Lunch with the Girls

I've made a few really nice friends on Facebook this year.  However, up until today I haven't had the chance to meet any of them in person.  Today I got to meet Beth Angela (her FB name) and Kim for lunch.  Kim drives an 18 wheeler for a living and since she was on a truck run from Canada to Houston, we met at the Denny's near the Truck Stop on Route 20 in Dallas.

Beth Angela and I have been friends and have talked on FB every day since March and I have really enjoyed her friendship.  She's a really kind and nice lady!  I just had the pleasure of meeting Kim last week on FB through Beth Angela.

We had a really nice lunch at Denny's and sat there and talked for a good while after we finished eating.  Kim told us a lot about her life and when she was in the Army.  She is such a sweetheart!  After a while, we walked back to her truck and climbed up into it to talk for a while.  Her truck's name is "Cleo" and she's pretty cool looking!  Cleo is green and even has "teeth" in the front like some of the fighter jets in the military!

Since Kim is on the road all of the time, she pretty much lives in Cleo.  She showed us pictures of her family on her computer and a few pairs of really cool high heels that she has with her.  But what I found to be so special about the whole time there was how much she shared with us about some truly personal aspects of her life.

Kim is transgender and transitioned last year.  She showed us pictures of herself before she transitioned.  She also showed us her dilators.  For those who don't know what dilators are, after Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS), the patient needs to stretch her neo-vagina to prevent it from contracting.  This is done by doing daily exercises using rubber vaginal inserts, know as vaginal dilators, for about six months.  After that, dilation is done several times a week for the rest of her life.  This is what dilators look like:

Dilators

She showed us pictures of her using dilators after her SRS procedure and let us feel one of her breasts to see how natural the implants look and feel.  Just for the record for whoever might be reading this, there was nothing dirty or perverse about the way that she did this.  She was just sharing her experiences with us. She also said that if we ever had any questions to feel free to ask her.  I really appreciate how open she is about the whole thing and I definitely learned something from it!  What's even better is how happy she is with her life as a result of her transition!  This is wonderful to see as I've encountered a good number of trans women who are very unhappy and depressed.  I hope that one day they all can be as happy with their lives as Kim is with hers!

I haven't really had any close friends since I retired from the Air Force Reserve in 2004.  I'm glad to be making friends again, and I'm really glad that Beth Angela and Kim are amongst them!  I have the feeling that they both will end up in my inner circle of friends, and there aren't too many people who have ever made it there.

My Personal Training Success Story

Back in my 1/4/2012 blog called "On the Right Track",  I talked about how excited I was to be starting on the Personal Training Program at 24 Hour Fitness, which is where I work out 4-5 days a week.  Before starting on this program, I had worked out at least four days a week and subscribed to a low fat diet for a long time . However, even being this active wasn't getting me the lean definition that I was seeking.

So fast forward to now, I've been steadily working out with my Trainer, Brad Siegel and I've had great success in gaining more lean definition and strength and losing 15 pounds!  Most of those clothes that were just hanging in my closet because they were too small are now too big!  What's even better is that my blood pressure is staying down now without medicine and I can run up steps without my knees hurting.  I actually enjoy working out now!

My trainer is very happy with my progress and submitted my story and pictures to the 24 Hour Fitness Corporate Office in Addison, TX so that they could format them for their 24 Hour Fitness Personal Training "Wall of Fame" at the gym where I work out.  This made me feel really good that somebody noticed all of the hard work that I've done and how it is paying off!

Here is my "Personal Training Success Story" that they have on the "Wall of Fame" at my gym:

My Personal Training Success Story

Here is a picture of me in a beautiful blue suit that I had hanging in my closet for over a year because I couldn't get into it:

Mae in "The Blue Suit"

Although all of this feels great, I know that I can't sit back and rest on my laurels.  I have to keep up the pace so that I can continue to maintain and advance my physical fitness goals!

Love Hurts

Although I'm extremely glad that it's Friday, I have to admit that I'm singing the blues again, and it's the same old song that I've been singing for the past few years.  In my own defense, I haven't been singing it as often these days, but there was an event this week that has caused me to sing it again.  I've done all kinds of things to get my mind off of it, to include getting a Facebook account and starting a blog, but it just won't go away!  I've got to let go!  There's simply nothing there to hang onto, there never was and there never will be!

