Planetfurry BBS

[Teric]

[AmigaDragon]

And those of us who remain unmarried (whether by choice or by chance) understand even less than the rest of you.

[Teric]

Chapter 76:

Holy freakin mergin fergin whattheheckhappenedthere?!?!?! Aslaug, *please* tell me that Jean's experience there wasn't a reflection of reality. please...?

My gosh... I feel like I'm going to cry.

[Styx]

Oy! that one was painful for me too, brought back some very unpleaseant memories.

[Aslaug]

I'm sorry to say that Chapter 76 is pretty precisely what happened to me, Teric.

Both the bleeding and what happened during the night.

I had lost 24 lbs in one month. I had done so because the surgeon and chief nurse at the hospital had seen me one month before and had said that unless I fit my BMI I wouldn't get surgery. Then they sent me home. I had one month to fit my BMI in. Body Mass Index is the least precise measurement of weight-to-height ratio in the world. All it does is say 'what's your gender, what's your height, then you should weigh -this-'. It takes NO account for body or skeletal structure whatsoever. One guy around here was told at one point that unless he stayed 25 points OVER his BMI, he'd be dangerously underweight because he's literally easier to jump over than walk around. He's fat, sure...but even if he lost weight he'd be as wide as a barn door. He's built that way. However, if he's 25 points over his BMI, he's officially in the category 'life threatening obesity'.

And he was told by his doctor that if he dropped under that, he'd risk a heartattack.

In my case, I'm not exactly built like a battleship, but nor am I a little waif. I'm five foot nine, and I had to lose 30 lbs in one month. I was nearly in tears when I went home. So I contacted my M.D. and asked for help. She realized this was a matter of extreme urgency and gave me the strongest diet-pills one could, at that time, get on the Danish market. They have since been withdrawn. She instructed me to take those and eat some very specific things and get LOADS of exercise.

I didn't do that. I ate one pill every morning, as instructed. Then I drank tea, water or apple juice...and I rode 20-25 kilometers every day on my bicicle. I didn't eat.

At all.

I wish it was a joke. I wish I could say that 'of course I ate something'. I didn't. I ate one meal a week, deciding to set it for Sunday afternoon. Usually, I barely finished all of it. After three weeks of this nonsense, my skin was turning yellow and I was having difficulty standing upright from exhaustion. My I contacted my M.D. as I still needed to lose yet more weight. She told me flat out that unless I started eating normally she'd have me hospitalized and force-fed. That what I was doing was extremely dangerous. So I ate a little now and then. Not a lot. I developed anorexia in under a month, in fact. I was convinced I was a fat blob. But I fit a size two...and in fact, a size two had room to spare and I would have needed to get children's sizes next. I still have a few of the skirts I bought then, to remind me of my own madness. When I went to the hospital, I had lost 24 lbs I believe it was. The doctor and chief nurse barely believed their eyes. The surgeon was visibly shocked. The nurse, who is infamous amongst Danish transsexuals as being a rabid homophobe, scoffed at me and said I was still too fat and needed to lose another 6 or 7 lbs.

"You can come back in six months when you're serious about this," she said.

I threatened to make a scene by litearlly going into the front hall of the hospital, taking my clothes off and asking passerbys if I looked fat to them.

That made the difference and they hospitalized me. But starving yourself like that for a month weakens your blood-vessels. Nowadays, I realize just how dangerous what I did was.

Especially going into major surgery right afterwards.

All I can say is thank the Gods I don't look like that anymore. My hipbones protruded further than my stomach. I looked like something that had just stepped through the gates of a concentration camp. My skin was a pale yellow because my liver was starting to give away. Only eating three meals in three weeks CANNOT be recommended, folks...

So I bled a lot during surgery. A -lot-. When I woke up, the nurse on call immediately had me wrapped up like a native american baby, more or less...in hot blankets and she told me later I was still going blue. I had hallucinations while I was laying there...whether morphine induced or because of the bleeding I don't know. But I saw my former self next to the bed, saying 'I didn't think you had it in you. I guess you deserve to live, more than I do'

Probably the scariest moment of my life, I tell you.

And then, during the night...12 hours later, all my anesthetics set out. The epidural cord got bent, the morphine in the IV clogged and the shot I had had in my thigh didn't work anymore after that long. I usually tell people that I'm not afraid of death. I've stared it directly in the face and I've gone through the most extreme pain a person can probably experience and I didn't lose my mind.

