Waking Up

I woke up, opened my eyes, and closed them again because it hurt to keep them open. Not that tired-eyes-hurt, but just like they couldn’t focus. I took stock of my surroundings eyes shut.

The first thing I noticed was that my mouth tasted like shit. So bad it had pulled me awake.

The second thing I noticed was that I had been sleeping on my back. I couldn’t remember another time I had been conscious of the way I was laying when I work up. This is because I’d been strapped down. That thought came with some panic. I put it aside to focus on the third thought.

The third thought was that I was uncomfortable. When I shifted there were things on my legs and a tube running somewhere around my thighs.

Easy conclusion: I’m in a hospital. I’ve never been in a hospital as a patient before.

From there it went: Whatever happened to me was bad enough I ended up in a hospital.

Finally: They have fixed whatever happened to me. That’s what hospitals do.

“I got water right here, sweet pea.” That must have been a nurse on my left. Eyes still closed I gave something like a croak, and then just nodded my head. The back of my bed raised up, until I was sitting. I pried my eyes open long enough to see a straw in front of me. Like an invalid I opened my mouth, got a straw stuck in it, and sucked. Water had never tasted so good in my life.

“Are you uncomfortable anywhere? Hot? Cold?”

Oh, yeah. I was freezing. “Very cold.” My voice squeaked when I said it. Fucking puberty. I had alternated between a bari and a bass since 11, my voice hadn’t squeaked in a year. I tried to let the embarrassment pass over me.

“I’ll get you a blanket, sweet pea.” With water inside me I had enough energy to open my eyes, and watched while she moved over to something that looked like a mini-fridge. She pulled out a stack of thin blankets and spread them over me. I was enveloped in thin cotton that would have been terrible, but they were warm like they had been in an oven. So there’s such a thing as blanket ovens. Maybe this world isn’t so bad.

My but had scooted down in the bed, and I put my hands down to lift myself back up, and my world collapsed around me again. I still felt the swelling on my chest, felt the blanket pull down over the inflamed skin. I must* have been stung by something. Or I’m allergic to the ground. Yeah, I passed out, got too much ground on me and swelled up. Then: You’re being an idiot Ash. This is some kind of medical conundrum. They’ll have to call in experts on swelling, and bones that feel like they’re breaking. It’ll be just like one of the TV shows, where everyone is mean to each other because they’re geniuses.*

While I came to terms with my infirmity, the nurse came over to a computer on a stand, and started checking monitors, while typing furiously.

I wiggled my legs around and felt the catheter between them. And then I felt something terrible. Or a lack of something, and the lack was terrible. Oh god. I can’t feel my balls.

I don’t remember not having testicles, so I guess they dropped early. I do remember asking my grandpa about them, and I must have been four. So for all of my life that I can remember I’ve had testicles. And for all of my life that I can remember, I’ve known exactly where they were at all times. You have to think about what your toes, or your ears feel like, sure. But just like my index fingers, or the inside of my mouth, I didn’t have to concentrate to know where my balls were at any given moment. And where ever they were now was not attached to my body.

Okay Ash. Stay calm. Sure you’ve been castrated somehow, but there’s hormones, and you never wanted kids. I’d never had sex, now maybe I never would. Could you still ejaculate if you’d lost your testicles? That’s not something I could remember them covering in sex ed.

“You okay, darling?” The nurse asked.

Too shy to ask such a deeply personal question from a lady nurse, I tried to cover for whatever expression I had on my face. “Just…” Freaking out. “Wondering what happened to me.” My voice wouldn’t stop squeaking, but it had fallen to the bottom of my priorities for the moment.

“You’re gonna have a long talk with the doctor about that, he’s gonna explain it all to you. You came in in a coma, and you’ve been out for,” She checked her watch, “Six days and five hours.” She winked at me, “You’re lucky you woke up now, they were gonna put a feeding tube in you this afternoon. They are very uncomfortable to remove.”

She went over and started freeing my straps. I stretched my arms and legs as they came loose, feeling the collection of tubes and wires on my hands and around my legs.

“You were picking at your IV lines while you were out. It’s common. We couldn’t have you pulling them out and getting all your blood everywhere.” She finished tucking them away. “That better?”

“Yeah.”

“I called Joann, she’s going to come in before the doctor, and get some information from you. Then your doctor will be in. You want me to turn on the TV?”

