Tag: phalloplasty

This is my view of Spot for the next week and a half or so. Don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt!

My last stage of a buccal-graft (rebuilt with inside-of-the-mouth tissue) urethroplasty was this past Friday. I went home that same day, and I’ve been more or less asleep until today.

I low-key feel like I have to pee, all the time. This is normal, the same as any other time I’ve had a catheter in, though this time they’re giving me medication twice a day to prevent bladder spasms.

*Unlike* most other times, this stage of urethroplasty had me under total sedation, so they had to put a breathing tube down my throat during the surgery. I had a sore throat for the first couple days; it’s all fine again now.

Siiiigh. A year and a half of stricture complications since June 2015, and fingers crossed, this is THE LAST chapter in the Spot Surgery Saga. I have the catheter taken out two weeks after the surgery– as my doctor put it, “You’ll be peeing in a bag for Christmas, and standing up for 2017.”

Can’t wait. 83

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~!

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’!” 😀

My First Year of Phalloplasty: A Handy Timeline.

[cracks knuckles] Cool. I’m back at it! Let’s do this.

Before I get into specifics about last week’s urethroplasty, I figure I should lay out a timeline. This blog’s gotten a bunch of new followers lately, and it’d be keen for everyone here to be able to follow along on the same page. :3

February 12, 2005: I take the leap to living full-time as a man at age 25. As I had only recently moved to the city I now live in, and had scarcely left my apartment before this, introducing myself as someone new raised no eyebrows.

Late 2005: I enroll in counseling with the University of Minnesota’s Center for Sexual Health. My counsellor agrees that I qualify as someone who would benefit from gender conversion therapy. I am educated about the possibilities and outcomes of hormonal treatment, as well as various surgeries I can work towards.

Due to warnings that my depression might get worse while taking T, I decide not to opt for HRT treatment. I also decide to keep binding for the time being, as the only sexually reactive parts of my body are my nipples, and though the risk is low, I’d rather not take the chance of losing that feeling if I was to get top surgery.

Phalloplasty is mentioned as an option for sex reassignment surgery when one can’t undergo HRT.

Though I function more naturally as a man in general society, I identify most strongly with being an androgyne, and feel neutral towards the parts I was born with. I ask if there’s a possibility I can keep any of them. “I’m not sure,” is the response I get. “Nobody’s ever asked that before.”

2007: I start saving my money.

2008: I begin building connections with psychiatrists and therapists who I’ll need letters of recommendation from before anyone will consider me for phalloplasty. Some agree. Some don’t. Enough do.

2013: With a significant amount of money saved up, I set my sights on Mr. Christopher’s surgery team of London, England. His phalloplasty results are, in my opinion, the most organic-looking currently out there. I make plans to see him in London for a consultation.

September 2013: Mr. Christopher tells me that he won’t allow me to undergo surgery unless I first agree to a full hysterectomy and vaginectomy. “Why else would you want to have this done?” he asks. “It would make no sense.”

I also learn the hard way that, currently, my psychiatrist and therapist letters are considered to have expired after over a year’s time.

I leave for the USA without scheduling a surgery date.

When I report to my counsellor at the Center for Sexual Health, she gives me the name of an up-and-coming surgeon I might want to check out, one Dr. Curtis Crane.

July 2014: I have a consultation with Dr. Crane in San Francisco, California. He’s cheerful, personable, and assures me that having phalloplasty without taking hormones or removing my original parts is indeed something he can do for me. “Who am I to tell you what body parts you should feel natural having?”, as he puts it. He is, to my knowledge, the first surgeon to be willing to perform such an operation.

I sign up for his next possible phalloplasty date that very day… which turns out to be in June of next year. Dr. Crane is a busy fellow, to put it lightly.

June 17th, 2015: The words “radial forearm phalloplasty with urethral lengthening, glansplasty, and no scrotoplasty” cannot convey the joy and sense of contented wholeness the procedure brings me today. I spend the next week in the CPMC hospital, where I’m discharged on Day 6.

June 23rd – July 17th, 2015: I spend the next month by myself in a live-in hotel in Corte Madera, with three weekly follow-up visits to Dr. Crane. Uber and Taskrabbit become my best friends, when it comes to getting places and making sure I stay fed.

I develop 3 fistulas under my phallus head (healed over by regular use of Medihoney gel) and accidentally open a groin stitch that leaks serous fluid constantly. The latter ends up giving the area an infection that takes a week longer than anticipated to heal. I’m grateful I took off the full 4 weeks from work instead of the 3 I initially planned for.

