Medical Incompetence

I’m tempted to call this “medical abuse,” but honestly, I would prefer to think that it was simply a mistake made on my Doctor’s part, and so I shall refrain from going so far. The fact of the matter is that, for the last several months, I have not had an adequate supply of hormones for transition. When I left the city in which I did my Master’s Program, my GP gave me a year’s worth of refills for HRT prescriptions. These expired in June, and GPs are notoriously hard to come by in my home city. There is a clinic here which specializes in transgender-related healthcare, but the doctor there works only one day a week, and so it is booked solid for about six months in advance. Therefore, when my prescriptions were on the verge on expiring, I went to a normal walk-in clinic to have them refilled.

The doctor seemed sympathetic enough, at the time. He admitted that he had never, to his knowledge, treated a transgender patient before, but seemed perfectly willing to write me a new prescription. It was only when I took it to the pharmacy several weeks later that I realized that there was an issue. Apparently, the prescription had, in some way, not been filled out properly. The pharmacist was required to call the walk-in clinic to get verification. I can only assume that there was some miscommunication there, because when I was given my prescription, I discovered that, without any consultation whatsoever, my dosages had been changed–presumably by a man who, by his own admission, had no experience treating transgender patients. In particular, my dosage of anti-androgens had been cut by two thirds; my estrogen dosage had been cut in half; and my progesterone dosage (which had been kept low on account of how progesterone can induce depression) has been raised by a quarter.

I have not been able to get my prescriptions changed back to their original state without a note from either my GP or my endocrinologist, which somewhat inconvenient, as you might imagine, as they are both on the other side of the continent. Over the summer, I have watched in disgust as the dosages have taken their physiological toll.

But thankfully, I will not have to wait much longer; the first thing that I do when I return to University will be to schedule an appointment with my endocrinologist.