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1:39 a.m. - Tuesday, Aug. 06, 2002
Another MIlestone for Ms Leslie
Today begins the home stretch. A month from now, give or take a day for the international date line, which changes things but I don�t remember which way, I�ll be having my surgery��. IF I�ve lost enough weight.

That�s my only obstacle now. I have the money. I have my diabetes under such control that I can be considered no longer diabetic. I quit smoking. I�ve gotten two therapists; educated, concerned, thinking people, to agree that having this surgery is a logical and reasonable thing to do. They�ve both put their good names on the line by writing letters to that effect.

I�ve told my family and resigned myself to live with the consequences. I�ve lived publicly as a woman with some success. I have, in fact, completed most of the job, really, of physically altering myself to appear female. The surgery is just another step forward in this regard.

I�m not afraid of the surgery. I keep thinking I should be, but I�m not. I keep thinking there should be something I haven�t considered; some reason I shouldn�t go through with it, but there�s not. I�ve even explained to myself that having completed the surgery won�t necessarily mean that I have to return to working on the issues surrounding PTSD or any other issues for that matter. I don�t have to do anything I don�t want to do.

So it comes as a matter of surprise and personal disappointment that I can�t seem to get my weight under 200 lbs. I can get within five pounds of that, but then I rocket back up again. Now it�s crunch time. It�s time to stop screwing around. I don�t know. It seems sometimes I work best this way. I seem to need a crisis. I need to do everything just in time. So� if that�s the way it is, then this is the right moment for me to kick in that final just in time effort. There�s an awful lot riding on my success. Or to put it another way� there�s a lot riding on my excess.

Tomorrow is a month before my birthday, by the way. My whole intention is to awaken after surgery to find myself reborn on this symbolic day. If and when I finally make it to the operating room and start counting backwards for the anesthesiologist, I�ll be coming to the end of a life. If I awaken at all, I�ll awaken to a new life with new possibilities. I guess in some ways, I�m not thinking about that enough. I have my eyes on the goal of counting backwards� ending this life. I�ve been reluctant to hope, I guess, that the new life is possible for me. Maybe, like everything else in life, I won�t believe it until I see it. Gosh, I sure hope I do see it.

I�m canceling my appointment with the New Orleans therapist today. It seems pointless to go. She can�t help me with this and there�s nothing else I care to think about right now. I might as well save the time and money. For the past couple of months my visits have been not much more than polite and superficial chat about little or nothing of substance. That would be fine. I like her and like talking to her, but at the end of an hour, I leave a pretty good handful of money behind. Along with the major portion of a day spent traveling back and forth to New Orleans. In the end, I guess I�m not being helped if I don�t feel helped, and lately I don�t feel helped. Most of the help I feel comes, in fact, from writing here, and from reading the comments and e-mails I�ve been getting lately. You can�t buy therapy like that.

I�ve seen my VA therapist for the last time before my trip too. I know I have work to do with her, because I still cry within minutes of beginning to talk to her. I try hard not to cry, but there�s just no way I can avoid it. It�s like I can push all the war stuff into the background most of the time, but to do that, I have to not talk about it. If I try to talk in any real way, then I can�t hold back any more. This is her specialty. She works exclusively with veterans, and mostly Vietnam veterans. She�s so good, she scares me� literally. She knows things I feel before I tell her about them. She knows because she�s seen it all before� and because she cares. I think when it comes to combat trauma, she cares so much that she feels a lot of the same things; experiencing it through her clients. I just learned that she even accompanied two veterans on a return to Vietnam a couple of years ago. I think she is as close to being a combat veteran as a person can get without actually having gone through the experience. The point is, she scares me by knowing so much. I want her to help me with the symptoms that still run my life, but I�m scared because I know she can touch places that I�m afraid to have touched.

But that�s all for the future. It�s for after I come home again. It�s not to worry about right now. I made it wait this long. It can wait another month.

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