My Shockingly Easy Top Surgery Recovery
Part 2: My time in the OR and the first week post-op.
This is an archived piece that was originally published to my Medium in June of 2023. Why I am moving my archive to Substack.
Should I write a one-year follow-up in June of this year?? Let me know!!
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On June 1st, 2023, I received a double-incision, bilateral mastectomy with no nipple grafts from Dr. Lawrence Iteld, a private plastic surgeon, at the 900 N. Michigan Surgical Center here in Chicago, Illinois.
In my last entry in this series, I explained what motivated my choice to undergo gender affirming top surgery, why it took me so long to arrive at that decision despite knowing for years that I was trans, and how I went about selecting my surgeon and procedure. You can read all about that process in the piece here:
My Completely Quotidian Top Surgery Experience
Part 1: Why it took me so damn long to just let myself live. Plus: why are plastic surgeons better at gender affirming…
At the time of this writing, it’s been one week since my surgery, and I could not be more pleased with Dr. Iteld’s work, the support of his staff and the 900 N. Michigan surgical team, my rate of healing, or my results. I look fantastic, I am in no pain and essentially never was, my energy levels are high, and I’m outright stunned at how easy and frictionless this entire process has been.
This is going to be an uncharacteristically positive essay for me. It’s a fresh challenge for me as a writer to have nothing but positive things to say. To people who have lived with surgical complications, slow, painful recovery periods, or transition regret, my story might even feel like gloating. But in a world where transphobic activists and fear-mongering gender critical journalists have penned hundreds of thousands of words about the supposed dangers of gender transition, and at a time when many of those words have found their way into legislation attacking trans people’s ability to exist in public, I think a happy, humdrum story about a pleasant, transition has value.
So let’s dive right into it:
Pre-Surgery Preparations
In the weeks leading up to surgery, I really did follow the advice of Dr. Iteld and his office to the letter: I stopped drinking alcohol or consuming weed two weeks before surgery, I didn’t take any medications except my testosterone, I avoided cigarette smoke, and I hydrated like a motherfucker.
I also did significant research online and spoke to many trans people in my who already had this type of surgery to ask for their tips. I bought a wedge pillow online and practiced sleeping on my back, I moved all my pills and personal care items down from the cabinets, into containers I could reach easily, I did a thorough cleaning of my house and sanitized my bathroom, I picked up all my prescriptions early, I got anti-bacterial soap for my pre-op shower, and I stocked up on high protein, high fiber snacks.
I also maintained my usual exercise regime, lifting weights for half an hour per day five days per week, and tried to eat high-protein, high-fiber meals so I’d have plenty of energy and keep my bowels moving after I woke up from anesthesia. Post-operative constipation was one of my biggest fears, as silly as that might sound, and so the day before my procedure I was slamming down apples and chugging bottles of water with a fury.
On the evening before my operation, I began fasting at midnight, took a shower with anti-bacterial soap as I’d been instructed to, and then laid down for an anxious night’s sleep.
Surgery Day
My operation was scheduled for 7:30 am, with a check-in of 6:30 am.
Dr. Iteld’s office had instructed me to take two different prescriptions three hours prior to my surgery: Aprepitant, a hard-core anti-nausea medication, and Celecoxib, an anti-inflammatory, so I woke up at 4:30am to take both of those. I showered once more using anti-bacterial Dial, got dressed in a loose button-up shirt and comfy shorts as I’d been told to do, and then my partner and I took a Lyft downtown to the surgical center.
After completing check-in and saying goodbye to my partner, I was escorted back to my recovery room at 900 N. Michigan. The space was beautiful, with a huge view of downtown Chicago glimmering in the rising sunlight. I changed into a surgical gown, grippy socks, and a hairnet, stored all my belongings in a locker, and was greeted by my nurse, Talia, an incredibly warm alt-girl type with a sleeve of tattoos and aviator-style glasses tucked into a soft asymmetrical braid.
I felt immediately soothed by the presence of Talia. She was very easy to talk to and gentle as she inspected my wrists for a vein and hooked up my IV. After I got settled into bed, she gave me a funny little pat on the feet and went off on her way.
Outside my room, I could hear a group of nurses talking excitedly about Taylor Swift’s upcoming concert.
“Your tickets are worth two thousand dollars and you’re not selling them?” I heard one woman cry out incredulously. “And you paid how much just to stand in the parking lot??”
