38 Days Until Surgery

I keep trying to write posts very 10 days – but it’s just not happening.

Psychologically

How am I feeling? Well to be honest I haven’t had much time to think since I saw Dr Goossen back in May. Between work, trying to lose weight and buying a house it’s been pretty hectic. But as of last Friday – the house and work stuff are settling down; and now I have a bit more time to think. 

If I’m honest, I’m starting to get a bit nervous. It’s a byproduct of the anxiety I think – because I know it’s not regret. I guess I’m just a worrier.

I worry that I won’t be happy with the results, that I’ll have major complications, that my mental stability will suffer, that the graft won’t take. I worry that my wife won’t like the result, what people at work will think, what random people on the street will say; and every other worry that a person can have (whether rational or not). But at the same time, I know that this is just my brain trying to think through every possible scenario and how I’d react in each one. 

I know I want this surgery, know the helplessness and pain won’t last long in the grand scheme of things, know that at the end of the day – what I will be left with will be mine.

Weight

I have 1kg left to lose before I hit my minimum goal weight. I’m quite please with how things are going, but at the same time I wish I was a bit further along. If I keep going at this rate, I should lose another 3.5kg before surgery – which would be awesome. 

I don’t feel like I’ve lost a whole lot, but I’m total so far I’ve lost 9.5kg, and 4.5kg since May. Clothes are fitting better, and I’ve lost about 6cm around my stomach so far.

Arm

My arm is looking good. The weight loss has put the veins on show a bit more. I’m still working on my hand strength – which is helping in other aspects of life at the moment.

I’m pretty pleased with how my arm is looking post laser hair removal at the moment. Usually I start getting a heap of ingrown hairs around this long after treatment, and that doesn’t appear to be happening yet.

The plan is to take measurements pre and post surgery.

Hair Removal and Update

There hasn’t really been much to update on lately to be honest; I’ve just been working on losing weight before I see Dr Goossen in July.

Weight: So far, since I saw him on 16th May, I’ve lost 3.1kg. I know it’s not much, and to be honest I can’t really notice it yet – but it’s nice to see the numbers going down, and I can see a bit of a difference in the way I look in clothes. I have 2.6kg to go in 33 days… It feels so far away at the moment…

Hair Removal: I got called in to the laser clinic today to see the doctor. My usual clinician has taken an undetermined period of leave to take care of some health issues, and the girls wanted me to see the dermatologist to make sure I was still good to go.

He seemed really nice, and as planned originally – there will be no issues with continuing the hair removal post-op. The only real condition is that there are no open wounds. I’ll probably come and see them at about the 6-8 week mark just to see what their thoughts are on how everything is looking.

I have my last removal appointment pre-surgery on Thursday. Apparently I’m looking really good for only having had two treatments – but we’ll see. I’ll try to remember to put a picture up comparing the hair growth.

Doctor Consult

So today I went to see Dr Goossen for a catchup and hopefully to hear I have a date booked for surgery in July.

The catchup went well, and he said that there wasn’t really much else I could do in terms of preparation other than keep doing what I’m doing. He advised that I’d be fine to get another laser session done on my arm and that should do me until post-op (next appointment is in June).

As for a date – I’m tentatively booked in for August 6th. This depends on a couple things:

1. Whether the plastic surgeon is available on that date; and
2. Whether I can get into the normal BMI range by July 18th.

The second point annoyed me slightly. When I saw the doc in February I specifically asked whether that would be an issue – and he said no. Today though he advised that I needed to be within range. For me that’s only 4kg I have to lose; but had I known this in February – I’d already be way past that by now, and I’d be looking at early July. 

But! These things happen. Moving on…

I’m going back to see Hans on Iuly 18th, and should be able to meet the plastic surgeon then too. As for the weight loss – I’ll be hitting it hard from this point on. I’m cutting pretty much all refined sugars from my diet, and my workouts are going to be increased too. I’m annoyed that I hadn’t been working on this harder, earlier. I’ll keep you all informed on how that goes.

Question Time

Ok, so I see the good surgeon in Monday. If anyone has any questions – let me know, and I’ll try and get as many of them answered as possible.

Just to confirm, this is the surgeon in Brisbane, Australia. I’ve done a post about him previously, and as of Monday – in hoping I’ll have the go-ahead to put his name on my blog.

