To have peaks, one must have valleys. All who are strong have at one point in their lives been temporarily defeated. Weakness cannot be confused with the expression of intense emotion, no matter how cloudy that distinction may appear.

    These past two weekends have been cloudy with 100% chance of showers of tears. The first weekend, nothing in my abdomen was working properly. It had become so distended you could have sworn, looking at me, that I was pregnant. It came to a head when I began vomiting uncontrollably and I was whisked away to the hospital where I would spend the next several days. It sucked. It only got worse when a procedure to place an IV port in my chest so radically failed when the sedation refused to take hold and I felt the scalpel carve into my neck. Due to my tears and screams, I escaped with only a small knick and a horrific bruise on the right side of my chest. I went home defeated, but at least my abdomen was working again…

    The distension didn’t subside. By the following Saturday I was again unwell, but for different reasons. The fear that had taken hold as I had laid on that operating table, wide awake, subjected to molestation and pain, wanting to just give in right then, none of that subsided either. The pain wasn’t exactly bearable either. I was taking unbelievable levels of narcotics, but nothing seemed to dull any aspect of the agony. I became despondent, trying desperately to sleep my way through life. When that failed, I tried my best to ignore what was happening. But it came crashing down in the shower Saturday evening. The feeling of so desperately wanting to give in overcame everything else as I crouched in the tub, alone, naked, crying in the darkness of pain. As the water turned cold, I tried to put it out of my mind as I got out and began brushing my hair. But my efforts to ignore life failed within moments. My Mother found me, and I ran back to the solitude of the white walls in the shower, where I sat alone for another hour. When my joints and flesh could no longer bear the hard porcelain, I crawled out and laid in bed, forcing myself to sleep once more.

    The following morning my stomach revolted again; I couldn’t even keep water down. I stripped myself of all my pain medication, resolving to detoxify my system. I pulled off my narcotic patches, I put away my pills; I gritted my teeth.

    I couldn’t stay in hiding forever. Monday morning came as they always do, and it brought with it a visit to the Naval hospital at Bethesda. I woke that morning in agony; everything felt lifeless after so many days without food, without the medication my body had become so used to. Everything was despondent, every movement was climbing a mountain. But I pulled myself together, and as I sat downstairs waiting to leave, my body shook, my insides ached, my mind revolved around the pain and begged for relief. I starred at an image of a rock star in a magazine and I wondered why perfectly healthy individuals put themselves through this chemical hell for no reason. I knew this day would come eventually, everyone knew it was unavoidable; but I had no choice. I felt despicable and grotesque, inhuman and alone, all through no fault of my own. I loathed the dependence, while all at once experiencing no guilt, accepting the reasons for what had come to pass.

    I gave in, feeling at once weak and relieved as I licked at my narcotic lollipop. I was in the car, on my way to meet with the new doctor, who the following day would attempt to cut my chest open to insert the third IV port of my life. I wrestled with the fear and the memories of what had happened the last time on a few days before. But the narcotics, fresh in my clean system, numbed my mind as I felt the pain ebb away.

    The IV port was placed successfully on Tuesday. The doctors, nurses, and corpsmen of the Navy distracted me, easing me through the procedure with adequate sedation, pain management, kindness, and even an actual dance or two to make me smile. My doctor was remarkable, going so far out of his way to not only take care of me, but also to cheer me up. I may not have liked why I was there and what had to be done, but I loved them for handling it the way they did.

    Awaking this morning, this past weekend seems so far in the past. With my aching shoulder I returned to my cold white shower. But as I did so, I looked at myself in the mirror and contemplated the radical change in only a few days, in only a few weeks. When my body first began to grow, I would avoid the mirror, but not for the reasons you might think. I knew the body in the mirror wasn’t me; it was a reminder that I was sick, that something was wrong, and I didn’t want to face it. Once the sickness had a name, it was even worse. Staring down fate, looking at the effects of death. This time was different. My stomach, which was not so long ago distended, has returned to its more familiar proportion. My upper arms, which for years have been abnormal, are recovering from surgery and look almost normal for the first time in over a decade. My thighs, which have throughout my life been unnaturally shaped, are subsiding through surgery. I could see my shape, the shape I knew I should have had all along. I’m starting to look halfway normal, more naturally feminine, and I love it. It’s a small glimpse of what’s coming, what I’ll finally look like after all this years. It’s a beautiful feeling, getting my true physical self back.

    Things are changing, the surgeons tending to me are reshaping my image. But the most unexpected change of all could be seen just under my collarbone on the left side of my chest – the incision where the port had just been inserted beneath my skin, the bruising left behind. It had taken the shape of a near perfect crucifix over my heart.

    Every life goes through peaks and valleys; periods of happiness, and periods of great pain. Or, in other words, times when everything we know changes and we are reborn as something new and better than before. The process can be excruciating, but it is that agony that propels us forward to the new chapter of our lives. In this case, I have a symbol of such rebirth carved into my flesh, a reminder that I’m going through just that kind of transitory period. Although in my case, the change is not just emotional. My new self is being physically manufactured every four weeks in an operating room; my new self is being prepared for something as yet unknown. The trials of fear, depression, chemical dependence, anxiety and pain, they are simply levels of Hell that have yet to be conquered. I am cheating death; since when has that ever been easy? And yet at the end, such cheating will have made this rebirth all the sweeter. Peaks and valleys are inevitably human; every strength was at once a weakness. Thus is the process of rebirth, thus is the process of life.