I leaned back in my hospital bed, closed my eyes, and nearly fell asleep listening to them. I hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before, because of nerves, but as soon as I heard them chatting an eerie calm descended over me.
After a few moments, Dr. Iteld came in, to make his surgical markings on my chest. He seemed bright and in good spirits, and as he adjusted my surgical gown, he made a light joke about keeping my ass covered since he wouldn’t be operating on that part of me. After a few awkward minutes of me T-posing Autistically while he drew on my body and told me to take deep breaths and relax, we were finished, and exchanged a handshake before he went off on his way.
My anesthesiologist came in pretty quickly to introduce himself. He was an affable man with kind eyes and a comforting, collegial tone of voice. After explaining what would happen next, a strong anti-anxiety medication was put into my IV. Another nurse entered the room, and my bed began to be wheeled into the OR.
As soon as the medication hit, I started feeling chatty, so I tried to commiserate with the nurse about Taylor Swift. I probably thought I was more lucid than I actually was. She just laughed politely and told me that yeah, it was a big subject of excitement at the surgical center today.
I remember entering the operating room, and seeing a bright halo of lights behind a half-circle of blue-clad bodies with eyes peeking out from behind surgical masks. My anesthesiologist instructed me to move from the hospital bed onto the operating table, and to make sure my body was centered.
I remember finding that to be an odd challenge, because the operating table was so narrow that one couldn’t help but be centered. It was nothing but center. I began thinking about how hard it would be for someone with a larger body to lay on that table — and then I was gone.
…
While I was gone, my surgeon used a localized nerve blocking injection called Exparel to numb out most of the pain in my chest for the next forty eight-hours. This would prevent me from ever needing to take any narcotic pain medications at any point in my recovery.
My surgeon drew an incision along the top and bottom of my breasts, curving upward into my armpits. He removed several inches of skin, my mammary glands, and most of the underlying area’s fat. The skin from the top of my chest was brought together with the skin from my lower chest, and sutured together in a curve that suggested pectoral muscles. Since my breasts were quite large and my torso is narrow, both sets of incisions had to be joined in the center of my chest, to prevent any puckering.
Long tubes were laid under my skin, leading out of my body through holes in my armpits, out into drains that would continue to suck blood and fluid from my body for the next several days. Some adhesive padding was attached to the center of my chest, to cushion the area where the two incisions joined in the middle of me. A tight-fitting binder was put on over my chest, to hold my newly attached skin in place and discourage swelling. My two drains were clipped onto this binder, where they’d stay all day and night.
The animation below depicts what a standard double incision top surgery procedure looks like in a not-too-graphic way. There’s only one key difference between this depiction and the procedure I received: I didn’t get nipple grafts, and so my nipples were removed at the same time that the rest of my breasts were, and were disposed of.
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I was upright in my bed in the recovery room then, and an older nurse with a sarcastic personality was handing me a cup of ice chips and a spoon. I dug into the ice gratefully, a starving medieval peasant nipping into a pot of gruel. Talia came in, put a hand on my arm, and told me that my partner had been called.
My partner materialized instantly, or so it seemed. Suddenly I was in chair drinking cranberry juice and picking at goldfish crackers that the sarcastic nurse wanted me to eat far more quickly. She and my partner took me to the bathroom. Then I fumbled to get myself dressed, insisting despite their pleas that I could do it myself.
There was a bit of blood on my surgical binder where one tube exited my body. It would need to be monitored, the nurse said, to ensure I wasn’t actively bleeding. The drains pulling fluid and blood from my wounds would need to be regularly emptied, their volume marked down each night in a chart that she handed to us. As soon as I got home, I had antibiotics to take. I finished my juice and nodded dully, thinking I had heard everything but forgetting the bit about the bloody binder instantly. My partner had to remind me about it later.
After that exchange, I became remarkably lucid. I was able to put my shoes on and walk around with ease. The nurse wheeling me down to our Lyft remarked at how normal I seemed.
It was both a hasty recovery and the work of reflexive Autism masking. No matter how tired I am, or how confused, my instinct is to maintain composed control. I even tried micro-managing which type of Lyft my partner ordered, mostly just to seem alert and in control. I was a little slow on my feet but I felt basically fine — and already, I was beginning to fill with euphoria and determination.
Arrival Home
As soon as I arrived home from surgery, I ate an apple and a protein bar, sipped a little bit of decaf coffee, and took an effortless shit. What a relief! The r/TopSurgery subreddit had conditioned me to expect gastic stasis and painful bloating for days on end, but my eager fiber-inhaling and water-drinking had done the trick — as had never taking any opioids.
