What Do The Doctors Know
Oh 2025, you invisible trickster. You silent interpreter of maladies. You singer of unheard songs. What a crazy year since the Vulture Moment last May, lifetimes, eons, ago.
I’m just trying to keep up with my dreams. In the desert, I dream of boats on the ocean, tides, clouds, gulls. In the green Colorado mountains, I dream of desert canyonland, red rock and purple-blue shadows, a sheer drop from the cliff’s edge, and such an insistent impulse to leap. Because I will soar, I feel it. And everywhere, the Vulture.
The tears didn’t stop after I pulled over to the side of Minnesota Highway 61, high on the bluff edge of an inland sea change, although I did not know it at the time. I thought I was traveling up the shore of Lake Superior toward Grand Marais, the Grand Portage, and Isle Royale. I thought I was chasing a story, following what I could find of the North Country Trail.
But in truth, I was Lightning traveling toward Thunder Bay.
Who knew. Who knew I would continue on to Lake Champlain, the watery line between New York and Vermont, camping in the rain, my mind as misty foggy as my days. My words lost to tell this story. Clouds filling my eyes, spilling over as tears, again, and again, and again. By the time I reached Boston, my daughter hugged me with love, and concern. I stayed extra days, sleeping in, not leaving her apartment. It was not like me at all. By the time I headed back west, I was convinced something was terribly wrong. I was not okay.
Back in New Mexico, I tried to shrug it off. Rest. Help my son with his projects. But residual trance-like moments, echoes of the Vulture moment, still came over me unexpectedly, like sudden squalls of a silent storm, of white stillness, intense focus on the tiniest detail of anything, a crabapple on a tree, its veined leaves, the exact color of magenta against the shimmering green. These incidents scared me, scared my son. Worried my daughter when she visited. When the psychic clouds washed over me at such times, I could not come up with words. Just the intensity of vision, and of deep connection in the moment. And tears when I tried to understand, to explain, a shaking feeling in my core.
What was happening? It was so out of character. None of it made sense. Are these small strokes? I wondered after the fact. Seizures? A strong knowing came over me, that I needed to go home to Colorado. I didn’t know why. But I had to go to Colorado.
So “home” I went, nearly a year to the date from the Vulture, back to my mother with Alzheimer’s and my sister finishing the manuscript of her first book. A year of feeling myself utterly lost, afraid and unsure, strangely and unpredictably emotional. I couldn’t write, couldn’t initiate that process.
No words would come. Simultaneously, the very part-time job that provided my housing ended. It all ended.
I ended. My identity was thoroughly shattered.
In Colorado, jobless, directionless, broke and broken, I went to the community clinic where I used to refer my homeless clients. My sister came along to help explain, and to listen and take notes. She could see I was not myself. Her response — of kindness, support, encouragement, and love — let me gather some of my shredded energy. And the doctor was fantastic. She set up test after test, chasing down possible causes, ruling out … everything.
No stroke. No seizures. No tumors, no cancers. My heart was fine. My bloodwork was terrific.
What could explain my out-of-body experience, my sudden onset of anxiety, my struggles with word retrieval? Maybe a hormonal imbalance? But I’d tried replacement estrogen back in 2011, after my cancer-related hysterectomy (ovaries too), at the surgeon’s urging. It had been a disaster. My skin tore open in bleeding wounds, and the hormones made me feel half sick. I quit and never looked back. Now, after 14 years of peace and stability, hormones?
My chart noted my “they/them” pronouns and “nonbinary” gender. I told the doctor I’d naturally had high testosterone levels all my life. All the symptoms: wildly irregular periods, small breasts, bad acne, low voice, muscular shoulders and legs, thick hair including a mustache and goatee that I shaved daily since my early 20s — plus a fierce temper and a robust sex drive.
“Do you think I might be low on testosterone? Do you think my … cognitive issues … might improve?”
“I do.” She nodded sincerely. And she wrote me a prescription for testosterone gel.
After one month, she asked how I was tolerating it.
“Great,” I responded. “Maybe it’s just a placebo effect, it’s probably too early to tell, but I’m feeling … a little clearer, in my thinking?” The over-emotionalism had calmed and faded away.
After three months, I was myself again. My mind, my moods, my energy. My son knew I was doing better when I could crack jokes. I thought of a line from the 1995 movie A Walk In The Clouds, where Anthony Quinn is Don Pedro Aragon, the strong-willed patriarch of a proud Spanish-American family. He is chastised about his health habits, and retorts, “What the hell do the doctors know … about the needs of a man’s soul?”
Apparently, in my case, quite a lot. I had never considered hormone replacement therapy, just like I had never considered gender-alignment surgery, especially after my horrible reaction to anesthesia with the hysterectomy. That altered my cognition for sure, and it had taken me a full two years to recover. Mostly recover.
No thank you. This body was my body, pushed to its limits many times, but familiar after all these decades. I was simply … me.
And yet, I knew I was completely different now. But this wasn’t about the testosterone.
This was about the Vulture.