Sooo…

So because of the stuff around I was getting from my GP, surgery looks like it’s been pushed back until July/August. Grr. Dr X is going to get back to me as soon as he hears back from everyone involved and they agree on a date.

Initially I was quite annoyed – I was looking forward to just getting in and getting the first stage done. But to be honest – I’m happy to wait. I’m still years ahead of where I thought I’d be regarding this surgery, and I’d much prefer everything to fall into place rather than try to push things to happen.

So in the meantime I’m continuing with my bodyfat-loss and conditioning plan. I’ve also purchased a couple of hand-strength exercisers from Prohands. The one I have at the moment is a medium, but I have a couple lighter ones on the way too. I tend to lose muscle quickly after surgery, so if I can minimise that as much as possible before hand – I will.

I’ve had it about a week now and already I can tell the difference. I’ll be looking at selling them on once I’ve healed from stage one – so watch this space.

On that – I’m thinking of selling my packers. I don’t use them, and they’re going to be a moot point soon anyway. I’ll put a post up in a couple days with the information on them.

Life Update

I know it’s been a little while since I posted anything – there really hasn’t been much to update on.

I don’t have a date set for surgery yet. Initially that was because there was a miscommunication between my GP and Dr Goossen, however I managed to get that sorted. I was hoping for a date in May – but that’s looking like it won’t happen now. The surgeon’s going away unexpectedly in June and he doesn’t want to do the surgery within two weeks of leaving (which I completely understand!). There’s still a slight chance I’ll get in around mid-May, but given that’s just over a month away – I’m not holding my breath. There’s a lot to organise, and if he feels it’s better to wait – I’ll wait. I am a bit annoyed though. Not with the surgeon – with my GP. She stuffed around for three weeks, and that could’ve cost me a May surgery date… Ah well…

In other news I had my second round of laser hair removal. The woman at the clinic said I had a good result for the first round, but was glad I managed to get in again before surgery (I moved it forward a week because I thought I was having surgery in May). This time she turned the machine up to 26. I could definitely feel the difference – but it wasn’t too bad. I’m booked in again for late June, but we’ll see how we go. She did mention that at after 4-5 sessions you can get a random lot of regrowth. Apparently it’s just around the time everyone decides to stop going. She didn’t explain why it occurs – but I’m going to guess its the hair follicle’s last-ditch attempt at growing.*

That’s pretty much it for now. It’s 5 years on T for me on Thursday – so I’ll endeavour to make a post about it.
*I’ll check that and get back to you!

Psychological Preparation for Surgery

It was brought to my attention that I should really do a post on my psychological surgery preparation – to go with the body preparation I talked about a couple of posts ago. So here we go…

I’d like to point out first of all that this is my own way of preparing. Anyone considering this surgery is almost certainly over the age of 18 – so you should definitely know by now what you need to do to be prepared for things. 

My personality tends to go one of two ways when it comes to preparing for stuff. Either I wing, or I research; and believe me – there isn’t much between the two options. If I decide to wing it, the length of time between the decision being made and the event happening is generally quite short. For the main part this tends to work out quite well for me (luckily). If, however, I decide to research it – there’s no holding back. The time until the event is usually a bit longer – but I will research the hell out of that topic until I feel like I know everything about it… Or the event occurs… Whichever happens first. Usually this works out well for me too – unless the event occurs before I am able to absorb enough knowledge about the topic.

Luckily, the research side of me seems to be working when it comes to phalloplasty.

I’m a very analytical and logical person by nature. Meditation doesn’t really work for me unless I am actually in the situation that I need to be prepared for – and even then it’s more of a losing-myself-in-music type of thing than properly meditating. I need to know exactly what to expect (or as close to that as possible) before, during and after the event; and that’s what I did with phalloplasty.

