One Night in Bangkok

So little

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 10:08:01 -0600

For having achieved a goal that was such a HUGE driving factor in my life, so little has changed in the day-to-day that it has just hit me again, I’m post-op.

Little Triumphs

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 14:13:14 -0600

Been a while since I updated again, but nothing terribly significant has been going on, recovery-wise. Our dryer was broken the week before last, so I ran out of clean skirts. I was able to wear pants without too much discomfort, so that was good news. My dilation continues apace. Every now and then I miss a session, but I get in at least two sessions each day. The only ill effects from going a day or two at two sessions instead of three is that dilation gets more painful as some narrowing occurs, but I don’t lose any depth, so that’s more good news. Today my fiancee’s therapist asked me to sit in with one of her clients (with the client’s permission) to consult with them about their possible gender issues. This is huge because I love to help people and this is a great chance to really help someone, and because it’ll get me out of the house for a little while, and the bonus is that she’s going to pay me as a consultant.

This last bit is TMI using anatomical terms, so I’m putting it below the fold.I’ve had stabbing and scratching pains around my clitoral hood since I got home. Exploring things a bit I found that the ends of stitches, done with very stiff thread that almost looks like thick nylon fishing line, were jabbing into me. After a couple of weeks I finally got fed up with this and decided to try tugging at the ends that were causing problems. I pulled out a thread that was about 2.5 inches. It slid out easily, without the pain I felt when I tugged on the other threads. I also pulled a piece that was about a half inch long. Since then I’ve been healing up, and while there was a little blood, there has been no more scratching, very little jabbing from the threads that are still anchored in me, and the pain is gradually going away.

Been a week or so

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 14:02:58 -0500

I missed my fiancee pretty much the entire time I was away in Indiana helping friends. I missed cuddling him. I missed our weekend visit with my best friend and her husband. I missed our simple evenings together. Even so, it sure felt good to get to help a few of the family of my heart. Felt even better coming home to my guy in our house knowing the family of my heart was probably doing a little better for my visits.

While I was in Indiana, we did a little shopping therapy because it feels nice to get out of the house, it was a good way to spend time, and the specific shopping we did got my friend thinking about ways to better secure her house. Since we were in the home improvement aisle I picked up a shower head that mimics the brand name shower head my fiancee has been drooling over and I got the internals for a toilet tank, since our toilet is flushing poorly. You have to hold the handle down to make sure the bowl flushes completely. When I tried to turn off the valve leading to the toilet, it wouldn’t turn all the way off, and it began leaking after the attempt. Our fix-it guy is pretty good, got the valve working again without doing anything to the plumbing, but he recommended we get a new toilet for the flushing issue. Apparently you can’t get 3 gallon flapper valves anymore since everything has gone toward more water efficient flushes, and that’s the reason the toilet won’t flush right. Owning a home is going to be so much fun!

I have to admit, it’s hard for me having to call a fix-it guy. I nearly have the knowledge to knock this house down and rebuild from scratch, but I no longer have the physical strength nor endurance to even change out a toilet, a job that is very slightly more difficult than changing a light bulb if physical strength weren’t an issue. I know I could do this myself if my body would let me, and that’s becoming a rather bitter pill for me. If I were healthier, I could move the wall between the kitchen and bathroom three feet to make the bathroom amazing. I’d put the door in between the house and the garage with ease. It would be no problem to fix the four facing boards on the roof that were improperly flashed and are starting to rot. I could make this little red ranch a palace, if I only I weren’t so hampered by my Fibromyalgia. Instead it’s painful for me to lie in one position for too long, and I’m beginning to wonder how much of my life will have to be lived reclined or supine.

This, of course, brings me to medical stuff, so I’ll just put all that below the fold.I was dismayed to discover that the source of the pain under my hood is a number of stitches in the area scraping things up. It hurts quite a lot, but at least now I know the cause. Also a large portion of the deepest parts of my surgical area have gone stark white. I sent photos of this to my surgeon and his liaison informed me that everything looks fine for this stage of my healing, but it certainly made me tense for a short while. Other than that, I’ve moved up to the largest size dilator for my stretches. The stretches themselves are going pretty good.

The Breakin and Hormones

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 13:09:04 -0500

Audrey is my friend whose husband drove them and another friend three hours to move our stuff, and who took a bus to take care of me for the first week that I was home. She went to visit her friends who live an hour away and returned home to discover that someone had broken in and taken her Wii, a laptop, and a jar of change. With this sort of crime it’s not so much the stuff she lost as it is the sudden knowledge that her home is not safe. It was Tuesday when she gave me a call just to talk, and I drove down here to be her watchdog for the week.

Audrey is a part of the Family of my Heart. We LGBT folks tend to lose the families we’re born into, or have those most personal of relationships change deeply when we come out. We replace the structure lost with a new structure of friends who have similar experiences or are otherwise more open to us out here on the fringes of society, this is what I call the Family of my Heart. The Family of my Heart includes my fiancee, Audrey, a little sister who is an LGBT activist, her room mate who works in a school for the deaf, and now Frances who I met and connected with in Thailand, and who lives about a three hour drive from us in Chicago.

