If they want enthusiasm, I'll post more from Gabriel. Remember, this is from someone who thinks it was a good decision!
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On discharge day five, I woke up with a six-square-inch pool of blood seeping through three layers of bandages from the donor site (“Fine, nothing unusual,” came the text back), which during surgery had been covered with thin skin shaved from my other thigh with an instrument like a motorized cheese slicer, then laid over and stitched into the edges around the exposed muscle of the donor hole. On day seven, blood soaked through two additional layers of bandages and another of gauze. (“Looks good,” the doctor said when I had my friend emergency-drive me back to the city.) Every morning, I got up, after trying to sleep perfectly still on my back with my penis propped and my hips and my legs aching fire, and hobbled with the help of a cane to the toilet, where I used one hand to keep my penis level and the other to reach over to the sink and fill a bowl with warm water, then slowly, gently wash my genitals. Still, my whole lap smelled unrecognizable, not-human seeming, like a cross between hospital air and a livestock barn. (“Everyone freaks out about that,” a different nurse said over the phone, laughing a little, when I asked if I was okay.) For more than 30 days, my donor thigh oozed fibrinous fluid from wet holes, which became big, open red gashes where the skin graft hadn’t taken. (“It’ll close. It’s just like any other wound,” said Dr. Andrew Watt, the other microsurgeon, at my fourth weekly post-op appointment — to which I’d responded, “Is it?”) My other leg, the one the graft had been taken from, had dried blood always flaking from the sometimes burning, four-by-seven-inch skinned site trying to regrow itself, and at some point my penis started to separate a bit from my body.
It was a tiny gap, the littlest hole, between the base and my pelvis at the underside where the stitches hadn’t closed, small compared with many people’s wound separation, as it’s called, which happens “90 percent of the time” and is self-resolving. But it was so distressing that I mostly just refused to look at or touch it for two weeks, the panic spreading harsh electricity through my whole torso, even worse and for much longer than the time I stood alone in my kitchen, hyperventilating, holding my penis level in one hand and my phone in the other as I Googled, “What does gangrene smell like?”
“The whole process is constant body horror,” Berrian said at one point — after he’d told me that the penis-tip discoloration I was worried about might just be sloughing tissue that’s dying off, which is also fine. And this was a recovery with no complications that required surgery. The overall proportion of phalloplasties that need surgical revision, while lower for some surgeons (including mine), is about one in two. The highest number of corrective follow-up surgeries needed by anyone I know personally is 12.
This is what some people do for their penises. And though phalloplasties that survive a couple of weeks tend to survive, period, through all manner of regular penis life and then some, I was hysterical over the possibility that mine wouldn’t. If it died, I felt certain, I would die. I had pushed myself up against the absolute limits of enduring life without it, and I wouldn’t go back to before.
I couldn’t go back to before.
One day, in that first week out of the hospital, I stood with my leg in a brace and my weight on a cane, thudding the tip of it rhythmically into the floor while listening to upbeat Billie Eilish. It was the closest thing to dancing I could do, but I understood then, for the first time, that what dancing is about is that Our. Bodies. Are. Spec. Tacular.