Since I never had to take serious pain meds, I never felt drugged out, sluggish, depressed, or even particularly tired. I never got nauseated, and I maintained a healthy appetite. From the moment I was home, the anesthesia seemed to be clearing my body, and I felt alert, and ready to tell everyone about how well I was doing.
I filmed this short TikTok video within an hour of getting home. Then I messaged all my friends excitedly about how well everything had gone, called my sister, told my mom, and settled onto the couch to relax and make posts. I took my antibiotic and a Tylenol and sipped more water. I wasn’t having any trouble keeping anything down. There was some tightness in my chest, but otherwise no pain.
After a few hours of resting , I remembered there was one item my doctor had recommended that I’d forgotten to buy: multivitamins. I was feeling completely comfortable by then, and amped with excitement, so I suggested to my partner that we try walking to the Target three blocks away from our house.
Walking on hard pavement with fresh wounds did feel a bit odd. Each step jostled what I imagined to be raw carnage under my binder, distributing dull, sloshy vibrations beneath the skin. I had to move slowly, but we got to the store and back with no issues. My surgeon’s office had encouraged me to engage in light movement, as it hastens healing, and I was glad to already be up for it.
At around 5 pm, my partner began cooking dinner, and I started reading a book that I owed an author a blurb for. There I was, hypocrite of an anti-work author, elated just a few hours after surgery to be capable of doing work. Forgive me, everyone, but I enjoy this type of stuff, and my brain is a harried creature that demands activity.
A friend who’d previously undergone top surgery had warned me not to eat anything too spicy, as it might irritate a throat that had just recovered from having a breathing tube shoved deep inside it. But for some reason, I felt no soreness whatsoever. My honest guess is that my throat is pretty well practiced for that kind of thing. I ate a dinner of roasted veggies and seasoned chicken thighs with no issues.
As we ate, my partner and I watched All Man, a 2022 documentary about the gay men’s fashion magazine International Male. The film was an absolute delight, spanning three decades of sartorial and queer history with a genuine affection that simultaneously didn’t shy away from acknowledging the magazine’s mismanagement and racism. I highly recommend it.
After finishing the film, I tried to find a comfortable sleeping position. I ended up propping up both my head and my legs on the couch, using stuffed animals as a bumper to keep me from rolling to my side in my sleep. I knocked out within a few minutes.
Day 1 Post-Op
The next day, I had a 9 am post-operative appointment with my surgeon. I woke early, and with some help from my partner I brushed my teeth, took my antibiotic and Celebrex, got dressed in a fresh button-up, and got into a Lyft to Dr. Iteld’s office. Opening doors was the hardest part — in order to not strain my chest muscles, I had to grab every door handle with both hands and then pull it open using all my body weight and a T-Rex-type grip.
At my appointment, Dr. Iteld told me that my surgery had been a success, and informed me that my incisions had needed to be joined in the middle (I hadn’t seen my results, and wasn’t aware of this yet). I shared that I was feeling shockingly well overall, with no real pain to speak of. Aside from the discomfort of the tight binder and the tension from healing incisions that begged not to be strained, I didn’t really have much to complain about. I already had about 65% of my usual energy back.
I asked Dr. Iteld how much pain I could expect to be in, once the nerve blocking injection wore off in a few days. He shrugged it off. “Similar to the muscle ache after a workout,” he said. “You shouldn’t need to take anything for it.”
Then it was time to take off my binder and get a brief look under the hood:
I was absolutely elated by the results. I’d been cut open less than twenty-four hours prior, yet I had no bruising or swelling. Very little fluid was needing to be pulled from my drains — only about 15 millileters per side per day, and my chest didn’t look puffy at all. The curve of my incisions was exactly the way I wanted it. I looked completely flat, but not concave, and I didn’t mind my scars being joined together at the center at all whatsoever. The overall effect of the incision pattern was a masculine, natural-seeming chest contour.
Dr. Iteld put my binder back on me and told me that I was clear to take a shower.
“Do I take the binder off when I shower?”
“Of course,” he said casually. “We take our clothes off when we shower, right? Just keep it on the rest of the time. Come back in a week and we’ll take the drains out. You look great.”
I left the appointment feeling energized and delighted — and already far less fragile. I decided to walk to the train station and ride the Red Line home rather than Lyfting, because I felt up to it.