Nobody messes with my family and gets away with it, not if I can help it in any way. Unfortunately I did not get my hands on the person who broke in and stole her things, but at least I was able to return some portion of comfort to her life. She and her husband are taking measures to make their house more secure now, so after a brief visit to my little sister who lives an hour away, I’ll get to head home to my fiancee who I’ve been away from for too long.

This brings me to the TMI stuff, so I’ll put it below the fold.

I’ve been really lucky with hormones. When I went to the doctor to request hormones, we took a baseline and it turned out that my blood chemistry was a little less than normal for a cisgendered woman, a woman who was born physically female. Transgendered women tend to get some portion of PMS-like symptoms and/or puberty-like situations when they start hormones, but I never experienced any of that. The people around me have attested to my stunning lack of symptoms aside from the feminization of my physical form that the hormones were supposed to accomplish. Well, starting Tuesday morning, I think my symptomless treatment all changed.

Monday night, at the age of 32, I had my first ever erotic dream. My fiancee and I enjoyed each other’s company greatly, through space and time in the way only dreams can currently move. It was fantastic. When I woke on Tuesday morning, I was still aroused, and I was having trouble controlling myself. I spent most of the day, up until Audrey called, trying to settle down somehow. No matter what I tried I couldn’t calm myself, and this is a little dangerous for someone in their first three months after GRS (Gender Reassignment Surgery).

For the first three months, quite a bit of the anatomy the surgeon gave me is still held together with stitches. These will dissolve on their own as they’re no longer needed, but until then I need to try to avoid shifting those things that are still held for fear of both undoing his work and reopening my surgical wounds. With arousal, parts of my new anatomy swell and shift, just like a cisgendered woman’s anatomy. I was bleeding from places no woman should ever bleed, and I was in more than a little pain, but I couldn’t reign in the arousal, partly because I had never dealt with a libido.

At the time I suspected I had been taking too much estrogen after my surgery, but I thought it could also be my natural response to having been home for a week and a couple days, and having the house to ourselves for three days since Audrey and company left the Saturday before. It could be that having the house to ourselves and relaxing; having the opportunity to be alone together, my body was responding in ways it was denied for the first two years of our relationship. We had fooled around a bit before, but only gotten to third base because I would become frustrated with our inability to proceed any further; there was no way to get my fiancee to where I needed him. It’s been a rough couple of years in that department.

I did a bunch of research about hormone treatment, specifically after surgery, on Tuesday and found that doctors tend to reduce estrogen intake after surgery. I spoke with Audrey, who has gained a decent knowledge of pharmaceutical treatment through dealing with her medical problems, and I spoke with my fiancee, and we figured I might try backing off the hormones for a week. My hormone dosage was light for a transgendered woman undergoing transition. Backing off my dosage means cutting my intake by one tablet, but this also mean cutting my intake by half. We’re on the fourth day of my new self-prescribed dosing schedule and things are going fine. I’m going to have my doctor check my blood chemistry once I can get back in for a checkup.

Healing and Friends (again)

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 23:59:59 -0500

Yesterday I was reflecting again on what amazing friends I have. The same group that drove three hours to move my fiancee and my stuff from our rented house to our new house was visiting me. The two girls had been with me since I got home, they came up the day before I got home to hang out with Noel a bit before the welcome home party, and they stayed the week to take care of me. They made sure I didn’t have to do anything around the house for the week, which was nice because I wasn’t able to do much around the house; I had underestimated how much I would need to recover from the flight home. It’s a little frustrating, well more than a little, having done so well towards the end of my trip to Thailand, only to have so much of the ground I had gained pulled away from me by a bad six-hour flight.

The friends I have made since I started participating in the furry community, and since I started trying to be more active in the LGBT community. It’s amazing how fast you can make friends when you share interests or experiences. Heck, I spent the afternoon chatting with another artist whose work I’ve admired for years and years, and I’m marrying an artist whose work I’ve loved for even longer. The lady who came to help me for this past week is a straight ally of her LGBT friends. Such wonderful people all around.

As usual, TMI stuff is under the fold

I’ve been having this weird stinging, itching pain at the top of the surgical site, about the same area where I found a stitch still in. It looked like nylon string, not the blue auto-dissolving stuff. I took it out and I think things are getting better. Dilating, on the other hand, is getting more difficult. It’s more painful and takes longer to get to depth where I can finally start. I need to get the dilator to my usual full depth before I can start the fifteen minute exercises. There’s a muscle wall that’s giving me all the trouble, and I figure I’m either walking too much, or I’m entering the two or three month phase when it becomes more tough to dilate. I was hoping to get to the large dilator before hitting that phase.

Gimp.

