Just another status update

Hi blog. I'm supper fucking exhausted right now so hopefully this post isn’t too incoherent. Seriously, I fell like I got hit by a truck. Not much to report since the last post. When I went to work on Thursday there was a card in a sealed envelope waiting for me. I opened it up and it was from my boss, saying to take care of myself and wishing me luck on my transition. My day couldn’t have started any better. I've said it before, but my boss really is the sweetest lady ever.

My wife and I are getting along good. She was at her parents house the last few days and I had it all to myself. We will be moving into our separate parts of the house in the next few days now which is going to be a bit of work. My upper body strength is NOT what it used to be so I'm wondering how moving all this furniture around is going to go.

We had a friend over today to look at the condo and to see if he wants to move in. Looks like he probably will which is awesome as quite frankly he's the only person who we'd let in here. That will allow me to save money, which is something I really need to do.  (And my wife and I both think it will be kind of fun.)

As he left he mentioned that he was worried about me. I'm worried about me too and I think I'm trying to go way to fast in regards to my transition. It's something my therapist has brought up a couple times as well. I really need to give myself time to get comfortable with myself and to work shit out. Also as I mentioned in my last post, I'm starting to worry about not being able to pass as male in guy mode. I have a long way to go in regards to that, but as I begin to look more androgynous and my chest growth becomes more prominent (seriously, those little things are perky) this is bothering me a lot.

Is there a middle ground? I'm really not sure and this is just one of the reasons I need to slow the fuck down before I make a decision that I'll regret later. It must be nice to wake up in the morning and not have to think about what gender you are. Anyway, before I make any kind of permanent alterations to my body outside of the effects of HRT I'm really going to have to learn to accept myself as a bigenderd person.

I think the new game plan will consist of doing electrolysis over the next several months and then after I've saved up another 4 grand I'll do another round of laser resurfacing. I figure this will give me over a year to mull things over and to get well mentally with therapy and all that. (Well, I'll probably always be in therapy but I mean that I'll hopefully be in a better place.)

That's about it for the moment. Now I'm going to go play stupid video games until I feel like going to bed.  Weeeeeee.

Oh, NPR might want to interview me. Another day in the life.

Paige

Post OP Report

Ello! I am typing this without my glasses on, (more on that later) and I'm on pain killers so I'll do my best to keep this post as readable and coherent as I can.

Yesterday I finally had laser resurfacing done! I was put under general anesthesia and the procedure took about an hour to do. The OR staff was friendly and professional and I felt like I was in good hands. All in all it was a great experience.

The OR nurse who went over my pre-op stuff was super nice and she had bad acne when she was younger and has had laser resurfacing also. She said she was in her mid 40's which blew my mind as I would have guessed that she was in her mid 30's. Then the anesthesiologist came and and he refereed to me as Page. When he left the room the OR nurse looked at my sheepishly and told me that she would let him know what my actual name was, and I had to explain to her that I went by both. I think she figured it out after that.

They took pictures of my face and put me into the OR room. There was this weird blanket that was like a sheet with an air bag in the middle of it which had warm air cycling through it. When it was on me it felt like a light cloud of warm, comfy awesomeness. I want one of those for the house. The doc told me that he was going to put me to sleep and I told him to go for it; I didn’t get much sleep the night before and I was looking forward to the nap.

The next thing I knew I woke up in the recovery room and it felt like my face was on fire. The nurse keeps giving me phenergan and it took a while to get the pain under control. The nurse was surprised at how quick I recovered after that. Then I went home and now I'm living like a recluse until my face is all healed.

<Random note – When people go under general anesthesia they sometimes say silly stuff. When I asked the nurse if I said anything she said no, but when they wheeled me out from the OR to the recovery room I outstretched my arms like I was a plane and flying, which is actually keeping in character for me.>

As for my current status, after the really bad pain I had coming out of the surgery my face has only hurt a little bit yesterday and today hardly at all. I have awesome pain meds so that's helping of course, but I bet that by tomorrow I wont need them at all. Facial swelling is part of the healing process for this procedure and the nurse said that I might not be able to see that well by the third day, but I've been sleeping with my head elevated and I'm taking Motrin to help with that. Right now it is a bit swollen, but just barely.

