The Fifth Colu.mn: Top Surgery
I did it. I took the leap. My boobs are gone and I am left with a scarred, flat chest and significantly smaller nipples. I am also left with a brain that feels like it has gone through a blender…maybe not my physical brain but the thoughts that it houses; those have been jumbled so badly I fear it will take years to untangle them. I’m not sure where to start.
Garrett Hoffman is blogging his transition at transformgarrett.blogspot.com. You can read the rest of his posts on TheColu.mn here.
While I am not quite ready to dive into the cerebral mess I can give you a taste of my surgery experience. I’ll sort some stuff out and update you in due time. The things going on in my head are actually much more interesting than what physically happened to me. I’ll try not to bore you.
I actually had surgery on July 27th in San Francisco with Dr. Michael Brownstein. I heard he was the best. I did a tiny bit of research but not much. I looked at peoples’ results for about an hour online. His were, by far, the best and I didn’t want anything less than the best. I called him and him only. I arrived in SF on the Friday before surgery to do some touristy shit since I had never been before. It was Dore Alley weekend (I’ll let y’all google that for yourselves) so I spent some time there and some time with friends.
I had a pre op appointment the day before surgery. Brownstein is eclectic. Everything about him screams that this man is doing his own thing…everything from the location of his office to his staff to his 15 year old wiener dog, Frank, that he keeps in his office to his big yellow throne to his $4000 British aviator watch that he wears to the fact that he attended Carleton College, my alma mater, exactly 50 years before I did. Eclectic. Definitely.
I’m not going to go into the specifics of what actually happened. If you’re interested, ask, and I will give you all the details you want. But, I’ll say it again, I don’t want to bore you and I also don’t want to gross you out. Surgery is messy. So I had surgery on Tuesday and I slept all day Wednesday and felt horrible on Thursday. I stopped taking my pain meds on Wednesday night and Thursdays horrible feeling was due to, I think, a Percocet hangover which had absolutely nothing to do with my chest except for the fact that I was taking the Percocet so I wasn’t in pain. My drains were left in until Monday which resulted in the worst weekend of my life.
Drains are gross and annoying. Emptying them is horrible and ended up being a pretty intense trust exercise with the person who was taking care of me. I didn’t want her to accidentally pull at them and I physically couldn’t empty them myself for the first few days so I had to submit to her. It was harder than it sounds.
I felt fine over the weekend except for the drains. They came out Monday afternoon which wasn’t soon enough. I had heard that getting them yanked out hurts. I couldn’t actually feel a thing which was either due to my high pain tolerance or that I don’t actually have feeling in that part of my chest. Either way, no big deal.
Now I am slowly relearning how to do normal activities. I had a hell of a time getting my coffee cup off the top shelf today. I finally retrieved it by climbing onto the counter, knocking the cup off of the shelf and (thankfully) catching it before it shattered on the ground. I still can’t sleep on my sides or my stomach. I have to wear a binder for another couple of days. Playing tug-of-war with my pup is pretty much out of the question, which is upsetting to the both of us. I can’t run for a while. I am going a bit stir crazy but I’ll get back on the road soon enough.
I leave tomorrow to move to Missouri. I start my new job on Monday and school in a few weeks. I am nervous but excited, happy but sad, looking forward to it but dreading it. It’s the same with my surgery. I feel great about it but sad at the same time. It’s a both/and world we live in. This is, perhaps, the most important lesson I have learned during my transition. As I figure out more, I’ll share. For now, rumination is in order.
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