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 08:46:10 -0500

I love having great people around me. I dearly miss Frances, but I just went downstairs to wake up Audrey and Eva, so we can go out for breakfast and after exchanging our morning pleasantries, Audrey got on me about wanting to carry our small load of whites up on my way so I could fold clothes while I wait for everyone to get ready. I’m not medicated yet, so it pretty much hurts to move just about anything, and she knows this, so it was all out of concern for me, but after the two or three weeks, actually I think it was almost four weeks if you include the hospital stay, convalescing in Thailand I know my limits rather well by now. A small basket of underwear and socks isn’t going to kill me. Still, I love how she’s doing her very best to take care of me for the week she’s here.

Today we’re headed out to apply for a joint bank account for me and Noel, then we’re going to have some Denny’s for breakfast to sort of thank Audrey and Eva for being so really really cool and grabbing a bus up here from where they live, about a three hour ride, just to make sure I don’t over do anything. We’re also going to try and catch a matinee of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. My friend back here, Other Shannon, because I’m Proper Shannon among my circle of friends, around hers I get to be Other Shannon, but she brought me an inflatable doughnut which is so much better than what I got from the clinic. I think I’ll be able to pull the couple hours or so in the movie theater after we get home and I do my morning stretches. May even be able to drive without much trouble.

Going to be a good day <3

Cleaning up and Stretching Trouble

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 20:40:00 -0500

Yesterday Audrey, Eva, and I went shopping, and boy did I ever shop. My fiancee and I have a new house, and nearly nothing to put in it, so I bought some essentials. Got a really nice set of stainless steel pots and pans that I am just giddy over, they’ve got nice thick copper plates on their bottoms to distribute heat evenly. I like to cook, but is it strange to be literally giddy over a set of pots and pans? Got a toaster and a blender and a Bissell Little Green Clean Machine for steam-cleaning spots on the rug where sodas get spilled and the like. Now I have a really clean spot in the middle of a high traffic area. Had an absolute blast.

TMI stuff below the fold.

TMI STUFF: The problem seems to be that any time I do too much walking or the like, dilating gets difficult. I hit this muscle about three or four inches in that is near impassable. I’ve been doing the painful thing where I use the small dilator for ten minutes and the medium for five, but it turns out that Audrey had some extra Soma, enough to keep tied me over until I can see my doctor and renew my prescription of the stuff, since I let mine run out like an idiot. Now not only am I get able to get around the house quite a bit easier, but I was able to swap to five minutes with the small dilator and ten with the medium. Today is Tuesday in the states and I hope to back on the medium alone by Thursday. Of course, Friday Audrey’s husband is coming to town, so dilating might get rough again for a few days as we go out and do fun stuff Friday and Saturday.

Flying Home and First Stretch in 32 hours

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 03:10:00 -0500

Flying out to Chon Buri I took American Airlines to Tokyo Narita, then Thai Airways to Bangkok via Phuket. The trip out was wonderful, couldn’t have enjoyed it more and it got me a guaranteed upgrade to Business Class for the flight home from Tokyo Narita to Chicago. On the way home, I flew Japan Airlines from Bangkok to Tokyo Narita, and they would not give me an upgrade even with Dr. Suporn’s letter explaining that I had had a surgery and that I need a comfortable seat. I asked at the check in, I asked at the gate, I asked the purser on board, the answer was “No” across the board. Seems that the type of ticket I had meant they couldn’t give me an upgrade in spite of the business section being half empty. I ordered my ticket through American Airlines’ site, and JAL was carrying me because American Airlines doesn’t fly to Bangkok. The best JAL would do is give me three seats together in coach.

Now, the problem is that I have Fibromyalgia, and it’s been aggravated for a month from sleeping in a rough bed and generally pushing myself too much in Thailand, since I don’t know if I’ll ever be going back. It’s painful to sit upright for too long, I usually sit cross legged when we go out to dinner. At home I sit in a recliner or I lie in bed. Three coach airplane seats is about two seats too small. The flight was a little under six hours, and it took five of those to find a comfortable position in the three seats, and I had to get back into a single seat half an hour before we landed as we began our descent. I was in such pain that when the flight attendant tried to take my arm to help me up, my entire arm felt like it ignited in flames. I couldn’t sit comfortably, I couldn’t stand, couldn’t walk without shots of needling pain. The first leg was pretty tough.

At the Tokyo airport I boarded the American Airlines plane in business class for the eleven hour part of the trip home. Fortunately I had saved a Soma, and now I was in a chair that laid flat, but not quite level. My feet were a little lower than my head, so my legs were stiff at the end of the flight, but the rest of me had relaxed quite a bit. Business class was just crazy with the food and the snacks and everything, but I slept through most of it. Got home and rolled right through customs, had a little adventure finding my fiancee and a couple of friends who are staying the week to make sure I don’t do too much in our new house.

