What the Actual Fuck Just Happened to Me
I have just endured a level of pain over a sustained period that I’ve never experienced in my life. I’ve been to hell and back.
It’s Bank Holiday Monday after Easter, and I’m sitting here trying to piece together what the last two weeks actually were.
Even now, it already feels unreal. Like something that happened to somebody else that I’ve somehow inherited the memory of. But it was me. And it was, without question, the most horrific physical experience of my life.
I have just endured a level of pain over a sustained period that I’ve never experienced in my life. I’ve been to hell and back.
I’ve had surgery. I’ve woken up in agony before. I know what pain is supposed to feel like. This was different. This was relentless. The kind of pain that doesn’t come in waves, doesn’t give you a breath, doesn’t allow you a single second to think clearly. It just sits on you, crushing you, minute after minute, hour after hour, until time itself starts to collapse.
And the worst part? I didn’t know if it was finished. I didn’t know if I was at the peak of it, or if this was just the beginning of something that was going to get far, far worse.
The Week Before
Just days before, everything had been perfect.
I’d entered a 170km cycle (Remember last week, you were holding my feet to the fire over my training). My training was dialled in, yoga every morning, a proper class in the evening, weights four times a week.
I’d just spent three solid days finishing my gym: up and down ladders, painting, installing lights, obsessing over every detail until it looked exactly how I wanted it. On Thursday I trained properly: upper body session, then a short 18K ride. Nothing crazy. I logged everything, hit my macros, updated my training diary, and went to bed with that quiet satisfaction you get when your life feels genuinely on track.
How It Started
When I woke up Friday morning, there was a pain in my right ankle.
It felt like tendonitis. Annoying, but familiar. A younger version of me would have trained through it. This version didn’t. I thought: be sensible. Sit down. Work. Let it settle. I actually felt quite proud of that decision.
By Saturday morning, it had escalated. The pain was sharper, deeper, and when I looked down, I could see the swelling not subtle, that slightly unnatural, inflated look, like something under the skin was pushing outward. I took a picture, compared it to my other foot, and felt that first flicker of unease. Not panic. Just the sense that something wasn’t quite right.
Still, I adapted. I moved to the sofa, picked up Colonel Chesterton, and told myself this was fine. People sit on sofas. People rest. I did plan to paint some wardrobes this weekend, but that’s now off. Let’s just settle into a marathon of Netflix and get better. This will pass.
It didn’t pass.
By the time the afternoon came, I noticed my right knee beginning to swell. I dismissed it, circulation, lying down too long, something like that. But by evening, getting off the sofa had become complicated. Not impossible yet. Just difficult. Painful in a way that made you hesitate before moving.
And then, without any clear boundary, without any moment you could point to and say “this is when it changed”, everything collapsed into something else entirely.
There is no Saturday night. There is no clean transition into Sunday. There is just one continuous stretch of time where the pain locks in completely. Not spiking. Not ebbing. Just constant a solid, unbroken 10 out of 10, all the time. I was swearing, shouting, trying to breathe through it the way you’re supposed to. Deep breaths. Slow exhales. It didn’t work. The pain didn’t care.
Then I had that strange feeling. Oh my God, is my left leg starting to go as well? Am I making this up? Something isn’t right. It’s starting to hurt. Maybe it’s just that I’m putting all the load on it.
I hadn’t eaten since the morning. I hadn’t drunk anything. And I was staring at a very simple, very brutal problem: if this keeps progressing, I won’t be able to get to the toilet.
That thought changes everything.
I tried to move. What should have been a few seconds, just getting off the sofa and into the kitchen became a full, drawn-out, agonising ordeal. Dragging myself on my arms, inch by inch, stopping constantly, breathing, swearing, trying not to scream too loudly because even tensing my body made it worse.
It took me about 25 minutes to cover four metres.
The whole time, I was trying not to land in the little messes Chesterton had left on the floor, completely unsupervised for hours. I started to feel a bit like Tommy in Trainspotting. His flat descending into chaos while he lay there helpless, the word “toxoplasmosis” just looping around in my head in that Glaswegian accent.
I made it to the kitchen eventually, I was really starting to get quite upset and tearful. I got the goat’s milk out for Chesterton, he has a little puppy kibble with goat’s milk, normally microwaved. The microwave is up high. There was no way I could reach it. “Sorry, Colonel. You’re having it crunchy today.” I gave him a big portion, spilled milk on the floor, and just left it there. Every movement had a cost now. Every reach, every shift of weight had to be justified against the pain it would cause.
