Tag: advice

7 More Things I Didn’t Expect After My Phalloplasty

gerbilfluff:

I’m bringing this list back a little over a month after my phallo surgery last June (first part found over here: [Tumblr link broken] ), ‘cause there’s a few more things that’ve happened in the meantime that I *also* didn’t see coming. Keep in mind, these may not happen to you, but make sure you know going in that they *might.*

11.) THERE’LL BE WET SPOTS IN YOUR PANTS FOR A WHILE. Once your catheter is removed after two or three weeks and (joy of joys!!) you finally get to pee out of your phallus, your new meat is going to be totally inexperienced at what it’s doing– even moreso ‘cause the urethral tissue will be inflamed while it’s still healing. Urine will often be trapped within the urethra after you *think* you’re done going, only for it to slip out when you’ve already zipped up and walked away.

My way of getting around this has been to keep my dong cradled upon what’s called an “adult shield liner” (basically, an adult diaper, but just the crotch section) that I’ll stick between my legs, but even with that on my side, I have wet spots drip out after a bathroom visit and into my pants more often than I don’t.

I’d stress that you should take regular showers and change your clothes often, ’cause otherwise you are going to *stiiiink* after a couple days.

12.) SLEEPING ON YOUR STOMACH WON’T WORK ANYMORE. This one’s fairly obvious, but I still didn’t think of it. I’m a stomach sleeper– or at least, I *was,* until I had new sensitive bits down there I’d be crushing if I did. Sleeping on my side has been the go-to option so far, though it was harder than I’d like to admit to adjust.

13.) YOU MIGHT NEED A WARDROBE CHANGE. I used to be a boxer-briefs guy all the way. That was when I only had a 3-inch silicone packer to deal with. Bring that sucker up to a flesh-and-blood, not-so-squishable 5 inches, and space in the front of my drawers got dangerously tight in a hurry, if it didn’t poke out from the bottom seam altogether.

I went from Large boxer briefs to XL boxers, and had to start my underwear inventory from scratch (which ended up being 7 boxers, laundered twice a week– remember all those wet spots I mentioned having?). Count this as around $50 I didn’t think I’d have to spend.

14.) YOUR DONG MIGHT GROW HAIR. Again, this result varies from person to person. But I had electrolysis for a year before phalloplasty, and apparently that wasn’t enough to stave off *all* the hair from my arm. Right now, the head of my phallus has a layer of peach fuzz on it. I don’t mind it, and it doesn’t seem to have grown into the urethra or anything nasty, but it was a surprise after a month to realize I had hair sprouting down there.

15.) NOTHING WILL PREPARE YOU FOR HOW YOUR DONOR SITE IS GOING TO LOOK, THAT FIRST MONTH. I seriously didn’t think this would be an issue. I *love* horror movies – the gorier, the better. Bring on the Cronenberg arm, I told my surgeon team.

But when it came to unwrapping that section of my arm from its layers of bandages and gauze, and having to change that gauze, and wind everything back on again, every day, for 30 days… I had no idea. You can see your every heartbeat *moving* under there, that first week out of the hospital.

It’s going to look way, *way* better over time, even after just the first month. It really will, I promise. Deep breaths. You got this.

[EDIT, in 2018, including above photo: Heck, I had tattoos put around the scarring after it healed, because this scar was from something *happy*, and I wanted people to smile at it, instead of flinch and ask what in god’s name happened.]

But. It’s… *A Lot.* at first. Just be aware of that, going in. Gore hits a little different when the gore is part of you.

16.) WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T GO THAT FIRST MONTH ALONE. I am living proof that a person can technically make it through the first month of post-phalloplasty healing without having someone there with them. I stayed the whole month in a rental hotel room. Video chats with friends on a borrowed iPad and TaskRabbit and DoorDash drivers were my only human contact with the outside world.

DO NOT. DO. THIS. TO YOURSELF.

Bring a friend to stay with you. Bring a family member. Even if they’re jerks. I’m not kidding. If they won’t pose any physical threat to you, please, show yourself enough kindness to have somebody else there.

This is the reason why, to this day, if I hear a person has to go that first month alone, I will *immediately* hand them my contact info, so they can reach out when they need to. I do it gladly. I wouldn’t wish the hell that month was on *anyone.*

17.) NONE OF THESE THINGS MAKE THE PHALLOPLASTY FEEL ‘NOT WORTH IT.’ Seriously. No matter how many complaints I’m bringing up here, feeling whole for the first time in my life has made all these hurdles and quirks *combined* seem like no big deal. I’ve been all but euphoric since day one, to the point where people I know have mentioned how happy and calm I am now, and I can’t imagine I’m the only one who feels this way. Bring it on! >:3

Another from the main blog that belongs here just as much.

10 Things I Wish I’d Been Told Before Having My Phalloplasty

gerbilfluff:

Full disclosure: I’ve just had radial forearm phalloplasty with Dr. Crane’s surgery team this past June 17th, 2015. Mine was done with urethral lengthening, no vaginectomy, no scrotoplasty, no rods, and without top surgery or testosterone beforehand due to me-specific medical complications. I don’t claim my experience to be universal.

Would I change my mind now, 12 days post-op? HELL NO, haha. And yet, I’ve never heard anyone mention the facts listed below when I was researching online.

If I can help just one person preparing for or considering this procedure sleep a little easier from having a better idea what to expect, that’s all I’m after. :3

Here we go!