There’s so much to be unpacked and so much that can’t be unpacked until we get more shelves and stuff. The house is great, but there’s a lot to do and I can’t do any of it for a while yet. It’s annoying. I love having my friends here, I just feel a little useless.

TMI STARTS HERE: I did my last stretches in Chon Buri at about 3:30am on Sunday, which would have been 3:30pm Saturday afternoon here. My next set of stretches was at 11:00pm Sunday night, and I could not use the medium dilator. The small dilator was a little tight, but I got it to my usual depth. Today I’ve gone back to doing 10 minutes with the little one then moving up to the medium one. Once I get back to the medium dilator exclusively, I figure I’ll give myself a couple of weeks before I start trying anything with the big dilator.

The good news is, I got myself some new pads, and it’s so much nicer than the ones we get from the clinic. Hopefully the overnight pads will not leak the spot I’ve been getting recently from the pads that came from Thailand. I wish I had been able to change them more often on the ride home, I seem to have gotten a new sore spot at the front of my surgical site, it’s healing fine with application of the white antibacterial goop I got from the clinic.

I’m home with Noel <3!

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 18:09:28 -0500

I’m home with Noel <3!

Final thoughts from Thailand

Sat, 02 Oct 2010 15:46:06 -0500

I am sitting here, waiting for my pills to kick in before I do my final set of stretches in Thailand, and I thought I’d make my final official post from Thailand. The clinic is coming to pick me up in a little under an hour, and I’m still getting the bittersweet realizations that this might be the last time I’m ever a part of all this wonderful madness. I have seriously enjoyed all of the time I’ve had here with all the people, and that sort of plays with your head as you pack to go home after a long month away from everyone. There is always the chance that I could come back to take care of friends who are having their operations, or that I could raise the money for FFS and return to get rid of “Him”, but there’s no guarantee to either.

I’m going to miss this crazy place and all the strange and wonderful people I’ve met here, but they all have my contact information, and I’ll be continuing this blog at home as I get through at least the next four months if not the next year or more of getting fully healed. I’m going home to my fiance and our new house, and I can’t wait to be encircled by his arms as we drift off to sleep together tonight.

On Dr. Suporn and Leaving Thailand

Sat, 02 Oct 2010 03:53:00 -0500

I came to Chon Buri because Dr. Suporn is the only person in the world who does the operation he pioneered. His Gender Reassignment Surgery is a modification on the Scrotal Skin Graft method that gives superior depth to the Penile Inversion method, but the modifications he has made to this method give the transgendered woman a result that is anatomically equivalent to what a genetic woman is born with. Of course, that doesn’t include the uterus or any of the other internal organs, but the rest of the vulva is more or less the same. This was important to me because I hold the hope that some day I might be able to have further operations to allow me to have a child with my husband. I know it’s unlikely today, but no one knows what the future holds, and it is my fondest wish now that the initial surgery is done.

More blow the fold, no TMI stuff in this post, the post just got too long:

I could never understand why no one else does this surgery which Dr. Suporn has been doing with great success for ten years as of this writing in 2010. It’s because the surgery can take anywhere from five to nine hours, where the more common operation can be done in a much shorter time, allowing the doctor to do more operations in a single day. It is my conclusion that Dr. Suporn is more concerned with the results and happiness of his patients, whereas other doctors may be more concerned with getting more surgeries done. Dr. Suporn does only one major surgery per day, so that he can return to his clinic and see patients, both trans- and cisgendered women, where he performs everything from simple exams to minor outpatient surgeries. It is my experience that he takes excellent care of his patients both before and after their operations.

Tuesday, October 5, will be his last day of surgery on transgendered patients for the month of October. The clinic thins out as his staff takes vacations, meanwhile he spends most of the month with his family or doing charitable surgeries for the people of Thailand who need reconstructive surgeries but can’t afford to pay for them. People who have met with one accident or another and have been somehow disfigured by their incident, he works to mend them during the months of October and, I believe, April while his staff is given a break from the rigorous schedule they adhere to during the rest of the year. I have been deeply impressed with not only the care he gives each and every patient he sees, but with the man himself. Dr. Suporn is a fantastic doctor and a very good man.

His clinic is about a five minute walk from the hotel where I’ve stayed, so almost all his patients stay here. There are also non-touristy shopping centers within an easy walk from the hotel, which make the location a unique destination in downtown Chon Buri. You get to sit and enjoy breakfast or dinner with most of the clinic’s transgendered patients, and I’ve made a myriad of new friends from across the globe, I hope we are able to keep in touch with most of them if not all. All these new friends support each other as we get ready to go in for surgery or recover from GRS or Facial Feminization Surgery (FFS) together, it’s a wonderful little community unlike anything you’re likely to find elsewhere.

