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As a surgical tech in the process of switching over to nursing:
How was your healthcare team? What did they do that stood out as good / is there anything they could have done better?
I hardly ever get trans patients, but I want to make sure their experience is as good as I can make it.
Not OP but I went through this in 2017
The good: staff was overall very helpful, seeing my friends was great
The bad: explaining to the chaplain every time he came in that I don't necessarily care for religion (at least not xtianity)
my hospital is very pushy with the chaplain, but there was a way for me to kinda opt out by disallowing the staff from putting my surgery info on a whiteboard where the chaplain goes to find patients to prey on. This also meant my spouse wouldn't get updates from that same board, but we agreed it was worth it to avoid the chaplain, lol
sorry you had to deal with that, I think there is a lot of transphobia still and it's weird to me that chaplains are pushed so hard with gender-affirming surgeries 😬
it’s weird to me that chaplains are pushed so hard with gender-affirming surgeries
It's weird that chaplains are pushed so hard, period. This has been driving me nuts in clinicals - they'll just drop into a patient's room completely unsolicited and start asking religious shit. Like... dude, did that patient request a chaplain? No? Then get the fuck out! I can see the value in having a chaplain available to patients who want one, but until that request is made, stay in your damn office!
I actually opted out so the chaplain couldn't find me and somehow they still ended up dropping by during my recovery. Luckily this chaplain was pretty chill, it could have been a lot worse - but it was still a stressful event for me and against my explicit wishes and choices.
I wonder - what do you think the purpose of a chaplain is - all of this has made me think more about chaplains and their role. I tend to be cynical and think the worst, that being that chaplains are basically there to try to convert people when they are vulnerable (after a surgery can be a traumatic time, and a significant number of religious conversions occur after a trauma). There is also the opportunity to convert before death, so that might be playing a role too. But I need to actually read up on the history and context, maybe my cynicism is misplaced here.
no questions just a hells yeah
Congrats! 💜
Did you say anything silly when you were waking up from surgery?
Did you say anything silly when you were waking up from surgery?
Surgical tech of roughly a decade, here: This almost never happens. Of the thousands of patients I've seen wake from anesthesia, exactly 3 of them so far woke up saying funny/weird shit. Two of them were WAY over the top hilariously thankful; and one was completely convinced that we were bullshitting him when we told him his surgery was over and that he was just waking up. He had zero recollection of being unconscious at all: from his perspective, we rolled him into the OR, had him shuffle from his gurney to the OR bed, then immediately shoved him back onto the gurney while saying 'it's all done!'. He was a little more receptive to it once he saw the sutures, lol.
The vast majority of people either want to stay asleep, or they wake up kicking and punching.
Congrats! I hope someday I'll be able to do the same. The idea of sex kinda sucks when it feels like your brain is looking for parts you don't have.
yes, I didn't think my bottom dysphoria was that bad, I would have described it as moderate - but after the surgery and looking down, I felt such a huge sense of relief I broke down crying - I clearly had big feelings I was dismissing the severity of.
T~T
Tbh, I'm starting to look into it myself, though I still have +6mo before insurance will cover it. However, considering how long I've heard the waiting period can be, maybe now is the best time to start thinking about it and looking for surgeons.
yes, wait times can be very long and this is a surgery that requires a lot of planning. 6 months isn't even enough time to get your hair removal finished, generally I see recommendations to have 1 whole year of electrolysis and at least 3 full cycles of hair clearance. That alone is a huge amount of work and time - I had 1 hour electrolysis appointments once a week. When you add in the typical insurance requirements to have been on hormones under the supervision of a doctor for a year and the requirement to get two independent letters from psychologists, you are looking at a lot of appointments with endocrinologists, psychologists, and eventually with the surgery team. It's a lot - so start now if you think you might even possibly want it.
When I socially transitioned I practically promised myself I wouldn't get a vaginoplasty, I only wanted an orchi ... and that position was fully reversed after 6 months of estrogen. I wish I had taken the possibility of a vaginoplasty more seriously, and that I had started hair removal for that much earlier.
Why is the hair removal so important? Is it for removing hair that will be on the internal parts?
The scrotum and phallus skin is removed and used as a skin graft and it becomes the lining of the neovagina. You don't want hair in your neovagina. Besides the obvious discomfort with that, there have been cases where hair in the neovagina leads to infections.
Usually surgeons now will cauterize the follicles they find on the skin graft, but that only addresses the hairs growing in that cycle - you need to have removed the hairs over many cycles so new ones don't come in after the surgery. That's why it's best to have cleared all the hair with electrolysis across several cycles - ideally over an entire year (even longer than that would be better because the following year you can kill any that were missed the first year).