My experience

My characteristics going into surgery: 23, 68kg, 178cm, HRT for five years

I’ve had several surgeries, ranging from a broken ankle and ruptured ACL to minor cosmetic ones. Although I had somewhat of an idea of what I was in for, this was the most intense surgical recovery I’ve had.

Prior to op

Starving myself for bowel prep. I had some fruit juice and hard candy (Werthers originals for me)
Day of: Get to hospital at your scheduled time, hand in paperwork, wait around for what feels like forever, admin stuff, go in, say hi and then get drugged
Hospital: it’s nice, nurses are sparse and busy, I had my own room, and the hospital is clean and relatively new.

Early recovery (week 1)

I don’t remember it so well now. You get checked a lot by nurses and woken up, make sure you have your call button in reach where it can’t get away from you because you are very immobile.
It’s boring, taking pain meds constantly, the epidural wearing off was really bad. You have cannulas in both arms so that is unpleasant whenever you bend your arms.
The drugs were not fun, and made me into a zombie. Swapping from tapentadol (Palexia) to oxycodone (Endone) helped, this may be just my body’s reaction.
The epidural wearing off was agony, and my bed got stuck when it happened with no one around so I was in an uncomfortable position too. This was by far the most physical pain I’ve been in in my life. It took a while for a nurse to come and get my pain sorted.
The leg compression machine I had was very loud, it was on for 24 hours a day. I wish I brought earplugs so I could sleep.
I did my best to entertain myself, I played Yahtzee with my dad when I could manage a thought. Low brain intensity activities are nice. I played video games on my laptop with a controller a little bit when I could manage it, bending my arms hurt because of the two cannulas
It just sucked for a while, I was very bloated and swollen and moving was very painful. I’m not sure how normal this is, or if my recovery was especially bad.
Eating was hard.
I was constipated for most of this week, I think this was a result of the opiates as well as not eating for several days beforehand (bowel prep).
Getting all the bandages, tape and stuff taken off is nice. The tape took some of my skin with it though.
Catheter being taken out is weird and hurts intensely for a short period of time. Although having it out was good, it meant I had to get up more often which I struggled with.
- Learning to pee again is wack, it goes everywhere and you have to learn how to sit properly to stop it going everywhere.
  - This may be due to the additional webbing indirectly partially covering my urethral opening. This was fixed recently through a revision.
After getting my drains out I had to implore the nurse to use steristrips to close and cover the drain wounds. I was unimpressed by this.
Showering again felt lovely
I was given an old version of recovery notes on discharge. I didn’t and wouldn’t trust my discharge instructions.
- Dr Hart is aware “The hospital has some weird old set that gets handed out variably to patients. I wouldn’t pay much attention to it. I’ve told them a million times to get rid of it, but every so often it pops up.”
- On this note, every surgeon recommends different things. Just do your best and don’t force anything that feels wrong.

Out of hospital - week 2

It will suck and people around you will have no idea how much you are dealing with
I was quite scared at this point, I really didn’t know if the things I was experiencing, seeing, feeling were normal. And I no longer had access to any nurses or doctors, other than Dr Hart through email. I spent a lot of time googling “… SRS reddit”
Absolutely sucked, you are taken off the large amount of painkillers you’ve been on for a week. Everything hurts.
My life felt like it was just dilating. My day was broken up into blocks of time between dilating punctuated by the act itself. Having something to do hands free during this time was good, often though I was too tired to concentrate on anything else.
Sometimes when I stood up what looked like barbeque sauce would drip out of me. This was quite shocking.
I completely stopped taking my ADHD medication because of this surgical recovery and other reasons.
My heart rate was very high for a while, especially when I stood up, probably due to the surgical healing and swelling around my abdomen.
I’d try to walk when I could at this point. It was nice to walk again and be outside.
I emailed Dr Hart if I had questions I couldn’t answer by myself.

Back home - week 3 and beyond

After a week near the hospital I returned home and stayed with my family for the next few weeks.
It was more of the same, it got easier each day. Some days were better, some worse, mostly just boring and arduous.
I emailed Dr. Hart a lot. I got quite good at taking macro photos using my phone and a mirror- truly it is a strange skill to develop. It was helpful having Dr Hart to email as I had no one else accessible to ask about surgery related normalcy. Unfortunately he is one guy with responsibilities so his responses were not always prompt, one to four days usually.
Everything stinks during dilation and everything that comes from here for quite a few months. It’s a lot of wound healing, sloughing of cells and blood and stitches. It is proper rank, do not worry, it is probably normal (I hope lol). It gets better over time.
I had a lot of numbness, my ability to feel came back in time and was somewhat painful when it did.
I had PPV and did not douche, this went against Dr Hart’s advice but it was fine. I saw A LOT of varying info about this online and ultimately decided that not douching was the right decision.
- You’re dilating multiple times a day which is already basically mechanically assisted douching
- PPV produces a decent amount of liquid (in my case)
I removed my steristrips when they were ready
I took my own stitches out
I had salt baths for a fair while but mainly just once a day until everything was healed properly.
I don’t remember a lot of the rest of recovery, I ended up having a pretty severe iron deficiency and it really impacted me. I didn’t figure that out until months later. I guess I lost blood during surgery and didn’t recover. I ended up needing an iron infusion as tablets take an extraordinary amount of time to replenish iron stores and are not very effective.
- If I remember more of my experience I’ll make sure to add it.

Things I experienced:

Bloating
High heart rate
Being horrified at how my vulva looked initially (now I think it looks pretty normal)
Nasty smelling discharge, I think this is due to the healing process being internally contained with an increased bacterial presence.
The smell of my discharge not leaving my dilators, even when they had been cleaned as thoroughly as I could.
A stitch breaking
A stitch creating a small bubble of tissue along the vaginal opening
A significant amount of discharge, ranging from textured brown to yellow to clearish.
Severe iron deficiency
After having an iron infusion my discharge turned grey and smelled like metal. One of my friends referred to me as a “minecraft iron generator”.

Pain Scale

Source	Pain / 10
Epidural wearing off	10, agony.
Drains removed	8
Catheter removed	6