Sometimes a girl’s gotta deal with the anxiety by writing some javascript.

There are three hard parts to to getting gender-affirming surgery: the first is getting an appointment and navigating the approval process—I’ve started a service journey blueprint that maybe I’ll share later (if anyone wants to work with me to make it presentable, that’d be pretty cool, too. The second is the recovery process, which includes nearly a month of bedrest and two more months of barely doing anything, including cooking. The third, of course is the wait while you panic over the first two going wrong as the pandemic evolves and people’s availability shift.

It often feels like everything is stuck with anything needed for forward progress is outside of my control.

So I had do something productive and make something—Scriptable surgery countdown widget for my ‘puter. You give it your timezone offset in ±HH:MM format, and it counts down to August 29. It won’t be more accurate than that since I won’t have an exact time until a couple weeks before surgery because the hospital won’t give the surgeon’s scheduler the time of day until then either.

But this is the thing that is hard for me—there is so much that is unknown—the time of surgery, who will help take care of me for the three months after, how that’s all going to be scheduled. Not to mention the state of the pandemic, the midterm election, my rights as a trans person or safety as an Asian woman in America.

And I know I have it good. I have a surgery date. I have a stable job, health insurance, and a roof that I know will be over my head. There have been times in my life where all of those have been up in the air. I live on a predominately POC part of town where my neighbors know to look out for me. My friends love me, my family accepts me, my partners are around to support me. I have a level of safety and comfort that not every trans person enjoys. But having experienced precarity, I will always fear how near precarity could be.

For now, all I can do is redirecting some of that anxiety and frustration writing bad code to tell me that surgery is one-hundred-fourty-six days away.