Feeble excuses!

The Lietuvos Rytas newspaper has two articles on transgender issues today, for reasons best known to myself.

Among the coverage is a short interview with a gynaecologist who I suspect is still choking over his cornflakes. He refuses to treat women who were formerly men (their passports may still be male, only 2 people have so far been able to change their passports in Lithuania). If the passport says it's a guy, he says, how can 'he' visit a gynaecologist.  He further says that if a man becomes a women, she needs female hormones. But, he thinks, if they prescribe female hormones, the patient can then take them to court for serious assault.

Eh?

Why do cocks and bulls come to my mind?

You know how it is...

...in those cartoons, where someone cuts off a bit of a leg of a chair, to stop it wobbling, and he cuts it off too short, then starts sawing off bits of the other legs, and before you know it it's a stool....

That's how it was with my own hair cutting just now. I have a dinky little machine that I just run over my head and it had produced pretty good results so far (not that I can really see the back of my head....). And it was working nicely, and I was cutting off bits more and bits more - and suddenly it dug deep - and now I have a patch with very short hair indeed.

Well, I always wanted to see what I look like with extremely short hair (a No 1, roughly speaking). Guess tomorrow I will have a chance to find out. Unfortunately tomorrow is also the day that I might tell my other bit of news to a very good, albeit older, friend of mine - who a year ago, when I was still trying to be a woman, complemented me on my longer hair and (to him) good looks - and tomorrow he'll probably not even recognize this crew-cut person.

Variations on a theme of toothache

Oh heck!

Wednesday went to the dentist to finish off a little piece of work on a tooth on the right hand side which had got infected three weeks ago. In passing mentioned a little discomfort on the left side.

Dentist took a look and muttered something about a very large filling. Then took another look and realised that this (wisdom) tooth no longer has a friend above, and hence has started to rise up, creating a little pocket between it and the next tooth which caused debris to get stuck there. It has to come out, he told me.

I was aghast! After losing about 5 teeth before I was 25 I had always sworn I would fight for every further tooth! But arguing brought nothing, so out it came - with relative ease. That did not hurt, and it won't hurt later, he told me. I have a feeling he dropped a little silver thing into the hole. Bit surprised that it had only one root, but I see that sometimes the roots fuse.

Ha. 'Tis Saturday morning and I am now finding a good use for the painkilling medication I got after my hernia operation in January, when I did not need it. F*ck's sake. But when yesterday I went to finally finish off the other piece of work the other dentist said that it was healing well, and indeed it looks like it is healing well. But it still frigging hurts; I pray there is no infection.

Tomorrow I am off to Kazahkstan for three days and I'll have to manage the painkilling medication really well to survive flights and conferences etc. Last time I flew to Georgia I had a stinging headache and virtually no access to medication; that was horrific.

I wonder when it will stop hurting??

I can't believe

...the blog titles that are still available! This is such an obvious one, for us women who have been round the block a bit...

In the 80s there was a feminist woman's health book called 'Our Bodies, Ourselves'. It had the aim of making women thoroughly familiar with their bodies, bits of which were often only touched by doctors or lovers. It empowered women to take care of their own bodies, informed them of signs and symptoms and their bodies' needs and capacities, relationship aspects and it was a wonderful, uplifting read. I see the book is still around, with a separate edition for the menopause (hmmm, yes, well....), and of course there is a website. Well done, ladies!

The body thing is interesting. Sociologists, of which I am one, I think, take a great interest in the human body and how it links with the mind and social conditions (much as David Levitin, in his book 'This is your brain on music' tries to link the physical aspects of music listening to the generally pleasurable experience of music listening). Sociologically the mind (as opposed to the brain) has an impact on the body - just think of 'I should go for a run' and what happens what you do or don't do. Representations of the body are interesting, too and how they affect people's lives - if you think of people of different appearances, whether they are young, old, black, white, tall, small - these are the first impressions you have of people, and that's how they are generally treated. It would be interesting to know, for example, whether the body of a poor heroin-user clad in rags, and that of a wealthy investment banker cocain user would be treated the same on arriving in A&E. People who undergo medical treatment are often referred to by the carers as 'that appendix over there' or 'that lung cancer' rather than as a person who has these conditions. Much like persons with disabilities are still referred to in some countries out East as 'the disabled', as if the disability defines their whole meaning. (I could go on and on; it's a fascinating subject....)

If this title had not been around, the blog might have been called something like 'Personal Stuff' because that's what it is. It's a split off from Viola in Vilnius on arts and music, and from Good Buy Lenin on general life in Eastern Europe. to cover purely personal stuff, like running, health and all those things that I do not consider typical for Eastern Europe. I'm not planning to go on whinging about health all the time, though.....