I researched everything:

• Surgery types (metatoidioplasty or phalloplasty?)
• Surgery styles (ALT, RFF, MLD etc)
• Surgeons, and the styles they performed.
• Why they performed certain ones and why not others?
• Research papers on the different styles and how they’ve progressed through the years
• Donor site information for each style
• How much skin is used with the different types of skin grafts
• The pros and cons of each graft type
• The full procedure for a skin graft
• Electrolysis vs. laser removal
• Hospital admission information
• What to bring for surgery
• What to expect post surgery – from surgical, nursing, hospital and personal perspectives
• Specific hospital information including ratings and possible upgrades that could affect my surgery
• Surgical diaries from other guys who have had both phallo and meta surgeries – not just with my surgeon but any surgeon (FEEL FREE TO POINT ME IN THE DIRECTION OF BLOGS!!!)
• Things that can go wrong – and what to expect treatment-wise if it does…

The list goes on and on and on…. But I feel myself in that familiar place again. The point where I start wondering to myself if I’ve actually researched everything, or whether there’s some part of all this that I’ve missed. That I must have missed something, because this is such a massive, life-changing, body-altering surgery, and I only feel one thing…

Ready.

Exciting News!

So there have been a few personal bits and pieces that I’ve needed to get sorted before I could go ahead and get a date booked in for surgery. I won’t go into them on here – but what I will say is that today I got the final piece of the puzzle in place, and now have nothing standing in the way of getting a date for surgery!!!

So I left a message with the office of Dr X (still waiting on the go-ahead to use his name); and hopefully in the next few days we’ll be able to get a date locked down!

Very, VERY excited 😀

Body Preparation for Surgery

I know it’s been a while since I last posted – to be honest not much is happening at the moment regarding appointments and surgery dates. I thought I’d do q post on what I’m doing to prepare my arm (and to a greater extent my body) for surgery .

WEIGHT

I’ve put on a bit of weight since starting HRT; about 26kg all up – and most of that probably isn’t muscle! It’s been very difficult to lose the weight, and I’ve only lost 5kg so far – but knowing that I potentially have this surgery coming up in the not too distant future has really pushed me to get serious about dropping the weight.

To get into the ideal BMI range I need to lose about 18kg, but to be honest I don’t know how likely that is – given the amount of muscle I have. It works well as a starting point though – and hopefully I’ll be able to get rid of a decent amount of weight before surgery through eating less rubbish foods and working out more.

Body

Along with the weight-loss I’m starting to increase my protein intake – to help facilitate healing, and I’ve started taking a multi-vitamin and some vitamin C tablets.

When it gets a bit closer to the time, I’ll start using a moisturiser on my donor arm, graft site and pubic area to help make the skin a bit more supple. I haven’t heard anyone else say they do this, or whether it’ll even make any difference – but I did it before and after my chest surgery, so I figured there’d be no harm in doing it before this one!

Donor Arm

Along with the laser hair removal, I’ve been more conscious about putting on sun cream daily. On top of that, I’ve started wearing a UV protective sleeve when I go out in public / when I work out outside. This is partially because I want to keep the area as protected as possible, but also so people at work get used to seeing the sleeve. I know it’s a bit silly – but I guess a part of me thinks there’ll be less questions. 

Anyway, that’s all I think. If anyone has any ideas of other things they think might help / they’ve done – please feel free to let me know!

Laser Hair Removal

So on Wednesday I went to a hair removal clinic.

I was just going for a consult to see what it was all about, see if the clinic was a good fit etc. As it happened, the woman I saw was really nice. she answered all my questions, and if she was surprised about why I was there – she didn’t let on.

Initially I just told her that the forearm was going to be used for a skin graft and needed the hair removed – but I felt comfortable with her, and I ended up telling her what the skin graft was going to be used for. She fully understood, and said that she’d be happy to continue treatment post-surgery if it was still required then.

By the time the consult was over, there was still a bit of time left. She asked if I wanted to go ahead with a treatment that day – so it could get started. And I agreed. Why wait, right? At this stage, I don’t have a date for surgery, but I’d hate for one to come up in a short space of time and for me not to even have had one treatment – especially the underside of my forearm where the new urethra will be created from.

The treatment itself lasted maybe 10 minutes once she got all the machines up and running (I was first in for the day). She shaved my arm and marked out the area to be treated with a highlighter.
It didn’t hurt really. Just felt like someone flicking a rubber band on my arm. Next treatment is in April.

So that’s… Pretty much 4 days ago now. The hair is starting to come through again. Some of the follicles are starting to fall out already, but the majority of it is still pushing through. Give it another few weeks and I’ll have a better idea of what I’m dealing with.

Obviously it’s not the best way to compare them – given one was recently shaved.. But the plan is to compare them again just before my next treatment.