My face is red, raw and it looks like it's covered with rows of thousands of tiny dots. That's where the laser drilled those tiny holes to stimulate collagen production. For the first three days I have to keep my face slathered with bacitracin, and after that I have to keep it coated with aquaphor. I can't let my face become dry until the skin is healed, otherwise it will scab and that would be very, very bad.

My face is also slowly leaking serous fluid which is yucky, but that's all part of the healing process. I wash it (carefully) once in the AM and again before I go to bed. Then maybe twice during the course of the day I apply gauze dunked it a cold water/vinegar solution. It feels really awesome and it wipes away some of the old goop on my face so that I can apply fresh goop.

Although my face is all gross right now, looking in the mirror I can plainly see that me skin is going to be MUCH smoother than it was before. The Doc said to expect a 30-40 percent improvement, but I think it's going to be like 40-50. Over the course of the next five months my face will continue to heal and produce collagen, so it wont look it's best until about 5 months have passed. That means that over time it's going to look even better, and for once I feel really good about my face. (Or my future face anyway.) I'm very optimistic and I bet that if I was to do this again in a couple years that after the next treatment my skin would look flawless. I was so worried before I had the procedure, but now I think it's going to work out better than I could have hoped it would. (Hurray!!!)

I had a bunch of plans to keep myself busy over the course of the next two weeks. One thing I didn’t count on was the fact that I can't wear my glasses seeing how the skin on my nose was laser-ed off along with the rest of my face. I'm blind as a bat without them so playing video games, cleaning, reading, watching movies and typing are now very difficult. (My face is like 5 inches from my monitor as I write this post.) My first follow up appt will be on Monday afternoon and I'll find out then when I can wear them again, probably after the first week I'm guessing.

I have to be careful not to get food on my face so everything I eat has to be cut up into little portions. I'm trying this weight watchers thing now where I have a shake for breakfast and lunch and then a 500 calorie dinner, so eating two meals through a straw makes things easier for me.

<Random thought – So my shakes are chocolate flavored. When the hell did chocolate start to taste so damn good? I don't know if it's the hormones effecting me in a weird way or what but hot damn.>

Speaking of food, I'm really hungry and it's time for supper. I just wanted to check in really quick. I'm very, very happy right now. =)

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The next step

Hello Blog! It's been a while so let's recap. Uh, I've been sick and I haven’t been doing much of anything as a result. Well! Now that we're all caught up lets get to the big news. In two days I finally get my laser resurfacing. I have always been extremely self conscious about my acne and then my subsequent acne scaring. I lived with it as a male but now it's become intolerable and I'm fucking doing something about it. Rar!

I know I've mentioned this before, but this is a very important step for me. I'm soooooo fucking nervous. Nervous that something might go wrong and my face gets even more screwed up and also nervous that after I've healed it'll hardly makes a difference. (And I'm down four grand. =P) I'm trying to keep my expatiation’s low but if this doesn’t make a big difference in my complexion I don't know what I'm going to do.

I am burning all my vacation time for this, so I will have two weeks where I'll be confined to the house. (Which is a tiny condo under 600 square feet.) I'm hoping that after the first week I won't look like a radiation burn victim anymore and I'll be able to go outside at night to walk around without scaring too many children. I'm going to have to avoid sun exposure like the plague for something like six months after the procedure. I don't mind that too much since I'm pretty nocturnal anyway, but I still like to get out and go hiking and shit so that's going to be annoying.

I haven’t been able to exercise for like a week and I've been eating like crap up until today, and since I'm not supposed to exert myself until two weeks after the procedure I'm trying the weight-watchers “two shakes a day” thing. If it works OK for me I just might keep doing it. Then I can have fish, water and salad for dinner. =) I swear to the godess, after only one week of slacking off I look fatter. =(

So tomorrow after work I'm stocking up on any remaining supplies that I need and then vacation begins! Sort of. Kind of sucks that this will be my vacation for the year, but I have to do it. I plan on cleaning every square inch of the house to maintain my sanity. I'll also watch MST3K, old monster movies, play video games, do lot's of reading and meditate. I have a couple book series that I need to catch up with, so despite the fact that my face is going to be raw, painful and disgusting I'm looking forward to it. By the end though I'll probably be half crazed and desperate to go back to work.

RANDOM NOTE – My cat is snoring loudly right now. It's super cute.

Anyway, in the event that I die for some bizarre reason on the operating table I want everyone to know that I have no regrets and also that the moneys in the. . Blarrrg . . .

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