You are looking at the strangest turn of luck I’ve ever experienced.

That up there? Is a kidney stone. It’s about the size of a dime, and has formed itself to be covered in spikes.

I just tore this crafty bastard out from my own urethra, *only* because of the hole my surgeon cut into me over five months ago in a last-ditch attempt to keep my repeated strictures from ruining said urethra.

This thing would have *shredded* poor Spot, if it had been left inside. And out it popped, precisely because I’d had so many complications with my phalloplasty.

Folks, I’m floored.

Also wheezing with relief that my last urologist checkup before they sew up the urethral hole underneath Spot’s base this December 16th happens to be tomorrow.

…Seriously, I want to have this thing bronzed.

Good news!! FINALLY some good news.

I didn’t even need a cystoscopy today, like was planned. Dr. Elliott went in with dilation tools, as seen here– which I want to assure everyone, was COMPLETELY painless, by the way!– and tried going down Spot’s urethra as far as he could ahead of time, to check for scarring.

He found no blockage. NONE. The mouth skin graft to make a new urethra back in June took 100%!! This is *fantastic* news!

I still need to chill a few months to make absolutely, *positively* sure the scarring isn’t coming back again, but my final surgery is already scheduled for December 16th, where they’ll sew shut my current urinary hole under the penis base and redirect Spot’s new urethra for good, after which I can get back to standing while peeing again.

Can’t wait~!

gerbilfluff:

Hey, all. Gonna be disappearing for a while starting next Tuesday, for between two weeks and up to a whole month.

Remember that alcoholism deal I was wrestling with? Yeah. So do I. And it’s getting a little bit better, but even after months of outpatient therapy, it’s not going away, so I’m calling in The Big Guns.

Thing is, I’m not allowed to use a cell phone while I’m inside the inpatient ward I’ll be at. Which is a full 99% of my Internet access at this time.

You’re all so amazing, and I’ll miss every one of you. Be kind to yourselves while I’m gone, yeah? I’ll try my best to do the same.

This’ll be right after my (fingers crossed!) second-to-last urethral surgery to fix my complications Monday morning, so I’ll try to have a report on that before I’m offline.

ah, I hope this ask doesn’t come off as mean, but is it normal to have so many urine-related complications?

Nope! Thankfully for most folks having phalloplasty, I’m an outlier. I was told by Dr. Chen a few months ago that about 20-30% of phalloplasty patients will have some kind of stricture or fistula if they get urethral lengthening, with admittedly a slightly higher chance if they keep their original plumbing, like I did.

I still recommend to people wanting phalloplasty that they set aside travel expenses for at least one extra trip to and from their surgeon’s city, in case something happens. The crappy thing is, you really don’t know ahead of time whether you’ll be one of the “lucky” ones or not until you have a complication.

And not to say multiple complications *don’t* ever happen– I myself currently know, or know of, four guys who’ve undergone phalloplasty and had a chain of regrowing strictures like me. That’s out of hundreds who’ve had the procedure by several surgeons in the USA, though. I don’t claim to be a statistics expert; I only report what’s happened in my experience.

I’m planning on getting phallo someday, so if it’s okay, can I ask what airports are like for you?

Sure thing! I’ve heard some real horror stories from trans folks about the TSA, so I can definitely understand how it would be a concern.

My answer probably has more to do with the fact that I haven’t undergone hormone treatment than anything else. No matter how you slice it, I look pretty darn femme. When I went in for a scan, it was almost amusing– I noticed the guy TSA agents would punch the “guy” button, whereas the gals hit “girl.” Either way, if I got scanned, they’d see an “anomaly,” then they asked me for a patdown (where one time, they looked confused and just *asked* me whether I needed a male or female agent), found nothing, and waved me through– so often that I just opted for the patdown, after the second trip to and from San Francisco.

For whatever reason, whether a guy or a gal pats me down, they’ve always waved me through without incident afterwards. The only exception was right after the phalloplasty itself, where their concern was my arm cast. Even then, I didn’t have to come out and say “I had phalloplasty” or anything compromising; they just put some powder on the cast, swabbed it, and again, found nothing. Next in line, please. And that was that.

They checked the stuffed dog that I travel with twice, though, and I still have no clue why. Do terrorists use stuffed animals as weapons *that* often?

sup! I was just wondering, what was the healing journey like for the site your skin was taken from for the surgery? (sorry if you’ve already answered this, also, I think you’re lovely!)

