Tomorrow starts the one-week countdown until my eighth MRI scan and hopefully the obtaining of some useful results which might conceivably explain what is happening to my body at this point. It's frankly beyond bizarre to be in this situation. Until the beginning of this year I was merely trying to solicit medical help to answer questions about my intersex condition. This year I'm trying to find answers to increasingly mystifying physical symptoms.
Trying to define what I'm seeing in the mirror at this point is pretty much impossible. Looks like a woman, sure, but also one who has all the outward signs of being pregnant including distended abdomen and linea nigra, yet supposedly without uterus and ovaries and without accessible vagina. Oh, and with a penis. It seems more like an amalgamation of multiple bodies than a singular one. Trying to think about it all too much merely makes me feel terrified of what might be growing inside my abdomen.
For more than a decade now I, as a novel medical experiment, have been growing and developing, with this year apparently as the culmination of all those efforts. What will happen next is anybody's guess. It was a bit touch-and-go when I tried to get medical help which would have disrupted the experiment, but with that risk averted, this year we should hopefully all be able to observe what happens to a body with this type of hermaphroditism when left untreated and undiagnosed for so long.
Once the experiment is over, hopefully the results from the post-mortem will be able to teach us so much more about the interactions between such disparate body configurations when they're forced to cooperate in a single body. The side-effects from this should be fascinating. It's a shame that I will not be around to observe the result of the experiment.
It may all sound bitter and melodramatic, yet after more than a decade of what amounts to either outright lying or complete incompetence (or both) on the side of physicians, I find it hard to not feel at least somewhat like I'm trapped in a Mengele-esque experiment, with its seemingly complete disregard for me as a human being and my general well-being as the psychological and physical suffering increases. For more than a decade now I have pushed away any sensations of discomfort and pain - whether physical of mental - and forced myself to go through just one more appointment, just one more test in the faint hope that maybe this time would bring the so hoped for release and freedom. This all in the knowledge that doing nothing can have severe consequences considering the possible medical complications for hermaphrodite conditions.
Said complications seem to have finally arrived this year, after suffering milder complications for much longer. I hope more than anything that they'll find something on the MRI scan and/or any subsequent tests which can help me and that they'll actually be honest and do their job. Informing me about their findings and plotting the best course to fix whatever is wrong.
I am not a medical curiosity. I am not a plaything for physicians and psychologists to poke and prod at, to then forget about. I'm a human being with feelings and the capacity to feel pain and distress. Maybe once this medical experiment ends I'll finally be able to actually feel like I am this human being. At this point in time, however, I'm trapped inside this dark cell, to be only briefly released for yet another experiment, only to be put back afterwards.
It is with such feelings of trepidation that I face next week's MRI scan. Will it just be another experiment or is this is a genuine attempt to help me? I wish to believe it's the latter, but bitter experience says it's always the former. I hope so dearly that it'll be wrong for just once.
Maya
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