I nodded. Anything to block out the knowledge that I was no longer a man.

The nurse was on her way out the door when a woman in a long skirt, or maybe a dress, came in. She was broad, rather than fat, and was wearing a knit shall. “Hello dear, name is Joann,” She told me. Then to the nurse, “I’ll page doctor Stanton when I’m ready for him to come in.”

The nurse, I still didn’t know her name, gave a nod. “The doctor has to tell us when you can get some food in you. Meantime, here’s some water. I’ll be back with him, so I’ll see you soon.” She walked out through a pair of glass doors.

Joann took her time getting a chair just right, so that she could look at me, as I lay on the bed. “Alright honey. My name is Joann. I’m your child advocate until we can contact your parents. So lets start there. I need your name.”

“You don’t know my name?”

She looked at me from under her brows, “You weren’t in any position to answer questions when you got in here, hun.”

“Ashley. Ashley McKinnon. Ash.”

“Ashley. That’s a pretty name, dear. Is that em cee, or em ey cee?”

I was starting to feel patronized. What is with all these ‘dears’ and ‘honeys’. I’m not a child. “Em cee.Just call me Ash.”

“Okay, Ash,” she made marks in her notebook. “Let’s get your date of birth next, unless you know your social security number?”

“[REDACTED],” I said.

“That’s very good, it’ll give me a nice start. How did you memorize that?”

“It was my student ID number for awhile.” The blankets were making me tired, and I realized that I didn’t even need to get comfortable if I wanted to fall asleep at that second.

“Alright, Ash. I’m a child advocate, do you know what that means?”

I shook my head, and then took a stab, “You work for the government?”

She laughed, “Good guess. I work for child protection services, or at least they pay me. Actually I work for you. We haven’t been able to reach your parents, so I’m here to help make the decisions your parents would have made.”

She didn’t add the rest. I was found alone in a coma. She wanted to know why my dad hadn’t been there. She was following up to make sure I hadn’t been abused. That knowledge made me want to cry. She couldn’t help what was going on in my house.

She followed that up in a way that confirmed my line of thinking, “Ash, I’m bound by the rules of confidentiality, do you know what that means?”

I shook my head. Nothing I had heard of.

“It mean that I don’t have to report anything to the government that you don’t want me to. If you ask me, I’ll keep any secret.” I nodded, more than a little relieved and almost ready to trust, “Except—except Ash, where your well-being is at stake. If someone is hurting you, or you’re hungry, or there’s anything sexual going on, it’s in both of our best interests if you tell me.”

I sighed, the conversation was exhausting, but Joann seemed so nice. She asked my father’s name then, his phone number, our address, where he worked.

I gave here all that, finishing with, “He works in Sandia Labs. I have no idea what he does.”

Joann put her pen down then, and looked at me, “How are you feeling, Ash?”

I started to say, “Fine,” and instead I found gallons of tears streaming out of me. My voice wouldn’t stop squeaking, high like a girl’s, even while I was crying. Joann put her things aside and then sat carefully on the bed with me, squeezing my swollen chest, and holding me.

After a few minutes I was all cried out, and really embarrassed about the mess of snot I left on her shawl. She brushed my apologies off, “It’s machine washable. Everything I knit is. Now if you’re feeling like a brave girl, we can meet with the doctor, and get a better idea of what’s happening.”

A brave what now? My hand went to my hair as I said, “I’m a boy.” My face was flaming, equal parts embarrassment and betrayal. That was a cruel mistake for someone who was supposed to care for me.

“Oh, I’m so sorry! I didn’t realize.” She picked up her folder, “I’m so sorry hun, let me just make a note that you’re trans, so no one else makes that mistake.”

“I’m not trans. I’ve always been a boy. I was born a boy.” I’d never seen someone’s face freeze before. Like, really freeze. But all of the muscles on Joann’s face stopped moving as she stared at me. I saw something like real fear there, amids the confusion. Seeing that I found out I had more to cry as I sobbed out, “What’s happened to my testicles?”

Joann stayed silent, and pursed her lips. She came in for another hug, but didn’t say anything. Her silence broke me out of the crying fit this time, and I shrugged out of her embrace. Instead she picked up my hand and said, “Nothing happened to them, dear. They were never there.” Then she reached into her bag and pulled out a makeup thing and opened it. She showed me the mirror inside and let me turn it toward my face.