This little community is what makes going home a bitter-sweet prospect. On the one hand, I’m leaving all these friends who have been so wonderful to me this past month. On the other, I’m returning to my life back home which includes an amazing fiancee, a beautiful new house, the fantastic new friends I’ve made these past two years, and the potential new friends in the form of our new neighbors. It is both exciting and more than a little sad. I am reminded of the time I spent in Theater, working so hard to put on a show with forty or fifty other people, making teams and friends with each of them only to have to say good by when the show closes. This is almost the exact same feeling I had at all those closing parties so long ago, with everyone celebrating and crying at the same time.

I have had the most magnificent month, I’m so incredibly glad I came, and more so that I came when I did. This has been a truly amazing experience, one I’ll always remember fondly for the friendships that have been forged, for the tourist trips we’ve taken, and most of all for completing a goal I’ve struggled with since I was three years old. This has been more like the beginning of completing that goal, it’ll be done once the surgery site is all healed. As much fun as it has been, I can’t wait to see my fiancee’s face again and hold him tight.

The Clinic will be here to collect me at 4:30am Sunday morning, that’s 4:30pm Saturday evening for the Central time zone. My plane is scheduled for take off at 8:10am, to land in Tokyo at 4:30pm local time, I’ve no idea what that equates to in the States. I take off from Tokyo at 5:35pm Sunday evening and land at Chicago O’hare at 3:00pm Sunday after noon. I get to time travel a bit there and relive a couple hours, which will be rather nice. The return trip takes a total of 24 hours in the air, and while I’m not looking forward to all that time flying, I am happy to be going home. That 24 hours happens for me between 8:10am and 3:00pm tomorrow. I hate special relativity.

Last Shopping Trip and My Final Checkup

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 06:39:35 -0500

Today I had to go buy a second suitcase to fit everything that I need to take home in. We went to the mall, which includes climbing and crossing a pedestrian bridge. These things get you fifteen to twenty feet in the air, so there are a lot of stairs. Frances was so happy to hear I had been able to go up and down them on my own once, well, twice since I had to do it again on my return trip, she wanted to see me do it again. We had quite a bit of fun, and I spent the last of my paper money on a bandanna to wipe the sweat from my face before it got in my eyes. I was pouring sweat like you wouldn’t believe, I looked like I had been running a marathon or something. I have a lot of trouble with heat, and I seem to either not sweat a single drop and get ill, or I sweat like crazy and manage to do OK. Very odd.

Anyhow, the new carry-on was going to have to go on the charge card, so I treated myself to a few more of these skirts I love as well. They’re pretty, and so amazingly comfortable, it’ll be difficult to get me to wear anything else for a while. In fact, I need to wear skirts for another two months, so there’s that too. The luggage at the department store was all a bit pricey until we got to the bottom of the pile and found a perfectly sized carry-on that will give me the extra storage I need. It was only about ฿750, which works out to $25, so $35 with my skirts. After that adventure, we went to Swensen’s where Frances treated us to some ice cream. Their strawberry sundae is wonderful, and it was made even better by the company. This all took up most of our morning, so we headed back over the bridge to the clinic where we waited for our appointments.

Today was my final checkup, and things went great. Dr. Suporn says I’m healing very fast, which is good news. He had a few more of my stitches removed, I didn’t think I had any left. He believes the last of my necrotic tissue should be done healing within two weeks. Everything else is going better than average, I can even sit without my special cushion, though I’ll have it with me for the plane rides. After the checkup, he showed me all the pictures they took of my operation, which they burned to a CD for me along with a few other things, like the owner’s manual and a relaxation music mix. Medically I’m fit to return home, which is the best news of all.

Walking into the zoo, there sure were a lot of sculptures, which...

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 22:42:37 -0500

Zoo parking lot topiaries

Greated by a Panda Statue

Next was a Panda Garden

And a Minature Village

They had the most interesting trash bins

Psychedelic Elephant Train!

Pink hippos

Adding more turtle sculptures

Frances with the Sedated Tiger

Lose bird in the aviary

Walking into the zoo, there sure were a lot of sculptures, which got you in a pretty good mood. Then the first real animal you see is a sedated tiger with a couple sores on his side being manhandled into a semblance of sobriety for the length of time it takes to get a picture. I felt bad for the poor guy. Next was a huge aviary full of tiny cages for birds to sit in. There were a number of birds on perches out in the large enclosure, but I felt bad for the birds in the cages.

We had lunch at a fishing pond, there are these two ponds that...

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 06:38:10 -0500

Lunch was at a fishing pond

We had plenty to drink

We had pleanty of space to sit

The chicken could not have been fresher

We had lunch at a fishing pond, there are these two ponds that are stocked by the owner, people pay to come out and fish in the ponds. I’ve wanted to own something similar for a long while now. Unfortunately I wound up feeling too ill to eat, and didn’t take any more pictures than these. Lunch was completely authentic Thai food.

The jewelery store has a lot of scraps from when they cut gems. ...

