I realize I had been fairly quiet lately. Wolsey’s consult has been this weird, stressful, yet exciting thing coming up on the calendar. Originally we were going to do this consult in a year. That seemed like a good bit of timing, with the passing of my parents, work’s deadlines and just trying to get caught up from the funeral expenses I had expected more of a dead period for us to recover.

Fast forward to Trump being elected, Pence being vice president and Sessions now the head of the DoJ and the stress began to increase. Word started trickling down and eventually a flood of knowledge that the GOP is doing everything they can do to get the ACA repealed and thus the only protections of Wolsey’s medical care removed. Combine this with working for the federal government itself (and the DoD at that) that had the only pre-ACA exception from transgender care that was in Washington State means the timeline got moved up.

Originally scheduled for late May, the consult was stressful because of the changes happening and the consult was so far away. I hadn’t realized the stress would increase when we got a call from the surgeon to move it up two months (because we have a great case manager with our health insurance and she pushed). They evidently moved it up because they knew we worked for the DoD and we could lose Wolsey’s coverage fairly soon if things go badly.

I thought this was great, I am without a doubt happy we are doing this faster in order to make sure Wolsey has a better chance to get it done before any insurance changes. I do not begrudge that and I think this is our best choice.

However, the downside to all of this is evidently there are a ton of things going on in Phoenix in March. Because we moved up the time to get plane tickets and all of these other events are occurring meant prices for airfare increased significantly over what they would have cost in May. This was frustrating, but once again necessary.

Originally we were told that surgery would be 12-18 months after the consult (we won’t know until tomorrow when Wolsey gets his consult). However, our case manager is working hard and there is a possibility that it might happen by the end of the year.

The stress of having it 12-18 months is not knowing if we will have insurance to cover it from our current job or if I will have to jump to the state (since they won’t lose their coverage of transgender medical no matter what happens with the ACA since its state law that requires it). If it is sooner the stress is making sure Wolsey has enough time off available (I can donate quite a bit of leave to him, just require pressuring my boss to do the paperwork) and the costs we will have to come up with in under a year.

Fast forward to today and I am up at 2am, getting ready to head out at 4am to the airport (another bad aspect, the only flight we could catch required us going to the airport at 4am in the morning).

This stress, along with me trying to learn new stress coping mechanisms with my parents gone (and audit deadline at work, and us trying to get out and do more things) means I have shutdown online this last month or so, so my quietness here is not representative of not wanting to write, or not having things to write about. I am sure I will be back talking about our Arizona trip by Tuesday.