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“I’ve always been Sasha, but I didn’t always know what that meant," he said.
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Noah Doolady hand-drew a calendar that notes surgery-payment due dates, a blood test, a COVID-19 test, and the couple’s five-month anniversary.
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The couple met on an app called Grindr that LGBTQ+ people use to hook up and date.
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“I’m feeling panicked,” Sasha said while shopping for groceries with Noah. “My excitement is overshadowed by fear as the date gets closer.”
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“I did not feel good about that,” Sasha said as he left a blood test in preparation for the surgery. “All of my life, my experiences with hospitals and doctors have been especially bad.”
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“I usually fall asleep around two or three in the morning and wake up at five or six,” said Sasha who suffers from insomnia. “The night before the surgery I got an hour of sleep — if that.”
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“When I woke up there was some pretty bad pain immediately,” Sasha said after the three-hour operation with an ice pack on his chest. “I felt surprisingly lucid but I was extremely exhausted.”
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“Noah has been a saint,” Sasha said. “He calls me at 5 a.m. for my medication dose.” Noah designed a physical schedule to help Sasha keep track of his medication.
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“I don’t even know what would be 100 percent me,” Sasha said. “I don’t have that strong sense of identity I guess.”
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“Loving something or someone involves wanting to look at every inch of it and examine it and memorize it,” Sasha said of his artwork of Noah.
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“My surgeon explicitly warned me that if I smoked real cigarettes before my nipples were healed, they would fall off,” Sasha said while smoking an herbal cigarette. “I’ve been fantasizing about smoking cigarettes.”