The referral that never was

Hello internet, long time no blog.

To be honest, not much has happened since the last entry. The only thing of any significance is that I moved house to live alone, which at least gives me almost complete independence and control over my dominion; and all it cost me is a ton of money and the constant fear that I could die here and no one would find me for days.

Coincidentally, that almost happened! A few weeks ago a chest infection I’d had for a couple of weeks came to a head and I ended up utterly unable to breathe one Sunday night. A quick call to 999 and 90 minutes of nebulised Salbutamol later I was doing better and—more importantly—instructed to see my GP as soon as possible the next day.

This would be my first appointment with the lovely Dr Pert. Everything turned out to be okay. I did indeed have quite a bad chest infection and was granted the antibiotics and an inhaler to show for it, but more importantly I noticed an LGBT flag in the good doctor’s office.

Now that’s interesting.

Fast forward to 16 days later and I’m at my follow up appointment to see if the drugs worked. The antibiotics ran out over a week ago and I’m still a little wheezy, but generally improved. Dr Pert confirmed the infection was all but gone and was just about to send me on my way…

But hey, my appointment was booked for ten minutes! And we’ve only used five!

“One other thing…” I mutter, remaining seated.

I told him that I had been trying to get a gender identity clinic referral for a couple of years, and had not heard anything back from my previous GP. He looked up my records, and it turns out they had referred me, just to entirely the wrong place. And after that the trail had ran entirely dry.

He asked a few questions, took down my new name and details (promising to change them on the surgery records if possible), and said he’d copy me into any communications with the GIC. Everything should go smoothly. After all, he’d done this before.

Result.

After years of waiting, confusion, and (to be honest) putting off having to come out to a doctor I’ve only just met, I’m finally off square one… for the second time. Let’s hope the system doesn’t fail me now.