Two days earlier, I had returned to Tulsa from a week-long stay in California, where I had undergone a secondary labiaplasty - a procedure that refines the shape of the inner labia of the vagina. For this procedure, I had returned to the surgeon who performed my original genital reassignment surgery in 2005, confident that she could make some minor improvements. She was one of the leading specialists in the world, a gynecologist who had traveled the same medical journey as I had, from male sex assigned at birth to female. After returning home from this second surgery, I had developed a minor abscess around one suture. It was extremely painful and terribly frightening. I lived more than 1,000 miles from where the surgeon practiced, and my family-practice physician was not available on the weekend. Hence, the demoralizing and disastrous weekend visit to the minor emergency center.