I started planning. Not calmly, in that slightly panicked, survival-mode way where your brain tries to solve problems you never imagined you’d have. Water. Toilet. Towels. I slid a pan across the floor toward the sofa. There is no way on earth I could get to a tap, or even get to the water dispenser of the fridge, it was too high. I know, there is a bottle of alcohol-free Prosecco in the fridge. I’m going to pop that and just swig it. Forty minutes, all of that. Then I dragged myself back to the sofa and collapsed, knowing really knowing that I might now be stuck there.
Time became formless. No meals, no routines, no breaks in the day. Just pain.
And then, slowly, I became aware of an escalation. My left leg. The same deep, blooming inflammation that had taken over the right side was arriving there too, I hadn’t imagined it. Quietly at first, then unmistakably. Both legs now. And the fear that arrived with it was specific and cold ”this is something moving through me. Something I don’t understand. And I have no idea where it’s going to stop.”
The practical reality caught up quickly. I was going to need the toilet, and I already knew I couldn’t make that journey again. I had tried to will myself as hard as I could to move enough to use the pan that I’d slid across the floor,, over and over but I couldn’t, I couldn’t lift myself. There was no way. It was excruciating. So I looked around the room not as a place I lived in, but as a set of resources. And then I remembered the puppy pads.
Chesterton’s little training pads.
Luckily, there were two in arm’s reach of the sofa that I could just about hook over if I used an empty Coke bottle. It took me about ten minutes just to get one into position, millimetre by millimetre, stopping constantly, breathing, swearing, every tiny shift of my hips a negotiation with my own body. Eventually, I got it under me, and then I did the only thing I could do.
There’s no dignity in that moment. There’s no way to frame it nicely. It’s just necessity.
I used the towels to clean up as best I could. And then, lying there after, one genuinely absurd thought surfaced through everything else: “This is the one time a penis would actually have been useful“. Those empty Coke bottles right there. The irony was not lost on me. The one time you need it, you haven’t got it.
At some point I called the out-of-hours doctor.
He asked if I could come in. I said, very plainly, “I can’t move an inch.” He said they couldn’t send anyone. Too late. They were going off duty.
I hung up and stared at the phone. There’s a particular kind of loneliness in that moment. Not dramatic. Not cinematic. Just the quiet, flat realisation that there is no one coming. Not yet. You are, for now, entirely on your own.
And here’s where I need to be honest about something that most people won’t fully understand.
Any rational person would have called 999 by now. I know that. I knew it then.
But I couldn’t. Not yet.
Because I had a tiny bit of grey hair on my chin and lip. I know, I’m pathetic and I’m vain, and I’m so sensitive about these things.
I’d had an appointment on Tuesday with wonderful Nadine in London, eight hours of electrolysis to deal with the remaining bits that had been left to grow deliberately for this session. You could visibly see it, that bit of grey stubble. I’d let it grow for a reason, and I couldn’t undo it, and I couldn’t let a paramedic see me like this.
I know how that sounds. I know. But this is the reality of being transgender that nobody talks about. It’s all very easy to go out into the world when you’re put together, when you’ve got your makeup on and your hair done and you’re presenting yourself on your terms. But lying there, unwashed, unshaven, the same underwear on for days, completely exposed, completely unable to manage any of it, that’s a different thing entirely. That’s raw.
I tried to get to the bathroom and get the razor. I genuinely tried. So many times. The pain was too much. So instead I lay there, bargaining with myself, while my mother and friends texted in the background telling me to call an ambulance. I grabbed a sports top from beside me and tied it around my head like a makeshift scarf, as if that would help. The instinct doesn’t switch off, even then.
Eventually and I mean eventually, edging into Tuesday now I admitted it to myself.
I can’t do this on my own anymore.
I called my friend who lives 30 mins away. When she answered, I didn’t soften it. “I’m in a bad way. I can’t move. I need help”. She had a medical appointment herself that morning and said she’d come as soon as she could. I don’t think I’ve ever been so relieved to hear a key in a front door. By the time she arrived, I was in agony. I was starving, and the dehydration was starting to do very strange things to me. I was starting to feel dizzy.
