An Accident


They said I was unconscious for 10 or 15 minutes. Out-cold, in a crumpled fetal position on asphalt still damp from an early morning fog off the San Francisco Bay, while a crowd of my co-workers gathered, curious to see what had happened. Outside their growing circle, my mountain bike lay, taxi-cab yellow against the dull-gray pavement, its knobby tires slowly spinning down. It was relatively undamaged from the accident that had left me with a concussion, fractured arm, sprained wrist and patchy map of road-rash across my body.

I came to slowly, confused. I’d been dreaming, which made me think at first that I was home in bed. But the voices I heard above and around me didn't fit. One voice in particular, hoarse with excitement, broke through my haze.

"I looked up, yeah, and I saw this guy flying through the air! And he landed and I expected him to get up, but he didn't. He didn't get up…he just lay there, not moving. So I ran over…"

The voice receded again, as if down a tunnel, and my focus shifted to the cold, lumpy surface beneath my back, which resolved abruptly into gravel and asphalt. My heart started thumping as a picture popped into my mind--bicycle handlebars, and beneath them, a fat, off-road tire sunk deep in a roadbed rail-groove. On my final approach to work, outside the gate to Bayer’s Biotech facility in Berkeley, California, I’d tried to cross railway tracks to skirt a double-parked semi-trailer truck. As my tire encountered the wet tracks, however, my bike had jerked beneath me and without warning, slipped into the groove. A split-second later, wheels locked tight, it had stopped dead.

But the guy flying through the air couldn't be me. I'd just had my first shot of testosterone a week before. Fellow Bayer employees all knew me as a woman--a short-haired, cross-dressing odd sort of woman, true, but a woman nonetheless. That I was actually a female-to-male transsexual—or "ftm"—just beginning transition was as yet unknown. No coworker would use male pronouns to refer to me.

But the driver of the double-parked truck might. The man with the excited voice might be him, in which case, the guy he was referring to could be me. Flying through the air.

There was no escaping it: I must be lying in the road. Had been for a bit of time, it seems. Who—if any—of my coworkers had seen the accident? More importantly, who had heard the truck driver call me "he?" With any luck, they’d just think they’d misheard. Or that the truck driver was befuddled. Slowly, I opened my eyes and looked up…to see a circle of Bayer employees five or six people deep surrounding me.

Shit! I clenched my eyes shut again. Heart racing, fighting nausea, I rolled over onto my side, struggling against the tangle of my bike-bag. All I wanted to do was escape the stares of those 30 or 40 people. Nothing else mattered. Not my head, which was pounding. Not the palms of my hands, scraped raw, nor my arm, which screamed in pain.

Somehow, I managed to get up onto my hands and knees and crawl a few feet—no one tried to stop me—before once again collapsing. Face down, fighting not to throw up, it occurred to me then that I might have a neck or spinal injury and should not have moved at all. The full extent of my predicament began to sink in. Still, so strong was my desire to flee the stares of coworkers who knew me as a woman but had heard the truck driver call me "he," I would have kept on crawling if I’d been able to.

Instead, I rolled over on the pavement and stared up at the sky, avoiding the eyes of my coworkers, wishing more than anything I could turn back the clock and walk, not ride my bicycle over those damned railroad tracks.

The ambulance arrived. Two paramedics jumped out and knelt on either side of me. One immediately immobilized my head and neck while the other checked my pulse and looked me over for injuries.

"What's your name?" He asked, shining a penlight into my eyes.

"Brynn C."

"What’s the date?"

"March 2nd, 1994."

The two men worked over me, untangling my bike bag, packing sandbags around my head and neck, and immobilizing my left arm. That was when I heard someone tell them I'd been unconscious for more than 10 minutes and really began worrying I might have caused permanent damage by trying to crawl away.

"Who's the president?" The EMT broke into my reverie, leaning over me. They really ask that? I thought before answering, "Bill Clinton."

His next question brought me up short. "Are you on any medications?"

Medications? Testosterone was a "medication," wasn’t it? I stared up into the inquisitive faces of my coworkers. Did I need to mention it? Would testosterone's side-effects be of any concern under the circumstances? My mind raced.

A concussion, which I must have suffered to lose consciousness for 10 minutes, causes the brain to swell, right? And testosterone leads to water retention and weight gain when first injected by a female-bodied person. So, could water retention worsen a concussion?

"Are you on any medications we need to know about?" The EMT repeated his question, his tone more insistent. In my state of mind, everyone in the surrounding wall of people seemed to be hanging on my reply. If I said, "Yes, testosterone," word would spread like wildfire, and Bayer's several thousand employees would all know by day's end that I was a transsexual. Hardly the way I'd planned to come out.

"Are you?" The paramedic asked again, his face looming.

"I.… I'm..." Suddenly, my stupor cleared enough for me to see the simple solution. "I’ll tell you later, ok?" I said in a low voice.

The EMT hesitated just a beat. Then, "Sure," he said, and the two of them finished strapping me to a body board and loading me into the ambulance.