1.) YOU WILL SMELL HIDEOUS FOR MANY, MANY DAYS. Which is okay! Nobody should be judging you for this. You’ll have just had whole parts of your body moved around; you’re gonna have enough on your plate. But you’ll have six days in your hospital bed go by without a single shower, just occasional wet-wipe pad rub-downs– and then you’re not allowed to take one once you get out for another ten days, either. It becomes a sort of Zen stank, your scent lofting to the heights of the universe to declare your new existence. But yeah, you’re gonna be smelling levels of stankalicious you didn’t even know you could reach.

2.) Also, hate to break it to you, but YOU PROBABLY WON’T BE SLEEPING WELL IN THE HOSPITAL. Or maybe you’re the type who can nod off for quick naps. That’s keen! I really hope for your sake that you can, ‘cause all through the clock, there’s gonna be nurses and assistants wheeling in to check your blood pressure, your Doppler readings, how much you can inhale at once, getting blood draws, everything you can think of, every half-hour to an hour or so. I take forever and an Ambien to be able to go under, so I didn’t sleep the whole six days as much as I passed out for half-aware exhaustion hallucinations for a few minutes, or at least until the next assistant arrived at 4:30am.

3.) When you’re going to the bathroom (number two) a few days after surgery, DO. NOT. PUSH YOUR BOWELS. It’s gonna be frustrating beyond belief waiting for it to come. Trust me, it’s gonna come. And you’re gonna be on so many stool softeners and laxatives– when it came for me, it literally fell out of me. But yeah. No pushy, or you’ll be like naive Pre-Pushing Gerbil who thought, “Just a *little* push won’t hurt, right?” And before I knew it, I was looking at streams of what I could’ve sworn was blood dribbling out my groin from the staple I popped (see #8 below). I didn’t think I was even pressing with enough pressure to DO that, but I was wrong. Don’t be like Pre-Pushing Gerbil.

4.) As a matter of fact, until you get to know in those first couple days what the difference is between actual poop or just tricky gas? DON’T BE ASHAMED IF YOU MESS THE BED. Multiple nurses and care assistants told me, they’ve all seen *way* worse, and they’re gonna be changing the sheets regardless. Accidents can happen, before you’re comfortable knowing what needs a bedpan or not. (Though the first couple days’ worth of *my* asking to use the bedpan were some frustrating, empty-fart-filled times for all.)

5.) YOU PROBABLY WON’T BE SLEEPING WELL ONCE YOU LEAVE THE HOSPITAL, EITHER. You are gonna be sore as all hell the first week after you’re out– especially Days 2 and 3, by my experience. The leg skin graft is so huge that, for me, when it started oozing (and it did, for days, constantly), it soaked my bedsheets on that leg’s side. When it finally dried about five or six days later, my leg muscles kept twitching from how itchy the scab was, so then I couldn’t sleep from *that.* It’s gonna be rough. Doable, believe me. But rough.

6.) THERE IS NO WAY ‘I WAS IN A CRASH’ EXCUSES WILL WORK IF YOU GO FOR THE FOREARM DONOR SITE. This one can be chalked up entirely to my not seeking out more recent photos of forearm donor sites beforehand, but instead of the stitch-heavy displays often seen in the past, my donor site can instead be described as “shrink-wrapped meat squeezed down to a ridiculously small-looking surface area.” It’s a little disturbing in its own way, but nothing that the old “I was in a motorcycle accident” chestnut would reasonably excuse. Crash injuries do not look like this. Instead, I plan to answer all inquiries with “I traded a wizard a pound of flesh to get a bigger dick.” It’s technically not wrong.

7.) BABY WIPES WILL BE YOUR FRIEND. There’s gonna be an awful lot of dripping and oozing going on in multiple places for a good long while, and regular toilet paper’s just too scratchy and dry to be of much help. In fact, in the first few days, using TP instead of baby wipes actually scraped up an opening on the surface of my junk that still hasn’t closed after days upon days of Medihoney, so make sure to treat your new appendage right from the start.

8.) THAT PINK LIQUID ISN’T BLOOD. This one’s less universal than the rest, but knowing it would’ve saved me a bit of stress. I popped some non-vital stitches in my groin on Day 5 in the hospital (remember #2?), and was leaking what I swore was bloody urine in a steady drip from the groin. When it hadn’t stopped in three days, and in fact had become more frequent, I was sure something terrible was going on. But no. There’s stuff called serous fluid, usually found around surgery sites, that I’d simply opened up a groin tap for. It’s light pink, and it is completely harmless; it’s just *super* annoying to get all over anything you sit on. (I took to calling it Lisa Frank Unicorn Blood.) Wrapping a towel around my waist and tucking it into the top of my underwear became my best shot at getting some sleep without waking in a panic that I’d wet the bed half an hour later.

9.) YOU HAVE INNER STRENGTH YOU MAY HAVE NEVER SEEN BEFORE IN YOUR LIFE. Believe me, if you’d’ve told me beforehand how many times I’d be dealing with situations in the first couple weeks that included the phrase “so I look down and I see [what I thought was] blood spraying all over,” and that I wasn’t going to bat an eye over it even in the heat of the moment, I would’ve laughed (and asked you how you got into my apartment). But you’d be surprised. *I* certainly was. You don’t know me, but trust me: nerves of adamantium are not in my nature. Until those times when they had to be.

10.) WORDS CANNOT DESCRIBE HOW AWESOME IT’S GOING TO BE JUST TO HOLD IT. Seriously. I’ve found myself just cuddling it occasionally, feeling how big and warm and alive it is. I want to give it a hug. Tell it, hey, we got through this, buddy. We did it.

From the main blog. Seems like it belongs over here, too.