I almost never answer the phone if I don’t know who’s on the other side— heck, I barely answer the phone when I do — but I had a feeling that this was the call I’d been waiting for all month. “Ms.…LaBelle?” I heard in a bored, feminine cadence. “I’m calling from Denver Health. You left us a message about starting hormone therapy?”
I pulled onto a patch of grass next to the road and tried to speak without a quiver in my voice. “Yes,” I said, before repeating myself in a slightly higher register. “I mean, I don’t have a primary care doctor yet, so I don’t know if I’d need a check-up first, but, um, yes. I’d like to speak to someone about HRT.”