It's raining, the cold is the kind of cold you retreat into a warm snuggly bed from but for some reason I'm sitting on a couch next to an open sliding glass door absorbing it all in. It's been a hell of a week and I find myself struggling to approach an entry, even though I know I need to do one.
Snippets of conversations, shattering glass and the sickening crunch of tortured metal being bent into directions it was never meant to go fill my head. I'm trying so hard to forget that I don't know where I can possibly begin.
"God dammit it all to hell.. I'm sick of this shit!"
I fling my bag down onto my bed, fuming. I've arrived to my hotel in Brisbane from my 8:30pm Sunday flight to a room without should've-been-there-car-keys. It's happened again, irrespective of the fact that the workcar was prearranged to be dropped here on Friday, and by now I'm getting pretty sure it's a deliberate insult that's being played by a store manager who is supposed to know better.
After a few deep breaths I decide to hire a car because I have an early meeting first up tomorrow morning and I won't have time to collect the work car. I'll charge it to the store and hopefully deal with the 2 squarking birds confronting me with 1 stone.
I have a pre-existing account with an existing car rental agency and I use this to hire a car, feeling considerably better once I've done so. I'm still angry and the darkness curls tightly around me, but I've got a solution now and the rest will be a battle for tomorrow.
After unpacking I get into bed and quickly kill the lights, I'm tired from the flight and Monday looms large.
Waking the next morning I iron and then shrug into my work suit, adjusting a few things here and there as the first meeting is a key one. A small, subconscious sigh, one of thousands, escapes my lungs as I smooth the shirt down over my chest.
A tie, soon I'll be able to properly wear a tie without these.. things.. getting in the way.
I call for a taxi, shoot across town and pick up my rental car. The day goes smoothly, the meetings go particularly well and aside from some further unpleasantness with the aforementioned manager, it's a successful day.
It's my last week in Brisbane for a while and I'm loading up my calendar to moosh as many people into face to face discussions about my impending transition as I can. Some already know, most don't, so it's going to be an interesting next few days for me.
David and Jenna - check.
Salvie - check.
Christian and Kat - can't make it, previous commitments.
Gavin - check.
Nimer - check.
The work day is over and I'm on the way to Lonestar for dinner with David and Jenna - the first metaphorical cabs off the "Nye's fun transition talks" rank.
"Don't forget that you have to call Dr Jayadev Wednesday.."
I smile as Mel's voice echoes in my head, privately basking in the warm glory of the knowledge that, everything going well, I could be booked in for my 'T' shot sooner rather than later.
I arrive at Lonestar for the dinner with Dave and Jenna, which goes well as I stumble my way through an incredibly well cooked and tasty steak AND explaining GID/Transition/Next Steps/etc etc.
The steak is only a little cold by the time I'm finished.
They both respond brilliantly well and we retire from the steakhouse for custom Icecream from Cold Rock. The night ends and we retire to our cars for the trip home.
Only.. I don't go back to the hotel.
It's one of those nights.. y'know? One of those nights where the skies are a rich, crisp velvet tapestry of glittering shards of star-streaked magic. One of those nights where the air stings your nose with the oncoming whisper of Autumn. One of those nights that hands-and-knees BEGS you to hit the open highway and blast away the rigors of the day.. and the mundanity of life in general in the muted glow of the dashboard lights.
My rental car happened to be an Audi A4 turbo. Glistening. Powerful. Full of pride.
And it was one of those nights.
It happened when I decided to turn back around to head back to Brisbane, roughly half an hour after setting out from the dinner. A judgement in which I believed oncoming traffic to be a correctly safe distance away saw me T-boned at roughly 60kms an hour at an intersection locally famed for accidents and scattered with debris of previous impacts.
I write the above with as much emotional distance I can muster. It took me 3 sleepless nights and countless second/minutes of ridiculous stress levels smashing through the ceiling of what I believed to be my endurance threshold to get where I am now.
It's not the sound of the twisting metal and exploding airbags railing around me I can't get away from. It's not the smell of road-stripped tires and chalky white-powdered stiffling cling of the airbag inflators. Not the feeling of being flung sideways at speed and crunching back off a lightpole after the initial impact.
It's the fact that if the insurance assessors from the rental company find any way to pin this accident on me as careless, reckless or deliberate they will force me to pay for the FULL REPAIRS of the Audi.
Not the excess of their insurance. Not even the $330 damage liability reduction that I took out and additional protection package I paid extra dollars for.
The. Whole. Cost. Of. Repairs. To. The. Audi.
It could wipe out the money set aside for my chest operation. And that is what is causing the sleepless nights and stomach-churning stress.
Everyone around me who knows has been as comforting as they know how in their own unique ways. Peter has sledged me (while offering solid advice), the owner of the company I work for has offered to try and find 'some way to work it out', people who work in my team have called relatives who are insurance lawyers.
The problem I face is that I won't know either way for at least two weeks while they sort this out.
And that's absolutely killing me.
First blog post
8 years ago
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