Fear, Uncertainty And Doubt

Got a bit of a 'blah' moment a few hours ago. Someone on IRC said that she still thinks that I'm AIS, basically that my body is like this because of Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. For some reason it got stuck inside my head that this might be the case, so to ease my ponders I went to look at the Wikipedia page on it.

Suffice it to say that my condition doesn't match up at all, with neither gradation or phenotype. The fact that I have a female body (including secondary characteristics) together with externally only seemingly normal male genitals is not possible within the AIS pattern as far as I can determine, as it is more of a sliding scale from male to female characteristics. Only thing which seems to match up is the genotype determined so far, being XY, 46.

What I have determined years ago already and basically reconfirmed today is that XX/XY hermaphroditism is still the best match, as it explains the contradictory nature of my body, with both strongly male and female characteristics instead of one strong and the other weak as is much more common with intersexuality conditions. It's a shame no testing was done before I began the hormone therapy on my fertility level (male side), hormone levels and such. Thank you VUMC, I guess. Ah well.

I found myself thinking back to the conversation I had with some Jehova nutcases a few days ago. The discussion itself was very familiar to me as I have talked to such people before in real life and have had and read countless discussions on such topics on the internet. The thing which always me annoys me about fundamentalist types is that they like to twist the truth and selectively filter it to best present their opinion. This time they tried to talk nonsense about evolution, for example, which is pretty much my area of expertise, so they didn't get far on that.

In hindsight I should have gone back to the basics and pointed out that their question they started with of whether a creator couldn't have made this planet and universe is invalid as they fail to define and specify what this 'creator' is or might be. That's always the point which annoys the heck out of me with blind faith-types, how conveniently they can skip over the fundamentals of logic. I hate irrational thought as it is chaotic, and chaos is always destructive.

Logic is an essential part of my way of thinking, which is why I haven't given up figuring out my body yet. My rational side is extremely strong and dominating, so that my emotional side is rarely able to surface except in time of fatigue and extreme stress. I know there is a solution to the logic puzzle that is my body and I will find it, despite the completely chaotic and irrational manner in which people including specialists treat me all the time. Humans are chaotic, irrational beings, prone to flights of fancy whenever their emotions flare up. Short-sighted, they rarely understand or concern themselves with the emotional state of those they should be worried about either through friendship, family or professionally.

I find it to be extremely annoying how I can send a response to an email from Weijmar Schultz in which I will ask a few questions, only to not receive a response for a week. Then when I send a short email as reminder I get a response within two hours. It doesn't make sense and it doesn't make me feel appreciated.

Anyway, having him tell me that he'll soon be able to give me 'most of the answers' I'm looking for is somewhat... unnerving to me. What will I hear? How will it affect my life? Is this the end of my search? Will I finally get an explanation and not another dismissal that anything is out of the ordinary? Can I trust these results? Emotionally I dread whatever I will hear as it'll either make me feel exalted or plummet me into a black mood I may never recover from. Logically I'm just tired of having to wait for irrationally slow and moronic people to catch up with me and deliver the final pieces of the puzzle to settle this. I'll know more in about two weeks or so, as the final test on my genotype will have been carried out.

In other news, a few days ago I resumed 'folding' again, which means that I resumed participation on the Stanford Folding at Home project (F@H for short). See http://folding.stanford.edu/ for more information. I last participated back in 2005 and my, things have changed. I have nearly caught up with the number of points I earned for the processed Work Units (WUs) before, doubling the total. I rejoined my old team, HardOCP, number 33 and some people actually recognized me from back then :)

Folding when I quit was still done only on CPUs, but in the mean time GPUs have joined the fray, so I put my nVidia 8800 GTS 320 to work as well and it is churning out WUs like it's nobody's business. Smooth. Only issue is that it's doing it at 85C core temperature and the fan is getting on my nerves. So to cure that I ordered a GTX260 GPU to replace it after which I will relocate the 8800 GTS to a secondary system which will also be used for folding (CPU and GPU client).

F@H is a scientific project aimed at discovering exactly how proteins fold themselves from a long string of molecules into a complex 3D shape with a specific function. Misfolding of proteins is directly responsible for a number of diseases including Parkinson, Huntington, and many more. Solving this complex puzzle will make life much more pleasant for many. In the process it brings people together in a community where people donate resources to a project both to help it out and to compete among each other to get ahead of the list of contributed work. It's a kind of sport, I guess :)

At any rate I hope that I'll get to hear some answers from the UMCG which I can actually do something with. I hope it'll take me a week at most to recover from it. I also hope that it'll take away this intense feeling of loneliness and fatigue which gets worse each day. I truly pray this is the last batch of test results I'll have to wait for, as I'm really not sure whether I can do this one more time. I probably will, though. I'm such a poor loser that I will probably continue the rest of my life if necessary. I just pray that isn't necessary. Please let this year be the end of all this FUD and let next year truly be a new beginning for me.


Maya