D’aww, kudos for the compliment! :3

As for the skin donor sites, if you go far back enough, there are photos of the sites from the first week through about half a year– but a year’s worth of posts are a lot to scroll through, so I’ll do the best I can to describe it in text form.

They took the skin to make my new dong from my left forearm (I got to pick which one they used), and there was a fair amount missing once they took the graft– enough to need to cover that site with *more* skin from the upper part of my left thigh. The forearm was wrapped with a small sheet of healing plaster called Xeroform, with a small roll of gauze and a hard cast needed over that, and then I had to unroll everything to change the Xeroform and gauze every day for the first week, every other day for several weeks after that. As for the leg, it was covered in a sheet of Xeroform and taped down, with that forming a giant scab that eventually formed new skin underneath, until the Xeroform crusted and fell off. (There may or may not have been some impatient tugging on my part near the end.)

To sum up the experience in handy ‘too long didn’t read’ form: *EWW,* for about two months. Then it got better and better over the next six months, and its appearance has more or less stayed the same for me after that.

Longform version: no sugarcoating it, seeing the donor sites fresh was hard to deal with at first. Like, they may not feel all that sore while you’re on the hospital’s painkillers, but damn if they’re not really painful to look at. They are straight-up RAW, and you still have to tend to them for at least a few minutes on a daily basis for the first couple months, no matter how much they may freak you out.

The thing is, my arm site wasn’t *gory.* It bled some at first, sure, but it was more… it’s hard to describe, but the best way I can put it is “unsettlingly shrink-wrapped.” It was cleanly stitched, clinically fit together, and *so much thinner* than the rest of my arm. Like a vice had squeezed it tight about nine-tenths of it around, and it stayed that way, with a regular-sized stripe of skin down the end seam. The thin section was red-purple, and you could see heartbeats calmly pulsing through the skin. It was a David Lynch movie kind of disturbing: something in your brain keeps saying things don’t look *right.*

The leg wasn’t nearly as much trouble. More annoying than anything else. About a week in, the Xeroform helped new skin grow back enough to relearn how to sweat. And that’s all that patch did for the next two days: ooze sweat. To the point where it was messy to sleep under bedsheets. Then it dried out! Woo and yay! Only for the Xeroform to get so hard and dry that it itched for one more day of not much sleep.

With that said, don’t let that first horrorshow stretch scare you off. Believe me, the difference after even just the first month is like night and day, and the sites WILL end up looking so, *so* much better than they begin, even if you want to hide for those three minutes a day you have it uncovered to change the dressings at first. Heck, the whole patch on my leg? Looked like a mild sunburn a few months in.

The arm site looked worlds healthier and regular-skin-toned by three months in, when I could take off the hard cast, but even now, it’s still… kinda awkward, because the smaller sized part will always be that way. Some folks stare when I’m wearing a T-shirt, and I’ve invested in some fashion sleeves to avoid the occasional “What HAPPENED?” Though by now, it doesn’t bother me. Most people don’t care what answer you give them; they just want *an* answer, even if it’s a smart-aleck Joker-voiced “You wanna know how I got these scars?”

The best advice I can give at the beginning, which is when you’ll need the most reassuring, is: it’s not going to look like this for long. It really won’t. It heals. It just takes time.

My next advice is for after the first couple months, when things are looking healthier, and the hand/wrist/arm exercises start to not seem so important. Keep doing them until your doctor says you can cool it. My hand on my donor arm still looks swollen over a year in, specifically because I didn’t wear a compression sleeve for nearly as long as I was told I should. Please, folks who decide to use your arm as your donor site: be the Gallant to my Goofus. Your hand will thank you.

And overall, even if 99.999% of them will never see your junk or know why your arm looks like that, more random folks than I would’ve ever expected respect a badass scar. 😀

You have a blog called ” My Phalloplasty Experience” and all you have are photos of your skin graft?! WTF. No one cares about your arm. Where is the phallos, the bottom surgery results????????

gendercube:

phalloexperience:

I’m under no obligation to share anything from my surgery experience. Only what I want and feel comfortable sharing, which is what I have done.

Don’t like that then don’t look. It’s that simple.

Also, you might want to work on your manners, tone and friendliness if you want people to help you out. Instead I just laughed at your ridiculous message.