A small section of skin at the top of my glans dies, discoloring the area with a dark purple blotch. In doing so, the new dong gets its nickname: “Spot.”

July – October 2015: Abnormally thick scar tissue limits my ability to move my donor arm’s hand and wrist. I enroll in weekly hand therapy sessions, which successfully give me back a full range of motion.

September 2015: I develop a stricture that gets more painful by the day.

October 2015: I arrive back in San Francisco for two days to have Spot examined, by now barely able to urinate without pain so bad I’m almost passing out hunched over there at the toilet.

The results point to a stricture far thicker than anyone had anticipated, and I end up staying an extra week to have a cystoscopy done, revealing a solid wall of scar tissue in my urethra, right at the join where the original urethra ended and the new lengthened one began. I’m given a suprapubic catheter, to remain in until the next possible surgery date Dr. Crane has available.

December 2015: Back in San Francisco, this time under the care of Dr. Chen, Dr. Crane’s new surgeon.

Dr. Chen cuts out three centimeters of scar tissue from my urethra, then sews the ends together where the scarring ends. I stay in San Francisco for two more weeks, returning home right on Christmas Eve.

Due to dwindling funds left available, I start looking for a closer urologist for the future, and finally am pointed (through word of mouth) to Dr. Elliott of the University of Minnesota’s Urology department.

March 2016: My first visit to Dr. Elliott comes just as pain and urine stream thinning start happening, just like they did in September, though thankfully without the pain this time. Dr. Elliott schedules the soonest X-ray and cystoscopy available.

April 2016: Yup, the stricture’s grown back, and looking just as thick as before.

May 2016: Dr. Elliott decides that a two-stage urethroplasty is the best way to treat my stricture problem. I’m put back on a suprapubic catheter until a urethroplasty with buccal tissue harvest can be done.

June 15th, 2016: First stage is completed.

June 20th, 2016: Follow-up appointment. My initial genital sutures are removed. Everything looks good so far, according to the doctor.

Three months from now, I’ll have another cystoscopy to see how the scarring is going (or, hopefully, not going). Six months from now, the second stage of urethroplasty *should* be scheduled, where they’ll sew the hole in my urethra shut, I’ll be able to pee standing up again, and that *should* be the end of it all.

Fingers remain crossed like hell.

[looks up at all that] Huh. Guess I did more this past year than I ever realized I did, didn’t I?

Spot is officially 1 year old!!

You know what this means.

This means birthday cake.

For real, though– I can’t believe it’s been a whole year already! Spot may’ve proved to be more of a problem pup in these first 365 days than most phalloplasties, but I wouldn’t trade the experience for the world.

Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU, all of you followers, for joining Spot and me on this adventure!

NOTE: Spot was thoroughly showered with soap and warm water after filming this. Sugar and genitalia do not go well together.

VIDEO: Spot is officially 1 year old!!

Word to the wise: if at any point you need a suprapubic catheter hooked up to you, and you’ve got a belly with some overhang, like I do, make sure you’re lifting it up and putting sterile, dry gauze over the entry site SERIOUSLY every day.

I could’ve had my catheter out with my urethroplasty yesterday, but because I’d been slacking off when it came to changing the gauze, not really checking if it was staying in place under my belly hang… yeah, even after six weeks of having a cath in, the area shouldn’t be looking *that* red. Got myself a nice little infection, which didn’t halt the surgery, but it means I have to keep it in for another week until I run a full antibiotics course.

So I’m having lunch with a friend yesterday, who surprises me with… a clown nose.

“Oh, right! For that one charity,” I remark. “Sorry, but I’m not sure if I’ll wear it. Not really into clown noses…”

“Pff,” she replies, waving the idea away with her hand. “I didn’t get it for YOU. I got it for SPOT.”

And this, lovely followers, is why I have the *best* friends. :3

Phalloplasty for Kids, 101

gerbilfluff:

Little kid’s standing in front of me in the returns line today. His eyes go huge, all of a sudden. “What *happened?!*” he whispers to me, pointing at my arm in horror.

“Oh, that was actually a good thing!” I say, lapsing into my standard answer. “They took the skin from there to fix another part that hadn’t worked right since I was a kid.”

He shakes his head. “Maaaan. I wish I had a scar like yours. Nobody’d ever try messing with me ever again!” >:U