Please read the previous two posts if you want the background: I am recovering from facial feminization surgery in Argentina. I will resume PressWatch broadcasts mid-August.
I went to the Clinic this morning to be checked by the surgeon, a Dr. Robles, a focused and capable man, and I thanked him for my upper lip, which seems feminine even in the context of my naturally bloated post-surgery face. He was of course looking for abnormalities or infections, and found none. I told him that I had awakened during surgery, and had found it quite a horror.
It was if I had slapped him; but he had an explanation, noting that I had told him, before surgery, that I tended to have a temporary paranoiac abreaction to long and deep anaesthesia. So, he, in consultation with the anaesthesiologist (yes I know, archaic spelling but I like it) had settled on a series of smaller injections of soporifics, rather than going for the deep hours-long sleep. He said that people sometimes talked during surgery, but I told him that I had been begging for help from his associates, and frankly his response was evasive.
I believe that, in the context of the operating room, when the patient awakens and screams for help, the response should be reassuring, at the least. His associate's response had been to tell me to be calm, and then to hold my head down, to better carve my flesh behind my ear. There was a job to do, and by Christ, he was going to do it whether I liked it or not. This is a response one might rather expect from an abbatoir exposed on a PETA videotape, not a modern medical clinic, and indeed I now recall trying to fight with sarcasm while strapped to that table, ranting in broken Spanish, asking if this was some Catholic attitude that the pain was good for me (I had seen a cross on the wall in the clinic's hospital room). That was all I had to fight with--my arms and feet were bound.
So, the explanation does not wash. I am not an animal.
This aside, they have done an excellent job on my face. How's that for irony? They're really good. If I don't get infected, I will definitely "pass" much better. And that ain't no little thing. Probably others who might come here for this procedure will not suffer this same horror. Probably they would get good results. This means a better life for me. Adventures come with risks, and risks can prove painful.
Theresa