After I got back home, my friend Maddie and I streamed for three hours on my Twitch channel. We talked about my experience with surgery, Maddie’s experience taking care of her spouse who’d had the same procedure, and then we just chatted about the latest Twitter discourse and current events. By the end of the stream I was yawning a ton and running out of steam, but I was elated to have been feeling well enough to do it.
After my stream, my partner and I walked to Carol’s, a bar a few blocks away. I inhaled a massive chicken sandwich and an order of pickle chips. My back began to ache after sitting at the table for a while — from under the binder my posture was cramped and unnatural, and my deltoids were having to compensate for work my chest muscles couldn’t do. We walked home. I played Fortnite with my sister for a bit while laid out on the couch, and then I went to sleep.
Day 2 Post-Op
The next day, my partner and I rode the train to a coffee shop and spent an hour out on the patio, sipping beverages and answering emails. I continued reading a book that I owed yet another author a blurb for. Then we went to visit CAKE, the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo.
We spent about two hours altogether at CAKE. I was able to walk around the exhibition hall, sit in on a panel on self-publishing, and catch up with a few friends before I started feeling a bit winded and needed a break. After that my partner and I bought pizza at a shop around the corner, walked another couple of blocks to the train, and went home.
I also was able to take a shower on Day 2. Taking the binder off terrified me, even with my partner’s help, but I was relieved when my upper torso didn’t detach from the rest of my body and fall to the floor the way it felt that it would. It was affirming to send photos of my flat, blank chest to friends and family, and to see my partner’s excited reaction to it, though.
Many surgeons instruct their top surgery patients not to lift their arms above their head at all for weeks following surgery, but Dr. Iteld told me that he wants me to be able to maintain full range of motion. I’m allowed to gently, slowly raise my arms to do things like wash my hair, grab lightweight items, put on t-shirts, and stretch.
My armpits felt tender and my incisions yelped with faint alarm whenever I over-extended myself, but with gradual encouragement, my range of motion grew more and more each day. Using my arms helped take the strain off my back and shoulders, and within a few days, I was able to wash simple dishes, grab items from on top of the refrigerator, and put away groceries again.
Day 3 Post-Op
On Day 3, I visited CAKE yet again, this time with a close friend, Integra. We drove up in the afternoon, then ran into another buddy of mine, the writer and queer comics expert Devin. The three of us spent a few hours wandering around the hall and chatting various artists and booksellers up.
The day was mostly uneventful other than that. I took another brief walk, I watched Alien 3 on Discord with some friends in the evening, and I ordered Taco Bell . The numbing injections I’d been given by Dr. Iteld during surgery began to wear off, but I didn’t feel any significant pain. The only notable change was a growing awareness of the tubes at the sides of my body.
The drain sites in my armpits were beginning to itch. A few times I had to remind myself not to smack them or scratch them. Whenever a bit of fluid got caught within the tubes in my chest, I noticed an quiet, unusual rumbling sensation. Some top surgery patients describe this as agony. But it didn’t really bother me. I just found it curious.
I kept waiting and waiting for the intense discomfort that other patients spoke about to arrive, but it never really came. All I can attribute this to is my having a high pain tolerance — as well as a great surgeon who prevented pain rather than medicating it away.
Day 4 Post-Op
On Day 4, my partner went back to work, and my activity level went up considerably. I hadn’t been cooking or doing dishes at all up to this point, but while they were away teaching, I did make us both smoothies and washed a few cups and plates. I made us coffee, answered emails, and started grading assignments in the Developmental Psych course I’m teaching this semester.
From Day 4 onward, my energy levels were back to 100%. I began to miss weight lifting, and craved movement and activity. In the middle of the afternoon, I took a significantly long walk, about two miles round trip from my home to Lincoln Square and back. An episode of the True Anon podcast about the Jeffrey Epstein / U.S. Virgin Islands lawsuit kept me company while I did.
When I got back from my walk, I tried helping my partner with making dinner, but they mostly shooed me away. I did wash a few of the less labor-intensive dishes, and tried sweeping the kitchen — that latter choice was probably a mistake. You never realize how much chest strength goes into an activity like sweeping until your skin has been pulled taught across the muscles and sewn back on.
That night, I felt acutely aware of the tubes running along the insides of my body. I was started to feel eager to have them taken out. But I found that I could easily offload any discomfort or annoyance I experienced by keeping my mind busy. So I continued reading and began outlining a new essay that I wanted to write, and then I went off to bed.
