Hi Teresa,
It’s a myth that Charing Cross have a general rule that you have to stop self-medicating before they will prescribe. I’d been taking hormones for a year before I first went there, it wasn’t a problem for them, and they gave me a prescription just as they would anyone who wasn’t self-medicating. Their normal procedure is for you to have 2 appointments with different consultants before they will give you a prescription, so it normally takes several months before you will get it. They told me that as I was already taking what seemed to them to be a sensible dose they would write to my GP after the first appointment and authorise him to start prescribing straight away. Unfortunately their admin is terrible and it ended up taking the usual several months for that to go through.
It doesn’t help to interrupt an established hormone regime and I think they realise this, certainly in my case they never asked me to stop. I’m afraid I’ve no idea whether or not your diabetes will affect your prescription, but I doubt that it will be sufficient cause for them to ask you to stop self-medicating.
If they used to have a policy of insisting you are off self-meds, they don’t now. In fact there seems to be a lot of false or outdated information about CX going around. Don’t listen to the horror stories, the people you see are actually very nice, they ask you lots of questions and as long as you don’t have any psychological problems everything should go smoothly. Just be patient, it is the NHS and things take time with them!
xx