After that all I remember is screaming.

As a case in point, let me mention the observations reported some 30 years ago by the visual anthropologist Edmund Carpenter. Carpenter recorded the reactions of adult Biami, and isolated tribe living in the plateau of Papua New Guinea, when introduced for the first time to their own mirror reflection, video image, and other Polaroid photographs of themselves. Carpenter reported a powerful expression of fear and anxiety in these adult individuals: “They were paralyzed after their first startled response - covering their mouths and ducking their heads - they stood transfixed staring at their images…(Carpenter 1975:452)

It is my contention that the fear expressed by the Biami adults, confronted for presumably the first time with their specular image, rests on the fact that the individual oneness to grip with the profound discrepancy between what he or she feels and perceives about the self from within his/her own body, and what other actually perceive of him or her… (Philippe Rochat, The Structure and Development of Self-consciousness, 2004.)

That would have been pertinent context, if I had ever read it.

An hour later the Klonopin had been working for 45 minutes, and the blind panic had mostly subsided. I read on the Internet awhile before that the little girl in The Exorcist had been purposely prevented from seeing her reflection in the mirror while in makeup. They had put child actors in monster masks before and the freak out was intense, when their cosmetic was real enough to fool a child.

Well I wasn’t a child, I was 14, but seeing a face that wasn’t my face in the mirror had hurt. I didn’t even remember what it looked like. Joann had snapped the makeup box closed, I guess. When I was cognizant of what was going on in the room, I realized there was a nurse there. She was sitting in the chair across from me and reading a magazine.

Making sure I don’t hurt myself.

“The first thing is to breathe.” My mother told me. I was six and she was teaching meditation, as a way to calm down. “Now become aware of your surroundings.”

There were a lot of ways to do this. I liked to count lights. Mom taught me to count the number of yellow things in the room, but this was just as effective. I started doing it every since I saw “Chain of Command II”. I would imagine Patrick Stewart screaming at David Warner, “There are four lights!” Good way to remember what I was doing.

I counted the bulbs, I counted the lights on the panels. I counted all the on light LEDs, from the TV to my heart monitor. There are 27 lights in this room.

“Now become aware of your body.” Was I hot or cold? Warm mostly. My arms were cold. I put them under the blanket for the time being. Where were my toes? At the end of the bed. What were my hands doing? Laying on my stomach. Was my head heavy? My mouth open? My brow furled? Yes, no, no.

There was a stretching on my shoulders, just underneath my clavicle. My chest was swollen, and sensitive. Okay, Ash. Let’s cope with that.

The apron they’d put me in was tight at the neck, because it was tied in the back. I couldn’t look down my neck line. I would have to go in manually.

Conscious of the nurse in the room, under the blanket, I reached my hand up to touch my chest. Gingerly, I expected it to hurt. Instead it felt like… like touching a part of my body.

Only… an intimate part of my body. I felt the heat on my face as I blushed.

I poked myself. Squishy. Then cupped a swollen pec. I’ve never felt a breast before. But if I had to guess, I wold say they feel like this. When I lifted up, I felt the stretching on my shoulders release.

Okay. I have breasts. Shit. What are they going to say at school? I could feel the dread rise up at the thought, and get pounded down by the Klonopin. Now was not the time to think about that.

What was it time to do? Close my eyes and continue to meditate.

I lost track of time, keeping my thoughts centered on my breathing. When I was aware that they had wandered I pulled them back.

Breathe in. Slowly. Slowly. Breathe.

When Joann came into the room, I realized that my hand was still on my breast, and I pulled it away, and prayed she hadn’t noticed. I was a teenager. I was good at furtive, but needed practice with non chalance.

Following Joann was another woman. Tall, blond hair, professional dress. Older, fifties I would guess. I noticed that I could see her cleavage, and my puberty brain put everything that had happened to me aside to focus on that. I told my puberty brain to cut it the fuck out, and tried to focus.

“Hi, Ashley. Joann says you like to be called Ash?” I nodded. “I’m Doctor Gunn, but you can call me Katie. I’m a child psychologist attached to the hospital, and Joann got me right away when you had an anxiety attack. I’d like to ask you some questions if that’s okay?”

When adults ask you “if that’s okay?” they usually mean that you don’t have a choice, but in this case I felt like she really meant it. It didn’t matter, because hanging out here and trying to deal on my own was more scary than anything she could ask me. “Sure,” I said.