Day 5 Post-Op
I woke up on Day 5 feeling positively elated. My back was loose, my discomfort was nonexistent, my body looked fabulous, and there was only one day left before my drains would be removed! Even with all the hassle and discomfort of carrying around a sliced-open body covered in a bunch of bulky surgical garments, I was already feeling lighter than I’d ever felt with boobs.
Throughout my recovery process, I’d been catching my silhouette in the mirror and oohing and ahhing at what I saw. I had thought I already looked pretty flat-chested and masculine with a binder on before this, but the change following surgery was dramatic.
My back looked so bulky in comparison to the front of me now! Shirts laid perfectly across the plain of my chest! I’d never felt so attractive, even wearing a blood-stained, sweaty surgical binder for nearly a week straight. I was fucking hot, goddammit. Hot and free. I was eager to unleash my chest upon the world, but dammit, I was already enjoying incredible relief.
I got a lot of work done on Day 5 because I was feeling so euphoric. I answered emails, I did an interview with a queer, Autistic podcast, and I drafted up most of this piece. I went to bed absolutely amped to get my drains pulled out of me.
Day 6 Post-Op
On Day 6 I returned to Dr. Iteld’s office to have my drains removed! It was a completely painless process that took about five minutes. A clinical nurse snipped the sutures holding my drain tubes in place, pulled them out, and then held a bit of gauze to each armpit to catch a few drops of leaking fluid. I couldn’t even feel the tubing leaving my body. From what I’ve read, this is common. Most people aren’t at all bothered by this step.
Removing the drains increased my arm mobility and comfort almost instantly. On a subconscious level, I no longer felt the need to lean forward or cradle myself, or to look out for the tubes getting caught on anything. My chest felt less restricted, and stretching out to my full posture no longer felt dangerous.
The nurse also removed the padding from the inside of my binder at this appointment, but told me that I should continue wearing the binder for two more weeks. In two weeks’ time, I could also remove the sticky surgical mesh that’s currently still lining my incisions. She gave me a package of surgical adhesive removal wipes to clean myself off with when the time has come.
Dr. Iteld popped in for a quick visit during this appointment, and we both took a minute to marvel at my results. He was clearly proud of his work and how it looked on me, and I was happy to tell him that my chest was already exactly everything I had imagined it could be.
When you have unwanted breasts, you have to strain to picture what your torso truly looks like underneath. You can push your boobs around, or try holding them back with tape, or you can take pictures of your body from above while lying down, and all those things can help you approximate how your top surgery results might look. But there’s nothing like the real thing. And with a procedure like double incision, your surgeon really has a lot of control over the shape you ultimately end up with.
I now have the kind of chest I’ve always envisioned. I couldn’t have conjured a better result for myself if I’d asked an artist friend to create it from nothingness. It’s as if my upper torso has been completely redrawn, unbound by the constraints of what had once been there before and how long I lived with it. Reshaping the chest and contouring incision lines is an art made manifest by science, and I have to say I’m blown away by Dr. Iteld’s execution of both realms of work.
Without my drains or binder padding in the way anymore, I could touch my chest far more easily, and became aware for the first time of just how numb the skin covering that area really was. My fingers could trace the lines of my pectoral muscles, all the way down to the first crease of my belly, but none of the skin in that region could touch my fingers back.
Apparently it can take a year or more for the nerves in the chest to fully regrow, and some top surgery patients on Reddit state they never got full sensation back, even after 3 or 4 years. The uncanniness of not being able to feel one’s chest being touched apparently freaks some patients out a great deal, but so far it doesn’t bother me. I can understand why it’s a bummer, particularly in sexual or sensual situations, but for now I’m so downright pleased by running my palms across the flat plane of my chest that I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything.
I also still have a mildly pleasant sensation of phantom nipples on either side of my body; specifically, I can feel where my nipples would be if I were binding and they were compressed. When I rub the area where my nipples would be under a binder, I can feel mild erotic stimulation. Only time will tell where those nerve endings will choose to grow, since I don’t have any nipples anymore, or if I’ll regain full sensation at all.
After my appointment with Dr. Iteld ended, I walked the full four miles from his office back to my home. My back was no longer troubling me; my incisions no longer strained when I moved. I could lift my arms easily, bend over with no discomfort, and stride at my usual breakneck pace. I was able to cook dinner on my own for the first time on this day, and stopped needing much help with household tasks. My only remaining limitation was that I couldn’t lift anything over eight pounds or lift weights for another month.
