Early last month in May, I started back on gender-affirming medication and care. I had been off my Spironolactone for over a year, hadn’t been on Estrogen for over 4 years. One of the reasons was being unable to afford healthcare, but the thing I didn’t ever talk about was I had been ordering online without a physician’s supervision. You can find a lot of online pharmacies, for a hefty price, willing to issue you a prescription and mail you your meds from foreign pharmacies. Let me be clear, you really, really, REALLY shouldn’t do this. But when you’re desperate like I was, and many others like me, you sometimes do things that you shouldn’t. I never wanted to encourage anyone to follow my path, so I stayed mum about the whole thing. Honestly, I’m lucky nothing detrimental happened. Today though, access to care is a lot easier than it was before. Here is my story from 2011 to 2021 about my history with HRT meds and the challenges in between.