So now I'm going to let Dan McCafferty finish singing the blues for me tonight, as he does it so well:

Love Hurts . . .what a fitting song to match my blues.

Hungry Like the Wolf

It has been 5 days since my Endometrial Ablation and although I'm doing fine, I'm noticing some side effects. I have been experiencing some bleeding and have been feeling quasi depressed.  Not too bad, but just sort of like "down on the dumps" and not very excited about anything.  It feels like I'm in a hormonal state.  I've also noticed for the past day or so that I've been hungry as hell!  It was really bad today.  I've been wanting to crunch on something all day long!  I ended up eating a big bowl of Kix as finger food today at work, which satisfied the need to crunch for a while, but didn't completely vanquish it.  This hunger state needs to stop!  It reminds me of a song by Duran Duran from back in the 80s:

Yes, "Hungry Like the Wolf" has been my theme song today!  However, the song will need to change tomorrow as I don't plan on gaining any weight!

The surgery has been on my mind a lot, so I looked up more about it on the internet and found that it was featured on the show "The Doctors".  Here is a video of a woman getting the procedure:

I'm still annoyed and disappointed with my doctor for not having somebody call me the next day and for the overall "cattle call" way that they did things.  I looked on Aetna Navigator today and was not surprised to see that her office was very efficient in getting the surgery billed, to the tune of $3,545.00!  I'm just betting that this doesn't include the anesthesiologist's fee either, which will likely arrive promptly in the mail before week's end.  Aetna is paying her their rate of $1,958.16, which is better but still exorbitantly expensive!

The medical field is becoming a racket.  This makes me sad as this is what I have to look forward to as I age.  I pray that I can keep my health intact for a long time so that I won't have to deal too much with a growing community of uncaring blood suckers!

Cattle Call

I underwent a Novasure Endometrial Ablation this past Thursday to mitigate some female problems that I've been plagued with every month for the last six months. This procedure destroys the uterine lining by "burning" it out with radio frequency energy.  I was supposed to have the procedure at 10:00 am, but my gynecologist is also an obstetrician and had to do an emergency delivery, so I got booted to the last appointment for the day.  This sucked because I had to fast from after midnight the previous evening up until the procedure!

The procedure was done in outpatient status at my doctor's office, where an operating room team comes to the office and transforms several examining rooms into makeshift operating rooms.  My doctor made it sound like it would be just an in-and-out deal, but it was far from that!  I asked her how many people would have to be in the room and she told me that it would be her, a nurse and an anesthesiologist.  It ended up that there were 5 people in the room:  the doctor, two operating room techs, a nurse, and the anesthesiologist.  I know that these folks look at women's bare crotches every day, but this made me very uncomfortable!  What made it worse was that the anesthesiologist was a man, and I specifically pick female doctors for my gynecological needs as I'm not comfortable with men being in the room when I'm in this unclothed state!

The anesthesiologist put me under with Propofol, which is the drug that Michael Jackson used to go to sleep and which eventually killed him.  To be honest, the Propofol was the worst part of the procedure!  It didn't hurt when the anesthesiologist administered it through the IV as he put Lidocaine through the IV before the Propofol.  I was out within a few seconds after he put it into the IV.   The worst part was waking up from the Propofol.  It felt like I was looking through a pair of broken goggles and I just felt so drugged out and weird!  It took several hours for me to feel normal again.

After going through this procedure, I will have to say in my honest opinion that it should have been done in a hospital. Even though the Propofol was administered by an anesthesiologist, it's a heavy duty drug and a lot can go wrong with it.  I don't even know if those people had a crash cart available for emergencies.  I certainly didn't see one.

Another thing that really bothered me was the "cattle call" feel to the whole thing.  I ended up having to wait about 45 minutes in a examining room right next to one of the makeshift operating rooms and I heard them waking up the poor woman that had the procedure right before me.  The woman was having a really hard time waking up, which I can fully understand after being put under with Propofol and they ended up getting kind of mean to her when she couldn't open her eyes.  Before they wake you (the patient) up, they put your underwear and pants on up to your knees so that they can just yank your pants up and get you out the door.  There was no recovery room with a nurse or anything like that. Once you wake up, they yank up your pants,  plop you into a wheel chair and take you out to your car.