Day 7 Post-Op
The night of Day 6, I returned to sleeping in my bed. I brought my wedge pillow with me back to the bed, and I tried to keep sleeping on my back the entire night, but I found it difficult to stay asleep, and my partner noticed me rolling onto my sides a few times. When I woke up in the morning, the incisions on my sides hurt from the weight I’d been putting on them.
Sleeping flat on my back just does not feel natural for me. I need to feel pressure on the front of my torso and my sides to be able to relax, and I like shoving my face into a pillow to block out any traces of light. I might have to return to sleeping semi-upright on the couch moving forward — or just surround myself with pillows and stuffed animals and wear a sleep mask in the bed.
Now that I no longer had surgical padding inside the binder to serve as a buffer, I was acutely aware of the rough-textured zipper at the front of the garment. It irritated my incision lines and bunched up along my sternum in a distracting way. Eventually figured out I could relieve much of this pressure by wearing a tight old sports bra underneath. Seeing a bra I normally associated with a high dysphoria day laid completely flat across my chest was a real trip.
Fourteen days, I reminded myself whenever the combination started feeling too tight. Fourteen days. I would need to spend two weeks reckoning with the final boss of chest binders to come out completely free on the other side.
My seventh day post-op was otherwise uneventful. I made coffee, Maddie and I did a livestream interview with Vaneet Mehta, the author of the book Bisexual Men Exist, I took a walk, and I made plans for the next few days. It was Midsommarfest weekend here in Chicago, and I was ready to spend a full day walking around in the sun and sipping overpriced brews. I hadn’t had substances in weeks and I was ready to throw back a little bit and dance.
Aside from the temporary annoyance of wearing the binder, my body felt completely unencumbered and light. Every time I slipped on a shirt, I was astonished at how simply good I looked. My shoulders were so broad now. My physique was such an unmistakably masculine V. Every article of clothing laid perfectly on me, and my nude chest looked even better.
Being gender dysphoric had always been so complicated. There were special garments I had to wear, silhouettes to avoid, necklines that never worked, stances I had to take, postures that betrayed me, limitations to how long I could be out in public, and activities I couldn’t comfortably do, like running or climbing or swimming. That was all over now. Everything was so simple. I could just be. And it was only going to get easier, as my healing progressed.
Top Surgery is So So Not a Big Deal
I hope that for readers who are contemplating top surgery, and particularly for the parents of trans kids, my play-by-play of the first week post-op can lend you a little perspective, and help you understand that a future life of gender euphoria is well worth a few days of itchy drain sites and sleeping upright. No matter how much poison TERFs try to pour in your ear, top surgery is so so not a big deal. It doesn’t have to be, anyway.
Even within the trans community, we have a bias toward sharing our negative outcomes and cautioning other people to not bump up against too much danger on the road to becoming ourselves. It’s understandable that we do this. Our enemies depict the trans community as a manipulative cult that grooms children into transitioning and understates the possibility of regret.
But in our desperation to be even-handed and acknowledge risk openly, we wind up speaking quite a lot about the limits and negatives to our various surgeries without letting ourselves truly savor the benefits. Anybody who has ever researched a gender-affirming procedure can tell you that there’s plenty of information online about the absolute ceiling of pain and dissatisfaction a patient might reach. Yet there’s comparatively little exploration of the floor.
When deciding to undergo a gender affirming surgery, it is important to be aware of the worst possible outcomes. But if you aren’t also cognizant of the best possible way that things could go, and how common that positive outcome is, well, then there’s far less incentive to transition in the first place. And that’s what transphobes (even the mild ones who call themselves allies) want.
The fact is this: if I had known that undergoing top surgery could be this easy, and the results could feel this fantastic even one week out, I would have pursued it years earlier than I did. I wouldn’t have assumed that a swift recovery was at all guarnteed. I just would have been able to see surgical transition as life-affirming rather than life-jeopardizing, a means of expressing hope and seizing control over my body rather than a dangerous ordeal to endure.
Getting top surgery is not all doom and gloom and months of discomfort. Sometimes, a lot of the time really, it can feel radically better than being dysphoric from the very moment you wake up.
This piece was one of the factors that pushed me to actually get surgery (including a very clarifying ketamine trip). Went under this morning and touchwood so far I seem to be having a similar experience to you! Thank you for writing this one, and also for your more recent writings on gender/detransition - makes it a lot less scary when I know I can just be feminine or even a woman if I ever feel drawn to it :)