Having never ridden in an ambulance before, I'd thought it would be exciting. The wailing siren, flashing lights, the drama of being the center of all that attention. Well, it was anything but. My condition wasn’t serious enough to warrant a siren, it seemed. A blessing I failed to appreciate at the time, so intent was I on not throwing up, as every bump in the road, every corner, every time we accelerated or braked, I prayed for unconsciousness.

"I feel sick," I finally managed to croak, but the words fell monumentally short of describing my misery.

"Hey, Joe, ease up a bit," the EMT spoke through the partition to the driver. Then he turned back to me. "So, what about those medications?"

Ah, jeeze, how was I going to tell this young guy I was on testosterone? That, in essence, I was one of those?

I took a deep breath, then blurted out, "I'm a transsexual and I had my first shot of testosterone a week ago. I don't know if it affects a concussion or not, but I thought you should know."

There was the slightest of pauses. Then, "That's cool," the paramedic said and wrote something down on his clipboard.

I felt so exposed. The silence lengthened and out of nervousness, I started talking. "Have you ever, ah, seen or dealt with anyone like me before?"

"Nope." The guy looked at me over the edge of the clipboard. "But that's okay." Then his face creased in a smile. "We're trained to deal with all sorts of things. Don't sweat it."

Gratitude washed over me. I was so thankful that he wasn’t put off. I was eternally grateful, in fact, that he was willing to treat me like a fellow human being. I exuded gratitude as I went back to fighting nausea, bouncing over potholes and careening around corners, until the ambulance arrived at the Oakland Kaiser emergency room.

Where, in short order, my composure met with a series of setbacks. A quick assessment by the triage nurse relegated me to an out-of-the-way section of a corridor. Still strapped to the stretcher, my body began to fail me. I started shivering uncontrollably, the room began spinning, my stomach was heaving and, worst of all, I had to relieve myself. Immediately. And they hadn't left me with a call button or any way to signal for assistance.

So I called out, not too loud. "Nurse?" Then a bit louder, "Nurrse!" Images of patients clamoring for attention in third-world hospitals flitted through my mind's eye. At the moment, though, the only thing more humiliating than yelling for help was the prospect of losing control of my bowels while strapped to the stretcher. Pretty soon I was shouting at the top of my lungs, "Nuuurrrsse!"

A white-haired, grandmotherly woman in a white uniform—the quintessential nurse—finally appeared, and I realized my ordeal was just beginning. Defecating into a bedpan while several nurses looked on was bad enough. But there was also the issue of the packer.

That’s right, I was packing—not in a suitcase, in my briefs. My ftm brothers and I had devoted an inordinate amount of time to devising a sort of handmade prosthesis, to give heft and a bulge to our trousers. After much trial and error, we'd settled on a fabrication of condoms filled with hair-gel and sewn inside a cut-off section of pantyhose. The "packer" looked quite lifelike beneath the fabric of pants. Exposed, it looked ridiculous, if not downright obscene.

And I had one in my briefs.

The urgency of the situation gave me little time to deliberate. I briefly considered putting my hand down my pants and sneaking the packer out before they undressed me. But then, where would I put it?

With seemingly no other choice, I came out under duress for the second time that day. "Ah, excuse me, but before we go any further, I have to tell you something," I started.

The nurse was down by my feet, pulling a blanket off my body. She paused and looked up expectantly. "Yes, dear? What is it?"

It's hard, that’s what it is. I sighed, then plunged on. "I'm a transsexual," I said. God how I hated that word! But nobody knew what ftm meant. "I'm female-to-male and I'm wearing a…a thing in my pants. It's kind of embarrassing and I want to take it out…"

"Oh, that's okay, dear!" The nurse actually chuckled and kindly patted my knee. "We've seen everything here. Don't you worry about it a bit. Diane?!" She called to another nurse. "Just a second, she'll bring you something to put it in." A younger woman appeared, disappeared, then returned with a large, white plastic bag.

"Here you go." While the first nurse finished removing my shoes, the other held open the bag. I reached down awkwardly with my unbroken right arm, pulled the packer from my underwear, and shoved it quickly out of sight into the bag. The nurse then stashed the bag discretely under my stretcher. The whole thing, disclosure to concealment, took just a couple of minutes, and neither nurse displayed the slightest unease or prurient curiosity. They were true professionals, for which I once again felt excessively grateful.

There remained the ordeal of the bedpan. Suffice it to say, only dire necessity made the humiliating feat possible. The tact of the nurses salvaged a modicum of my dignity. Still, by the time I was cleaned up, tucked under the blanket again and wheeled off to X-ray, I'd had quite enough of this hospital experience, thank you very much! Yet it would be hours before I’d eventually be released to go home.

I daresay, my experience would have been much more trying had I been farther along in my transition that day. As it was, after only one week on testosterone, my voice was still high-pitched and feminine, my face and body relatively hairless. Despite the fact I felt like a man, I still looked totally like a woman. With no surgeries, a doctor or nurse would find exactly what they expected beneath my clothing.

That wasn’t true the next time I found myself, by chance, in a hospital.