She walked in with Coca-Cola, an enormous Subway, crisps. She fed Chesterton. She sorted things. She’d also brought Nurofen Plus, you’re supposed to take two. I took five. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. And over the next 24 hours I took considerably more than the recommended amount.
The most important thing she did was take Chesterton with her. Until that moment, some part of me was still telling myself I was managing. When she left with him, that illusion dropped entirely. I wasn’t managing. I was being looked after. And I needed that.
Alone again, but differently alone now, there was a thread connecting me to the outside world.
The pain, though, continued. Unchanged. And with more fluid and food in me, the toilet problem came roaring back. I spent hours trying to manage it. Talking myself through it. “You can do this. Yu can get on the pan. Just a little movement.” Every attempt failed. Eventually there was nothing left. No towels. No workarounds. No next step. I literally pee’d myself.
My friend came back the next day. I said: “I need you to pack me a bag. I need the option to go to hospital”. She packed the most chaotic bag imaginable, not her fault, I gave terrible instructions. A toothbrush. Some shoes for the journey home. A jacket. One pair of jeans. One nightdress. A stack of pads, for reasons I still don’t entirely understand. And a mirror. Of course, a mirror.
She also brought an enormous amount of food, sausage rolls, sandwiches, crisps, doughnuts, more Coke. I drank all of the Coke. Here we go again! I needed the liquid.
And then the pain changed. I could feel it spreading into my right hip. I cannot continue like this.
I called the out-of-hours doctor again. This time they put me through to a Doctor. I explained everything. The doctor didn’t hesitate.
“Call an ambulance. Now. 999”
I asked, almost stupidly, “should I really? I haven’t had a heart attack or anything.”
“You should have called one days ago.”
999
I hung up. And for the first time in my life, I dialled 999. I have never in my life dialled for an ambulance, for myself or anybody else. I felt embarrassed, but I did it.
The woman on the other end was lovely. Genuinely lovely. I’m welling up now writing this. She said: “You should have called us days ago, love. You really are in a mess”. I said, “I am. I can’t look after myself. I can’t do anything.” She told me they’d send someone as soon as they could. I said it didn’t matter how long, you’re coming, that’s enough. And when I put the phone down, for the first time in days, I felt something I hadn’t felt at all: relief. Not because anything had changed physically. The pain was exactly the same. But because I knew that, at some point, this was going to end.
Two hours passed. Then three. She called me back every hour to check in a human voice, a thread. Then she said she was upgrading the call. “You’re in a bad way”. I said, “thank you.”
Around eleven at night, I saw the lights. Flashing outside, coming up the drive. And even now, thinking about it, I can feel that moment. That shift from waiting to being saved.
They tried the door. My front door has a trick to it, you have to jiggle the key just right and I’m lying there shouting, “keep jiggling, it’ll open, you just have to get it right.” There’s a vague panic. Dear God, what if they can’t open the door? Eventually it opened, and in came two medics, calm and direct and professional. I said immediately: “I can’t move. I’m in a mess.”
They assessed quickly. The trolley couldn’t get through the hall, abgles too tight. We tried the back door. No path for the trolley. Which meant only one thing: I had to get myself out.
I asked if they could drag me by my arms. Not allowed. It had to be under my own steam.
For just a second, that felt like the end. And then something else kicked in. Not strength exactly. Resolve. Because now there was an end point. I thought: “I will suffer this, whatever it takes, to get there.”
They built a little ramp from cushions at the edge of the sofa. I started slowly, arms only, screaming, stopping, breathing, moving again. My knees, which I hadn’t properly looked at in days, were like huge bulbs. My ankles looked like a 95-year-old whose joints had simply given up. It took about 25 minutes to cover the distance from the sofa to the front door.
When I reached it, there was a small drop down to where they’d positioned the trolley. I lay there for a moment, gathering everything I had left.
Then I said it: “Fuck it. Let’s do this.”
And I hauled myself onto the trolley.
The moment I landed on it, it was over. Not the pain. Not the situation. But the part where I was alone in it. That part ended right there. The part where all the effort had to come from me was done. I could surrender.
Hospital
They took me to the Mercy Hospital in Cork. Within a short time of arriving, they understood what was needed. Morphine. A lot of it. IV lines, fluids, anti-inflammatories. And then that release that sudden, almost unreal shift from constant, unbearable pain to something else. Not comfort. Distance. Like the pain had been pushed back just far enough to let me breathe.
