brought my initial report from Dr Reid and the surgical report from Dr Seghers, without these I might have had some issues proving that I had a trans diagnosis in the past. Some of his questions did seem intrusive especially regarding my sex life, however given the nature of the interview, it was understandable.
Then followed something that I hadn’t totally been prepared for, a physical examination, nothing particularly intimate. However I was on edge, when he said my blood pressure was a little high, and maybe it was due to being in hospital, I thought, “I’m sitting here in my knickers being poked and prodded and you don’t expect my blood pressure to be high”.
Once that was over and I was dressed, it was time to get the paperwork. First he wanted a full blood test to check my baseline hormone levels, a bone density scan to see what damage being off hormones has done to my skeleton. He also put me in for a mammogram due to the fact that my mother had breast cancer. He also gave me a copy of the contract I would have to sign to start hormone treatment, I have to sign this to say that I give consent due to the fact that technically the medicines are not licensed for what we are using them for.
With all this done I shall return on the 12th March and hopefully 12 years after arriving in Spain I will be back on HRT
by Theresa Davis | Jan 12, 2019 | Health
This week I came close to a crash and burn, by Friday I was not in a good place and in fact my mind was going to places where it hadn’t been in a long time.
I realised that things were getting bad when on Friday morning while washing my face in the kitchen sink (still don’t have an indoor bathroom) I had serious thoughts of just reaching over to the knife block and pulling out a knife from it and cutting my arm. The thought passed in a flash but just the fact that my mind went there was scary, I’m still here and I’m coping better today but I need to process how I got to this point.
Over the last few months work has been pretty stressful, there are a number of factors, but somehow it has ended up with several projects all coming to a head in the next couple of weeks with compressed timescales, and some significant technical hurdles to overcome. This has meant a lot of chopping and changing and juggling with other day to day issues that we have to deal with.
Then Friday morning the bombshell hit, this was a front pager article in the Daily Telegraph, now I’m used to the regular Sunday morning hate piece from the Times but for some reason this was personal. As many of you may know I worked at the Telegraph for a number of years and while I was there I was very open about that fact that I was a trans woman. To see this transphobic article on the front page felt like a betrayal, now I know it has been 11 years since I left for Spain, but it will always have a soft spot in my heart due to the acceptance and respect I felt there.
I realised that I am once again teetering on the edge of a complete burnout, so I will take a rest this weekend and try and stave off the worst, until I can find a longer term solution.
by Theresa Davis | Jan 1, 2019 | Health
It is normal for this time of year to make resolutions for the new year, I have made resolutions various times over the years and I’ve never really been that successful in keeping them. So this year I decided that I would take a slightly different track, I am to set some general goals and then some smaller actions that I can do to meet those goals. I’m not going to as far as full SMART methodology, but I would like to have thing more focused than just a simple goal that is vague and more than likely won’t be achieved.
Lose weight
This is almost a perennial on my list, every year I have but this down on the list and every year I have finished the year not a lot different from the start.
I’m however a little more determined this year than I have been of late. So how can I achieve this, here are some simple steps I want to make this year.
Diet
Now I’m not one for fad diets, I’ve tried them in the past and they don’t work well for me, something that I have tried and found works OK for me is to have 2 days a week when I have a restricted calorie intake. I want to continue this and also be a little more careful of the portion sizes, as I’m normally cooking for two it’s difficult as a lot of recipes are for 4 servings and just simply halving the recipe doesn’t always work out with workable quantities. So what I have been doing is when I make something for example a shepherds pie then I will make 2, one to eat then and freeze the other part for later.
Exercise
I have already started to get more exercise than I did a couple of years ago, because with going into the office most days, this enables me to park at the other end of town and walk 20 minutes to the office and back again at night. I want to add a little bit to this with some gentle core exercises once or twice a week, and hopefully introduce doing some sit ups once a week.
Language and Voice
The key things that has come out of my more recent activism and other activities is two fold, the first is that my Spanish is atrocious. I’m OK on a day to day basis but under pressure I tend to mumble and struggle to grasp for words, So I need to be a little bit more confident with the language and extend my vocabulary, I should really get back to using DuoLingo each day so that the Spanish comes easier to recall.
The next thing is my voice, when I transitioned I didn’t have any formal voice training and while again I’m OK on a day to day basis but recently I had a conference call where I had a substantial echo and it was very disconcerting, and again with doing more public speaking I’d like the experience to be a little less dysphoric. I’m going to be using “The voice book for Trans and Non-Binary people” to try and train my voice a bit better.
Thats most of the stuff that I would like to change personally on a day to day basis, there are some other things that I would like to achieve this year, but more specific things.
The Book
Having written the book last year the big thing is to get it edited into something that I feel ready to publish, I have only let one person read it so far. I deliberately left it to one side after I finished the draft so that I could come back to it again with fresh eyes in January. I’m also still hunting around for a publisher, I got one rejection so far and that was on commercial grounds as they already have a number of similar titles, but they did give me a list of other places to try. I’m still awaiting to hear from one, and a number of options are still open at this point.
Other Projects
I’m still looking at what else I can do, I’ve definitely been bitten by the writing bug and I don’t think the current book will be my last, in the meantime while I search for inspiration I hope to keep writing things for this blog and who knows maybe some other things for elsewhere.
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