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 06:02:00 -0500

Gemstone scraps from cutting in a mosaic

Gemstone Mosaic Dragon

Gemstone Mosaic Tiger

Tiger Closeup showing gemstones

Gemstone Mosaic Horses

Black Koi Gemstone Mosaic

Gemstone Mosaic of Animals

Gemstone Mosaic - Buterflies and Flowers

Gemstone Mosaic Taj Mahal

Taj Mahal Closeup showing gemstone work

The jewelery store has a lot of scraps from when they cut gems. They use these scraps to create these beautiful mosaics. Unfortunately these were the only pictures I was allowed to take at the jewelery store.

Done!

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 05:59:04 -0500

Woke up this morning feeling fine, well, fine for me. I’ve discovered that mornings tend to include joint pain in just about every joint on my body. I’m hoping returning to my bed on Sunday will see the end of that trend. In fact, I didn’t have much appetite at breakfast either. Exercises were rougher than normal as well. That’s right! I had a nap after talking to my fiancee, so the second time I woke up this morning I was feeling pretty good, and there you have a fairly direct look at my cognitive processes.

I had expected to meet up with Frances to go to the Clinic together for my class this morning, but we missed each other. We were going to go shopping after the class, so I walked back to the hotel to drop off the materials they handed out at the class, as well as the letters certifying that I’ve undergone surgery. Tried to contact Frances again, since she’s the only one I know who has been to the shop that sells the skirts I like. Missed her again and decided to strike out on my own, thinking I could at least get my fiancee a toy for his souvenir. The only request he made was that it be some sort of something to do with fighting robots, which includes Power Rangers (they have vehicles, not robots, but who am I to pick nits?) and Transformers, as well as Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, I suppose. I found the Plaza Marketplace, and on the outside it looks like a swap-meet, or flea market. Little tents full of vendors selling everything from knock-off sunglasses and jewelery to off-brand electronics to clothes designed for people who are, on average, a foot and a half shorter than me.

Fortunately once you penetrate this rather narrow facade, you come to an entrance of an actual, air conditioned mall. The flea market feel is kept inside by veritable army of vendors, sans tents, lining every walkway. I made it to the second floor before I found that there wasn’t a single toy shop. I as I had ridden the escalator I noticed that one of the vendors crowded under the escalator had a tiny selection of toys, and I figured I’d need to make my selection from among their wares. However, the shop that sells the skirts I like was supposed to be on the second floor, or maybe the third, so I went looking for it. None of the tiny shops appeared to be the ones that carried them, so I headed for the department store at the back. Right next to its entrance was another vendor with a tiny selection of toys, these included a couple of things that might be robots, so I bought two, one for my fiancee, and one for the man who drove up to help us move while I was away. That completed my souvenir shopping, and the department store was indeed where my skirts were sold, so I was able to buy two more before all my cash was spent. Well, not all of it, but enough that I don’t know what else I might buy with the change.

Goodbyes and Pataya

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 20:08:55 -0500

The Swedish girl and her mother left last night. We didn’t get to meet often over our month together, but the times we did share were so much fun. Gave them a couple of the things I got for my girlfriends back home. Still have enough for everyone, I’ll jut not have extras for me, which is OK because I got the best of Thailand on my own, I think.

Pataya was great. I crashed a bit at lunch, overheated and couldn’t eat, but then I got cooled off, had a little steamed rice, and took my pills to make it through the rest of the day. Pretty much all we did was walk through beautiful and appalling scenery, then took in two great live shows. Had a wonderful time, but I’m worn out this morning. Finding it impossible to get going. I’ll see if I can start uploading photos and video later, have a class today.

Lack of Updates and My Parents

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 12:03:13 -0500

I am sorry that there was a two day lapse in my updates. I don’t know if this bothered anyone other than my parents who sent me an email consisting entirely of the word “uPDATE”. Normally I wouldn’t reprint a personal correspondence, but since this was a single word, and since this entry addresses that issue, I felt it was OK to do. My folks were actually so anxious that my fiancee reports they texted him, this from a couple who are far enough removed from technology that they send a single word email without checking to see if the Caps Lock had been on for that word. I don’t know that they’ve ever sent a text to anyone before. The lack of updates was because I didn’t think anyone would want to see a couple lines saying that I was hurting too bad to leave the room, that I had set up pillows to support my back and my legs comfortably, and that I had spent three days reading six books. Incidentally the first six books of the Guardians of Ga’Hoole are mostly excellent. The author falters a bit near the end of the fifth book, but I enjoyed the story those six books contained.

Click to read about my folks.

A lot of my friends think a little harshly of my parents. I think this is mostly because I’ve only ever told them the stories of how I’ve been hurt by my family in efforts to comfort them from the hurt their families have caused or were causing them. So let me tell you of their good side. Several days ago I posted lamenting my lack of dresses and skirts. My mother almost immediately asked me for the address of the hotel, she wanted to overnight me a package containing a surprise. She hadn’t considered the international shipping charges, she wasn’t aware that next-busniess-day FedEx would charge $50 for the few skirts she had gathered for me so I could get out of my room comfortably. UPS would have charged $200, and the US Postal Service site said that they use FedEx. She saw that I was in distress and my mother who has had diagnosed Multiple Sclerosis a little longer than I’ve been out of the closet, my mother who had knee replacement surgery earlier this year, my mother reacted as fast as she could to relieve my pain, and that’s as much as anyone can ask of a parent. I didn’t give her the hotel’s address at first, I alerted her that it would likely cost more than $100 to overnight a package of any bulk, then gave her the address to look up shipping rates, then remembered how handy she is with the Internet and looked them up myself and sent them to her in an e-mail.