I remember thinking: “this is what it must feel like when they forget the morphine after surgery.” That raw, exposed nerve of pain. That’s what I’d been living inside for days. And now, finally, it was being lifted.
A lovely doctor came and went, again and again looking at results, thinking out loud, genuinely baffled. “I’m scratching my head”, he said. “I don’t know what’s happened to you”. Which was both reassuring and unsettling at exactly the same time. They tested everything: MRIs, ultrasounds, X-rays, blood after blood after blood. Rheumatology. Endocrinology. The call was sent out to anywhere that might have an angle on it. Eventually, after about 12 hours, a consultant arrived and said, very plainly: “My best guess is reactive arthritis. But we don’t know the cause yet.” A guess. After all of that. A best guess.
They moved me to a ward. St. Catherine’s.
The “Mixed” Ward
I’m going to be honest about what happened next, because it matters.
The ward is a long corridor with rooms off either side and a nurse’s station at the centre. Behind that station is an acute section higher monitoring, more intervention. That’s where they put me. A mixed room. I didn’t think much of it at first. I was just relieved to be somewhere safe.
The steroids they’d started me on were extraordinary. By the next morning there was an unmistakeable shift. I asked for a Zimmer frame. The nurse looked cautious, but she brought one. I looked at it like it was a test. Gripped it. Took a breath. Stood.
I fell back onto the bed the first time. I got up again. And then I walked, slowly, shakily, to the edge of the room. Sat down. Got up again at lunchtime and walked further: out of the room, past the nurse’s station, into a chair in the corridor, where I sat smiling for ten minutes, genuinely smiling, because I could see a way out.
I should mention, there were two men in that acute room with me. I’m not going to overstate it, but they were uncomfortable. Cork old boys, getting along nicely with each other, and here’s this English transgender woman inserted into their space. I could feel it. Didn’t like it. Thought, as I always do in those moments: “well fuck you, your issue, not mine, boys. I couldn’t give a damn.”
And then I kept walking. Past the rooms on the left of the nurse’s station. All women. Past the rooms on the right. All men. I stood at the desk, breathing hard over the Zimmer frame.
Should I say something? And then my Stevie Tourette’s kicks in. I’m looking at myself from out of my body, and oh boy, I’m saying it. I always do. I can’t keep my mouth shut. “Why am I in that room in the middle?”
“It’s a mixed acute room.”
“I’m not acute. So why? It makes even less sense.”
He told me to speak to admissions. “Fine, YOU raise it!!”
I walked away from the desk, visibly upset and angry, with a sense of purpose. I was half convinced I was going to walk off the ward and not come back. Then I realised something, I wasn’t even using the Zimmer frame. I’d picked it up and was carrying it like a suitcase.
A couple of the nurses, who were lovely, started laughing. “Stevie, you don’t need that thing, do you? Just leave it there, we’ll come and get it.”
I went straight to the ward manager’s office. “I want to leave. And I want to know who put me in that room and why.” She didn’t deflect. She listened, and then she said something I won’t forget: “Somebody has been cowardly.” I told her I was fully transitioned, GRC and everything. She said: “That shouldn’t have happened.” I said I wasn’t making a formal complaint. She’d already handled it properly, in that moment, and that mattered. She moved me immediately, no delay, straight into the women’s ward.
Because let’s be honest about what that mixed room was. It was nobody wanting to make the call. Nobody wanting to take responsibility for the little tranny. So they put me somewhere in the middle and hoped nobody would notice. “Cowardly” was exactly the right word.
The Women’s Ward
The women’s ward was a different world entirely.
There was that initial moment, of course. A glance. Who’s this? You can always feel it. It didn’t last long. Within a day we were chatting like we’d known each other for ages, even the woman beside me, eighty or so, who had almost certainly never knowingly met someone like me before.
There was a woman across from me who was very ill. I won’t give details, it’s not mine to share, but at one point she stood up, right in front of me. Her eyes suddenly rolled back into her head. I watched her legs give way beneath her, her whole body just collapsing, and she went down hard, hitting the floor like a sack of potatoes.
It was awful. Properly frightening.
Before I even had time to think, I was out of the bed and hobbling as fast as I could down the corridor, shouting for nurses, shouting for doctors. They came running.
That moment told me something. Days before, I couldn’t move at all. Now I was moving, acting, helping someone else.
