SleepyCattenWe are so very, very tired of everything going wrong 🥺😔
We've had issues ongoing for years, but everything just keeps getting worse and it feels like every week brings a whole new opportunity for things to go wrong.
Here are just a few of the highlights of the last year and a bit:
- Mental health worsened, entering full AuDHD burnout, with increasing anxiety and mood instability.
- We got made redundant from a job we were clinging on to.
- It also took us about 6 months to finally get any benefits, so we ate through our entire redundancy payment, final salary payment, and some savings.
- Wife broke her ankle very badly, requiring an awful stay in hospital.
- When she got out, 17 days later, we became her primary carer.
- We had already been increasingly looking after her, as her health issues had worsened over years, but this dialled it up to 11.
- We entered carer burnout, on top of the AuDHD one.
- Even after her ankle fully healed and she'd done months of physicaly therapy, our wife's health and mobility declined due to issues unrelated to the ankle, which has further increased her reliance on us for care, and the NHS is going at a snail's pace.
- She's pretty much in constant pain, struggling massively, and there's very little we can do to help, despite her being so grateful to us 😔
- We started ADHD meds, and eventually started to feel like we were getting somewhere with a combo of meds, only for them to email us today with a suggested backwards change they want to make that will fuck us over royally, and gave us a mild panic attack.
- We had to contact them immediately to request an urgent call to discuss, but we now feel like the rug's been pulled out from under us.
- We tried to get actual mental health support through the NHS as far back as May, but due to incompetence, poor administration, and an unwillingness to meet basic accommodations, it's still not happened and is unlikely to happen.
- Our already fractured relationship with our assigned gender clinic broke down to the point where they no longer respond to us.
- They wouldn't even let us know what an appointment they'd scheduled was about.
- They wouldn't even respond to the relevant NHS PALS (Patient Advice and Liaison Service) when we asked for their help.
- We finally got offered some voice training assistance through the NHS, but they completely wasted our time and broke us more.
- Over 3 separate hour-long assessments, including one with their lead speech and language therapist, they decided that they couldn't help us voice train, that the problems we were having were all in our head, and tried to fob us off to a psychologist to overcome our perceived issues!!!
- When we asked them to support an Individual Funding Request (IFR) for Voice Feminisation Surgery (VFS), they not only refused, but the reasons given were a mixture of misrepresentations and outright untruths.
- Despite saying that they couldn't help us, their refusal to support an IFR advised that we could always come back to them in 6 months to try again 😑
- We finally progressed enough through the NHS "care pathway" to discuss options for genital reconfiguration surgery (GRS), but -- as we've written in detail here, it went very, very poorly.
- Had to do 2 very difficult emails to try to work out next steps, if any, to go with our backup option, but it's looking increasing like we're not going to be even able to get that from the NHS, and we cannot afford to get it done privately.
- Trans+ rights and access to healthcare are continuing to be rolled back and further limited, piece by piece, with no hope of that changing in the near future... or even at all.
- Oh, and the senior partner at our NHS GP surgery -- whom we very much trust and who actually cares -- is semi-retiring this year, and they were kind of our last lifeline in the NHS for wading through most of the shit 🙃
NGL: if we didn't have responsibilities and obligations to wife, cattens, and friends, as well as certain others in the community, we'd be seriously planning a homebrew version of Dignitas-level stuff right now.
It no longer feels like we're just treading water.
It feels like we're caught in rapids, desperately clinging to any rocks we can along the way, trying not to drown as the water increasingly fills our lungs.
But it doesn't matter how exhausted we are, how much it hurts, or how much everything sucks: we don't have the freedom to let go.
So instead we're doing everything within our limited power, resources, and capabilities to keep on swimming, staying conscious as we drown, and learn somehow to breath underwater.
If you've read this far, apologies for all of this. We could have said nothing, but we needed to be honest about how bad everything is.
And if per chance some of you are more-technically-savvy, and know what we mean by TOR and Dread, and could perhaps privately offer to share some info over Signal or Matrix regarding backup "supplies" for the ADHD stuff, we'd be much obliged. (We've got the GAHT stuff covered at least, as well as certain other meds. Just struggling with the ADHD stuff, particularly guanfacine / Intuniv.)
#MentalHealth #anxiety #depression #MoodDysregulation #MoodInstability #neurodivergent #neurodivergence #neurospicy #neurospiciness #AuDHD #AuDHDBurnout #burnout #CarerBurnout #NHS #NHSEngland #trans #transgender #NonBinary #enby #TransRightsAreHumanRights #TransRights #LGBTQ+ #LGBTQIA+ #FuckTheUK #HereBeDragons
SleepyCatten (@[email protected])
Content warning: Update post - NHS (England); gender-affirming surgery (specifically genital reconfiguration surgery) options; likely nearing a dead-end; bleak
Dr Annetta Mallon
Christine Bell