It’s true, she has told me flat out that she will never accept me as her daughter. My parents want to love me as their child, a genderless designation, even though I know they still use masculine pronouns to refer to me. I suspect they still use my old name, more than seven years since I legally changed it and more than ten since I started calling myself Shannon. I don’t think they will ever acknowledge they have lost their relationship with their son, so I don’t think they will ever start to build a real relationship with their daughter, but damned if they don’t love some little part of me, even if it is the ghost of the facade I shed at the age of eighteen. Then again, the skirts are the first thing they’ve ever gotten for me that definitely indicate my gender, it’s the sort of gift I’ve waited all my life to get from them, the sort of thing you would only get a woman. I know they don’t see it in those terms, I only thought of it myself as I was writing this paragraph.

Christmas time always meant a gaggle of gifts. Between five and fifteen things, plus stocking suffers for each of their five kids. Clothes and CD’s and movies and toys and all wrapped individually with tags from Mom and Dad or from Santa. My father’s birthday is the day before Christmas, and I think that this was one way he shows his love, since I suspect that more often than not he got one thing to cover both events. Always there would be one themed thing, the girls would get jewelry and the boys would get sports equipment, or Radio Controlled cars or whatever. I was always so disappointed to see that I had been gifted for the wrong gender, but I could never show that to them. As I got older I got worse and worse at hiding it, a small child will do anything for the approval of their parent, a teenager not so much. I finally told them to stop buying me presents and they never understood why. I told them it was because I had lost my job again and I couldn’t reciprocate, but the simple truth is that it hurt too much to get the wrong gifts. They tried to exclude me from the gender-based gift-giving, but this hurt even more. I’ve always been waiting for a gift that, if they can’t see me as a woman, at least accepts that I see myself as a woman.

My family are all good people who have always done their best for me. They have always set their compass by the precepts of their religion, but their religion has zero doctrine on transgendered people, so we have been declared a subset of homosexuals. Homosexuals the religion understands as sexual deviants, and so they are sinners, but being transgendered has nothing at all to do with sex. Problem is, my family will not hear anything regarding the issue that is not handed down to them from the Church.

I love my family, I can find no love within me for the religion that set them against me. They have hurt me a lot because their best intentions for me were misdirected by their faith. I know I hurt them quite a bit in return, sometimes just to return some of the pain I was feeling. They continue to hurt me for the same reasons, and now that I understand those reasons, I do my best not to hurt them. I know that, in their way, they love some part of me. I can’t see that they love me exactly, because they refuse to acknowledge a rather large part of who I am. But there is love there, it’s a tiny strand, but it exists, and maybe that’s enough.

I imagine this post has rambled quite a bit, but it has been emotionally draining to write it. I had to write it, but I was crying for a good portion of what I wrote. I am too exhausted to go back and edit it, so I’ve left it rather rough. I’m sorry for that, but if you’re reading this, thanks for sticking with me through the whole thing.

Checkup Results

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 05:04:12 -0500

Had my latest checkup with Dr. Suporn today, my final checkup will be Friday. As rough as my Fibro has been these last couple of days, I manged to walk over there with a little aid from Frances and walk back on my own, with just my cane to support my weight and Frances to support my mind and mood and everything else. She’s awesome.

As always, this may be TMI, click at your own risk.

Dr. Suporn is very happy with the way I’m healing, specific remarks included “Nice color,” “Good reaction,” and my favorite “No infection,” so I’m all smiles there. He wants me to try the biggest dilator, so I turned right around and asked him for a muscle relaxer like the Soma I’m almost out of. He had me come back to the hotel to call down the name and dosage I take, and they’re going to try to find something similar at the pharmacy. He’s only OK with it since I already take Soma for my fibro pain.

Just last night I dilated with the medium size on its own for the first time since I had my problem last Tuesday. I had to drop down to the small size, about one inch diameter, for ten minutes, then the medium, about an inch and a half diameter, for five. I’ve had to do this three times a day since last Wednesday. I managed to swap that, the small for five then the medium for ten, and finally went to the medium for the full fifteen minutes on my third dilation session last night. Today I’ve had trouble with the medium size, but managed it this morning. I’m getting ready for my afternoon session in another ten minutes or so, I have a meal and take my meds, then start thirty minutes later.