They didn't provide any kind of written post-op instructions and the doctor didn't even bother to speak with my husband, who was waiting to take me home.  I couldn't believe this as I was pretty out of it from the Propofol and couldn't remember much of what anybody said to me right before we left.  However, the absolute worst of all it was the fact that the doctor's office didn't even bother to call me the next day to find out how I was doing!  I have had dentists call me the next day after a dental surgery to see how I was doing and they didn't even put me under with anesthesia!

Frankly, I just found the whole experience to have been rather cold and uncaring.  My doctor is very competent, but not the greatest in the "bedside" manner department.  It's okay to have a doctor like this for just a yearly exam, but not for when you have problems and have to see them more often.  Hopefully, my female problems have been vanquished by this procedure that I had on Thursday.  If not, I will need to find another doctor, preferably one who is just a gynecologist so that they won't be getting called off at the last minute to deliver babies.  Overall, I would prefer somebody a bit warmer that this doctor.

Graduation Day

We drove to Austin this past weekend to attend a family member's High School Graduation ceremony.  We left Friday evening around 4:00 PM and ended up running into a bunch of traffic going through downtown Dallas.  It was stop and go for about 1-1/2 hours and we ended up getting to Round Rock around 8:00 PM.  We stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn there.  There is a Saltgrass Restaurant right in front of the hotel, so we ate Dinner there.  The food was marginal at best.  I had the tenderloin K-Bob which in better days used to be all tenderloin, but now they are mixing chicken into it so that they can charge more money and give the customer less.  Having chicken in it was probably for the best as the tenderloin was tough and didn't taste very good.  Adeline was fascinated with the longhorn, deer and bison heads that are hanging all over the restaurant.  Here is a picture of Adeline and I at the table:

Adeline and Mae at the Saltgrass Restaurant in Round Rock, TX

The graduation ceremony was at 9:00 in the morning on Saturday, so we got up, ate some breakfast and then headed there. Here is a picture of Adeline making a goofy face at breakfast while eating her yogurt. The ceremony was very nice and I was quite surprised that both the Salutatorian and Valedictorian talked about their relationship with Jesus Christ during their speeches, especially since they were graduating from a public school!  My bet is that this doesn't happen in public schools in states other than Texas.  It was nice to see that such young people were unafraid to talk about their faith when most kids their age are more concerned about maintaining a cool image.

 

Adeline Making Goofy Faces Over Breakfast

After the ceremony we went back to the hotel and took a long nap and then Adeline's maternal grandmother picked her up and took her to spend the night at her house in Georgetown.


After Adeline left, we went over to a party at Hernan's brother Luis' house.  Luis' daughter Christina was the one who graduated from High School.  They had a delicious spread of food there and plenty of beer!  We had a very nice visit with Hernan's brothers.  Here is a picture of Christina and me at the party:

Christina and Mae at the Graduation Party

We left the party around 10:00 PM and went back to the hotel to sleep.  We got up the next day and I jumped into the shower and soaped myself up, only to have the hotel fire alarm go off!  We thought that maybe the steam from the shower might have set off the alarm in our room, so I got out of the shower dripping soap and water and called the Front Desk.  The woman told me that they were testing the alarm and not to worry about it.  Testing the fire alarm at 9:00 AM on a Sunday morning!  And to makes things worse, they didn't even tell anybody that they were doing the testing!  I'm sure there were a lot of people who were running around naked there on Sunday!  Fortunately, I stayed in our room!  I'm going to write them up for it on the survey of our stay there.  I do have to say that other than the alarm incident, everybody there treated us very nicely as always.

After we ate breakfast we picked up Adeline in Georgetown and then headed back to Dallas.  We made a pit stop in Italy, Texas and look at what we saw on the side of I-35 there:

The Starship Pegasus Along I-35 in Italy, TX

Apparently, the Starship Enterprise's sister ship landed on the side of I-35 in Italy.  She is named the Starship Pegasus.  I had to stop and get out and take a picture of her!

All in all, the weekend was very nice, but way too short!  It was very hard rolling out of bed this morning, but the day didn't go too badly and now Monday is over.