Here’s a great example of how dehumanizing and degrading people are towards guys who’ve had lower surgery. I’m shocked but not at all surprised by how entitled people feel to our bodies and by how many people think it’s okay to say this.

Ffffff.

Folks, I know I may wag my dong photos all over the place here, but there’s no quicker way to piss me off than seeing people send stuff like THIS to anyone who wants to keep their private parts private.

Quick request, to all my followers? See the original message up above? Don’t ever be That Person. Don’t try to make someone feel bad for not showing off what’s ultimately their choice to show or not.

I mean, I’ll happily dump a barrel of dick pics onto anyone who shows interest. But a lot of folks running phalloplasty blogs– I’d say the majority of them– are not like this blog. And that’s perfectly okay. No matter how well-meaning you might be, nobody owes you a free trip into their pants just because you’re curious.

Angry Gerbil out.

Urethroplastypalooza, Part 1: This Hole Was Made For Me

This is it. Wednesday, June 15th, two days shy of Spot’s first anniversary. Take 3 in trying to stop scar tissue from “healing” my dong’s urethra shut. Stage 1 of a 2-stage urethroplasty.

(Or is it Stage 2 of a 3-stage? I had a suprapubic catheter put in a month ahead of time, just to give the whole area a chance to calm down if anything was inflamed from trying to pee through my stricture. But anyhow.)

For this surgery, Dr. Elliott used buccal (inside of the mouth) tissue to rebuild the urethra’s strictured area from scratch. And for as cringe-worthy as “we’re stripping the skin from the inside of your mouth” sounds, I can easily say that this surgery was both 1) the most painless, and 2) the oddest-looking, as far as results go, that I’ve had yet.

Pictured above: what the *outside* of the harvested area looked like, three days after surgery. That’s not hair on my lip; it literally looked black on one side from bruising.

But as far as pain went? There was so little, I was off the Percocet the docs gave me after only a day and a half. I could feel the ends of some thread poking from where the inside of my mouth was sewn back up, but other than that… Y’know when you accidentally bite the inside of your mouth, and it’s a little raw in that spot for a couple days, but it doesn’t really hurt? Imagine that feeling, only on one entire side of your mouth. I’ve burned my mouth on pizza and had it hurt more.

The only *really* annoying part is how I could only open my mouth a tiny fraction on my ‘good’ side at first. It’s slowly getting more forgiving, and should be back to a normal range of motion within a month or so, but watching me try to eat this first week has been pure comedy. Picture a sloth, using one hand to hold a forkful of something mushed flat, its other hand sloooowly trying to guide the fork through the tiny slot of its open mouth, and you’ll get the idea.

It was that same Friday night, a couple days after surgery, that I discovered the sutures sealing a giant pad of gauze in place right underneath the base of my penis and over my vulva. (You’d think I’d notice something like that sooner, right? But nope. Like I said, no pain!) This is when I started to get a little nervous. “I’m sure they have a perfectly good reason why they sewed my vagina shut,” I thought to myself hopefully.

And indeed, I found on my follow-up visit that next Monday, nobody had actually sewn anything shut– it just *looked* like they did. A quick few snips, some forceps tugs, and the sutures and gauze pads were gone, leaving a hole underneath the base of Spot, riiiight where my original factory-issued urethra used to end.

Here’s what’s going on inside that hole, as it was explained to me. The surgeons put a small slit down part of the rebuilt urethra, facing the outside, and lined it up with a hole to the skin’s surface. For most FTM guys, this hole’s usually made to go through the scrotum, and that’s where you pee from for the next few months. Since I didn’t have a scrotoplasty, they put my hole right above the top edge of my vagina. You could be forgiven for thinking the pee comes out there, it’s so close.

(That’s right. All you confused eight-year-olds out there can consider yourselves justified; there’s at least *one* person in the world who pees out their vag. Kinda sorta.)

Now all I have to do is wait three months before I go back in to have my doc scope around the area and see how the former stricture area’s healing. If no more scar tissue’s cropping up, then *six* months from now, they’ll be sewing the urethra slit shut again, and this whole year-long journey can finally come to a happy end.

As an aside, three cheers for my follow-up doctor for agreeing to take photos of my crotch as soon as she’d opened the area back up. She got even more bonus points from me when she aimed the camera and said, “Open wide… and say ‘cheese’!” 😀