I also met a woman who turned out to be a lesbian, waiting on biopsy results for what might be lung cancer. I thought at first she was a bit of a mouthy Dubliner. She was nothing of the sort, warm, direct, real. She got me completely. We talked loads.
Eventually they said I could go home. Heavy steroids. A bag full of medication. No definitive answer yet, but enough stability to leave.
Home
Walking back into the house was surreal.
It smelled stale, closed-in, a mixture of things that hadn’t been dealt with for days. I stood there for a moment, just taking it in. This was where all of that had happened. In this room. In that two-foot radius around the sofa.
I washed my hair first. Standing under the water, feeling it run over my face, over my body, one of the most grounding experiences of the entire ordeal. It marked a line. Before, and after.
Then I cleaned. Slowly, carefully. The area around the sofa was the worst: wet urine soaked towels, used puppy pads, crumpled food wrappers, half-eaten sandwiches, crumbs from sausage rolls, empty bottles. Every single one of them a decision I’d made just to get through those hours. I just cleared it. One thing at a time. And as I did, something unexpected happened: there was no shame. None at all. Because I knew exactly why every one of those things was there. They weren’t signs of failure. They were evidence. Evidence that I’d survived it.
When it was all clean, tidy and restored, I lit the fire. I lit some candles. Everything seemed normal again, like nothing had ever happened. I sat down in front of the TV and just cried for a few minutes.
A little while later, my friend came round with Chesterton. And that moment was everything. He came bounding in happy, excited, completely unaware of any of it. Alive in that simple, uncomplicated way that only a puppy can be. I sat there just taking it in.
It’s two days later now.
My left foot looks almost normal. My right is getting there. My left knee the one with the meniscus tear is still sore, but improving. My right ankle is loosening. I’m hobbling. But I’m moving.
The steroids are doing their job. Aggressively. Decisively.
I’m waiting on blood results. They think it’s one of two things. Either a viral arthritis; you catch something, your body reacts in a catastrophic, strange way, and your joints explode into inflammation. Or something autoimmune, something external triggers your system, and your body turns on itself. I’m desperately hoping for the first. Because the second comes with a longer shadow. Management. Ongoing medication. Something that doesn’t fully go away.
They asked me everything. Thailand. What I did there. Who I was with. Sexual activity, exposure, risk. I told them everything. I even joked: “I don’t think there was any sexual activity in Thailand. I’d only had my vagina installed a few weeks earlier. It was a bit sore, to say the least. That’d be the last thing on my mind”.
But underneath all of the humour, underneath all of the logistics and the horror of it, there’s something else I want to say. Something that’s harder to articulate but matters enormously.
Being transgender adds a layer to something like this that is very difficult to explain unless you’ve lived it.
It’s easy to go out into the world when you’re prepared. When you’ve done your makeup. When your hair is right. When you’re presenting yourself on your terms. But lying in a hospital bed for days, no makeup, no control over any of it, completely exposed, that’s different. That’s raw. And it affected my decisions. It delayed me calling for help. It kept me suffering longer than I needed to.
I’m not ashamed of that. But I want to be honest about it.
Because something else happened too, something I didn’t expect. I saw myself. Properly. Without the layers. Without the preparation. Just me. And I didn’t look bad. One of the women in the ward kept staring at me and saying, “your fucking skin is ridiculous for your age. Look at your hands, look at your face. What the hell are you on?” I told her the truth: a facelift, a lot of skincare, and probably a bit of luck.
But underneath that, I was still me. Not the curated version. Not the presented version. Just me. And that mattered more than I expected.
So that’s what happened. That’s where I’ve been.
It was horrific. It was terrifying. It was lonely in a way I hope I never experience again. There were moments in that house where I genuinely didn’t know if it was going to get worse, if I was at the limit of it, or if I was about to cross into something I couldn’t come back from. That uncertainty is the part that stays with you.
But I got through it.
I’m here. I’m recovering. And I’m waiting for answers.
And whatever those answers are, one thing is certain: I will never let myself get that far gone again. Not alone. Not without picking up the phone sooner. Because no matter how strong you think you are, there is a point where you need someone else. And I reached it.
So glad you’re okay Stevie, I was screaming in my head “call an ambulance” until you mentioned your facial hair, as a fellow trans woman a huge wave of understanding washed over me, I have similar struggles and totally get it.