“Great,” Then she proceeded to ask me a bunch of questions, all of which I answered with “no.”

Had I ever had an anxiety attack before? Had I ever had any memory problems? Was there a history of mental illness in my family? Had I ever suffered any head trauma? A bunch more question that aren’t important.

She made check marks in the folder for every answer, and her questions sounded more urgent as she went on. Finally I told her that my family had no history of dementia (that I knew of), and she blew out a deep breathe and slowly closed the folder. She put her hands together and looked at Joann for a bit. “How are you feeling, Ash? Are you getting nervous again?”

I was. I could feel myself coming down from the high, and everything was going crazy in my head again. Doctor Gunn looked to Joann and whispered, “I hate doing this, but…” Then she got up and went to the intercom on the wall, and pressed the button, “I’m authorizing another Klonopin.” She turned then, “I have to talk to Joann for a second, hang on while the nurse gets your med, it’ll only take a moment.

Then there was a nurse there, helping me swallow a tiny pill, while Joann and Katie had a conversation in urgent whispers outside the door. The nurse left, the two came back in. Joann looked determined, or maybe resolute. Katie looked… worried? Shocked? Flabergasted. Yeah, that one’s good.

They sat down in front of my bed and Katie started up again, “Ash, sometimes in my job, I have to give bad news to parents. I’m not used to giving bad news to children. Even if I were, in your case I don’t know what I should say.” She paused to struggle, gave herself some deep breathes, and almost looked about to cry when she started up again, “When Joann brought your case to me, I assumed you had suffered a severe case of gender dysphoria, something to do with the coma. Things like this happen when your brain shuts down from damage.” She laughed a little hysterically, “There was a man who woke up from a five month coma fluent in French. A language he’d never heard before. That I could handle. Your case—”

“Your case is different,” Joann interrupted her.

“Very different. Ash, do you remember… having been a girl before?”

It seemed both a very weird question to ask, and at the same time one that should have been asked a long time ago. “No. I’m a boy,” my voice betrayed me. Not squeaking, I realized that now. Just like it had never dropped at all.

“Okay, I wanted to be sure this had something to do with your accident. Ash you were found laying in an alleyway, a mile from your home. Do you remember how you got there?”

Ah. I chose that moment not to talk about the freaktures. “No,” I lied.

“Well there was no trauma to your body, Ash. When someone goes comatose it’s not necessarily because of anything we can see on the outside. It could be any number of things hiding in your brain. So when you were admitted, the first thing we did was an MRI of your entire body. We didn’t want to miss a blood clot in your leg, or a bleed in your spleen.” Katie looked then, very scared at Joann.

Joann said to me, “Ash, I’ve been able to get a hold of your father. He’s adamant that he doesn’t have a daughter. So adamant that he’s refusing contact from us. He says he’s remanding custody to your mother.”

“She’s in Denver,” I told her, “there was a custody thing.”

“Normally Ash, I would want a parent here to help you cope with this, but what Katie has to say is very important, and I need you to understand so that we can get your input. With children your age, we try to consider your wishes as much as possible, and you…” It was her turn to breathe deep, “You have some decisions to make.”

Joann gave Katie the nod to continue, and Katie picked up again, “Ash. You are biologically a female.”

I shook my head as strongly as possible. My own experiments aside, I knew that I wasn’t crazy. That she couldn’t be right.

“Ashley, we have pictures of your ovaries.”

Joann took over again, “Your birth certificate lists you as a boy. Your learners permit is a boys. I have access to your medical records, and you had an CT of your pelvis three years ago.”

I nodded. I had fallen and broken my coccyx, most embarrassing injury a kid could have. The doctor had had trouble with the x-rays and ordered the CT. It was an interesting experience. I would have told all my friends about it, if I had had friends. As it was I got to do it for a special show and tell. Some of the class clapped. That was nice.

“You already know this,” Joann said, “No ovaries.”

Katie finally broke out, “Ash there’s no medical record of this. There isn’t even a Biblical record of this. I don’t have any idea what to do here.”

Joann laid her hand on Katie’s wrist, “Let me talk to him alone please. He understands now, and I have to go into advocate mode. I can’t do that with you here.”

Katie nodded and stood. She looked like she was about to touch me on her way out, maybe give a limb a squeeze. Instead she just looked at me and fled.