So...yes...chapter 76 is based on personal experience...

[Karou WindStalker]

*whimper*

[shadowjaguar]

*gives the Filly a hug* I didnt realize that that chapter was written with personal experience. I had my susspisions, but I hoped they where wrong.
Dear gods....that must have been hellish.

[Teric]

... I... gosh...

I don't know what to say.

...

If that truly was real, then it makes me wonder just how much else reflects reality. How much support did you have from family and friends at that point? In that sense, I truly hope that Esteban and at least a few of the others represent real people.

I just can't concieve of going through an experience like that. For what it's worth, four years after the fact, I am truly sorry that it happened that way. You've done an excellent job of bringing me there to the scene, of pulling my heart out for Jean as she suffered.

I'm honestly very glad that you convinced me to come & read Transitions, Aslaug. I hope you'll forgive me for the preconcieved notions that kept me from it before.

[Tigermark]

The good thing, and it probably is the ONLY good thing, about preconceptions, Teric, is that, with some open talk, and a gentle spirit, we can get over them and see the true people that so many times get stereotyped.

Whenever you hear anything about anyone, go talk to them before you accept anything as fact. Instead of a hollow copy of what the world expects, you'll usually find a real person. A living, breathing, interesting person, who will most likely blow every one of those preconceptions away.

And in the case where the idea is confirmed rather than disproved, you will have gone to the source. That's always the best way to find things out.

Tigermark

[Aslaug]

Sad to say, Esteban is entirely fictional. I took a character from James Bruner's gallery of unused (or largely unused) characters, and gave him a personality, basically.

There is no real life Esteban, nor do I expect there to ever be one.

I lost 90 percent of my friends when I told them what was going on with me. My best friend through a decade tried to replace me as my parent's second child. He largely succeeded, something for which I haven't forgiven him, nor will I. When I meet him these days, he smiles and puts on an act and his disgust is so barely veiled I feel like I'm walking in a sea of sludge. The waxen smiles on his face makes me sick to my stomach. To think I ever called that person a friend...*shudders*. He's still there. My parents still see him regularly and they still speak as if they now have -three- children. But I also know that that third one is me. I'm the one who had to be accepted 'back' into the fold. By my mother, in particular.

Very few people stuck by me. Very few people indeed. I lost my job. I had -just- landed a job at that time, but I was told not to come back after I started treatment. Officially it was because my boss said he thought I needed to concentrate on that...unofficially, the revulsion on his face nearly made me retch as he said it.

My mother and father...well...let's not get into the problems I had with my family. I can't really bear it again. What matters is that my dad visited me in the hospital and that he had supported me and helped me through the last year and a half of my treatment. That he still does. If asked, he will tell people that he doesn't understand what I've done...and that he will never be able to understand. But he will also tell them that he -accepts- and -respects my right to make my own choices-.

Most of all, he does understand that it was a matter of life and death.

I wrote this story as catharsis...in many ways I still write as catharsis, but this one was the one that really 'pulled teeth' so to say. It was difficult to write some of these chapters.

Some of it is fictionalized. I've never had a Lance Gulo hunting me...I've only ever had to deal with the threats of it. I've never been beaten as severely as Jean was beaten early in the story...but I've suffered some physical abuse, nonetheless. All I can do is thank my many gods that I was born in a country where the level of tolerance is as high as it is here...

As for the preconceptions, you're well forgiven. I understand why you thought what you did. I suppose it is what keeps a number of other people from reading this story too. What matters to me is not what you thought of the story before...but what you think of it now.

I hope you'll enjoy both AVC and Transitions II as well...and whatever comes after those.

[Frazikar]

The html of Chapter 40 needs to have the font size readjusted, it's too big (literally!)...

[Aslaug]

It looks okay to me. I just checked myself, but that did look normal

[Frazikar]

Hmmmm, that's strange, I mean I have two machines (one IE7 and one IE8) and in both cases once Roxy starts reading Gabby's book, the text just keeps getting larger (and both have been reset a fewe times as well)...

Anyway, hows things on resurrecting the rest of 'Transitions' going?

[Aslaug]

Bastion was supposed to post some more chapters this past week but my guess is he had a very busy week

[tobi3B]

Ohh new chapters.
Interresting. I really like to see the expression on Doc Foxs face when he meet with Jean as Miriams boyfriend. And I´m really curious when Leo meet Lizzy.