I’m saving my last two Soma for tomorrow’s breakfast and lunch. If I’m still feeling OK at lunch I’ll save it for dinner, unless they can find me a comparable muscle relaxer to get me through the week. I’ll set up appointments as soon as I can with the Pain Clinic when I get home, and hopefully they’ll be able to continue my pain killers and muscle relaxers for at least the next three months. I’m told that it all gets much easier after the third month, but that the second and third are worse than the first, and it can take a good bit of the fourth month before it gets easier and you can ease off dilation. l’m also told that I’ll be wearing pads for about four months as well. It’s not exactly the same, but I’ll have bad muscle cramps, constant vaginal discharge, and be wearing pantie liners for the next four months, so in a way I’m kinda getting the full experience.

Pataya and computer or fibro trouble

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 01:08:00 -0500

Puh·TAY·yah is apparently a beach resort town nearby where I will be going tomorrow with Frances and a bunch of other Dr. Suporn’s patients. This is the standard Tuesday trip on the weeks when it’s not going to the Chinese Temple and his beach house. I’m so excited to be out and a bout again, and the trip itself sounds like amazing fun, but I’ve been having a bad time with my Fibromyalgia the last couple days and hope I’m going to be OK. I’m told we’ll be visiting a jewelery factory, then from there it gets muddled. Apparently there is an elephant show and a tiger show, I’m assuming not at the same time, and we’ll also be at a souvenir shop at least once in the day, but I don’t know if it’s part of the Jewelery place, the animal place, or if it’s its own entity. Any which way I’ll be happy to at last have a chance to get everyone back home a little something from Thailand. I hope I have enough Baht, I’d hate to have to hit my Visa too often.

The computer and fibro stuff is below the fold, it gets long.

I’m experiencing a lot of trouble writing. For one I can’t get myself into a comfortable position to write for long. Second, and maybe partially because of the first, my hands slip and where I expect to be typing words, I’m typing gibberish by hitting the key next to the one I intended to strike, so something like ‘whitened’ would become ‘ejoyrnrs’. It’s more than a little disheartening to see that threaded through a number of sentences. Finally, I lose keystrokes, or I transpose letters. I’ll have threewordscrammed together because either my spacebar or my fibro is acting up. I’ll spell ‘rough’ as ‘rou’, ‘gh’ is one of the most common letter combination I lose. ‘Of’ becomes ‘fo’, and I don’t know if these are caused by my sitting position or because my keyboard may be acting up, or just because I’m having a rough day with the Fibro. It’s this last idea that scares me the most. Over the past five years, and the past two years especially, I’ve watched myself slide further and further from being a productive and independent person. Now with the trouble I’ve been having in my arms I’m worried that I might not be able to drive myself, and most recently that I may lose my ability to type.

It’s painful for me to play World of Warcraft, my comfort as I’ve slid downhill all this time. At least in Azeroth I’m still a vibrant, independent Priest, or Druid, or Hunter or whatever class I’m playing, I can do it all on my own. It has been painful to play for a while. It just hurts my hands too much to actually play, so I do my dailies and logout. I don’t know what I’ll do if I can’t use the keyboad anymore. It’s kind of been my last access port to the outside world. Chatting is painful. Writing is painful. It’s so easy to get lost in despair the more I look at it.

I have to remember that plans are in place to halt my slide when I get home. That these plans may even reverse the course a bit and I may regain myself some, my ability to use my hands, and who knows, maybe even walk unassisted for a ways. And if those don’t happen, if I can’t type as easily as I’d like, I can always take up voice-activated software. Dragon Naturally Speaking has come a long way since its initial release, maybe I can be one of the first people to write a novel by dictating it to my computer. Besides that, who knows what possibilities the future holds.

TMI PARAGRAPH BELOW, this one I’m not sanitizing for the ease of those readers who I know are squeamish, so this should be plenty warning for them:

I’m healing pretty well, next to no bleeding, except where my exposed necrotic spots are healing, and that stings pretty bad. Lot of swelling on that side too. I also have a fair amount of discharge, which is … just gross. It gets caught in the pads I’ve been wearing since they took the packing out a couple weeks back. This morning I thought I had shed a chunk of something overnight and it had leaked onto my underwear, but it turns out I had just sat in some marmalade that had dropped from my breakfast tray onto my chair in a perfectly unfortunate spot. Worried me crazy until I saw that and that ‘the leak’ hadn’t gotten on anything else, like the bedsheets or my nightgown. Had a good laugh at that.

Dilation, my PT sessions, my stretches, to clear up any confusion there may have been, all these mean the same thing. I had trouble with the medium dilator, which I’ve also refereed to as exercise equipment, and had to go to using the small dilator for ten minutes before going to the medium for five. Dynamic dilation is only done for fifteen minutes. I was able to reverse that pretty soon after I started, I managed to do the small dilator for five minutes before using the medium for ten. Now I’ve gone back to the medium for a full fifteen minutes. It takes me a while to get it all the way in to my full depth, especially in the morning, but I get there by evening.