Surgery

It was a Friday — like today but minus the thunderstorm we had an hour or so ago — when my partner woke me up with a cup of coffee. He didn’t need to remind me what was special about the day. I was supposed to ring the hospital before setting out, to check that the bed availability, but I was on the coach long before the Admissions Office opened for the day…

In two earlier posts, I’ve told my story from early childhood to reporting to the hospital’s Admissions Office as I was admitted for much-needed and long-awaited gender reassignment surgery. I must caveat this post, that follows on from those, by saying that the surgical and post-surgical protocols have changed since then; for instance, I understand that the current hospital stay is 6–8 nights, for instance, whereas ‘back in the day’ you went home on day 12. I’m not going to go into gory or prurient detail at all. Anyway:

Friday

Having reported in, and with my paperwork processed, I was sent for a check-up and an ECG. I didn’t know then how familiar ECGs would become in later years (that’s another story altogether and completely unrelated to trans issues…) so this was a novelty, albeit a novelty with a very serious purpose.

After that, I went up to the ward that would be my home for the next week and a half. The duty doctor checked that I knew what would be happening and what the risks were (i.e. he made sure that I was consenting on an informed basis). I had a random lunch — I’d obviously not been there the previous day to order from the menu! I can’t remember what lunch or dinner were. I do remember that they were the last solid food I’d be allowed for a week.

I was introduced to the lady who had had the same surgery a few days earlier; she was making a good recovery but was not yet allowed to get out of bed, and I met a couple of other patients who were there for other surgeries. It happened to be November 5th, so later on some of us bonded over cups of tea and a grandstand view of fireworks across London from the day room (we were on the 8th floor). We could see all the way from Fulham to Canary Wharf.

The Weekend

I was allowed hot drinks on the Saturday, but no food and on the Sunday, I was on water only. My tummy needed to be properly empty in the days following surgery, and <shudders delicately at the memory> in the words of the immortal Captain Jean-Luc Picard I was given something to ‘make it so.’

I had given up smoking a few weeks beforehand to make my recovery easier, but I have to confess that I’d bought a pack of cigarettes and a cheap lighter on my way to the hospital(!). I was nervous enough to smoke a couple of them on the Friday and Saturday, and they did help to calm my nerves. This was in the days when not only could you smoke indoors in pubs and restaurants, but you could even smoke in certain areas in hospitals! From a modern perspective, even I find that strange. I finally quit smoking for good in the Noughties, by the way.

Monday

This was the big day. After I was woken up and had a drink of water, it was time for my pre-med, and I was told that I was fully bedbound from that moment. My nerves had disappeared by now. Shortly before I was taken to theatre, one of the friends I’d made over the weekend popped her head around my door to wish me luck and told me that I’d feel like a whole new woman afterwards. I had to smile —but she told me later that she’d realised why I was there and that she wished she could have taken the words back as soon as she’d said them in case she had offended me. She hadn’t. She’d made my day.

Up in the Theatre anteroom, the anaesthetist slipped a needle into my hand and I felt an icy-cold rush up my arm, then I woke up with the sun streaming in though the window. You’d be right in surmising that there was an interval between those two things! I was warm and I was comfy, I didn’t feel groggy at all, there was no pain, and I assumed it was the next morning. I was quite amused when I found out it was still Monday and, pleased that everything had happened, at peace with my body.

One of the nurses checked that I was awake and passed on good wishes from my boyfriend and friends on the ward. That’s about all I remember from that day.

Tuesday — Friday

This was long before the days when everyone had a mobile phone, and we didn’t have a phone at home or one available for patient use if you couldn’t get to the phones by the lift. The nurses told me that my boyfriend had rung every day that he couldn’t get to the hospital, and that my mother had rung as well; my boyfriend and I had discussed when to tell mum, and we’d decided that as she didn’t approve and would be worried and upset, it would be kindest to tell her afterwards (I said this to her when she and my sister came for a cup of tea after I’d got home, and she agreed that yes, that had probably been the best approach to take).

I continued to recover during the week, but I was not allowed out of bed at all and had to remain on my back day and night. Hospital radio and Radio 2 got me through this time — I tried to read the paper a couple of times but I did not have the concentration. I remember seeing Concorde among the aircraft coming over on its way into Heathrow very early one morning. Concorde was lit up underneath and easy to recognise, I’ve no idea what the other aircraft were.

We stepped my painkillers down pretty quickly and without any issues, and I had a course of antibiotics to ward off any infections. It’s fair to say that the whole process was a lot less painful than I had anticipated. I was rubbish at sleeping while I was in hospital; I wondered whether that was because I wasn’t doing anything to get tired.

I have one rather bizarre memory: Certain sounds — resonating heating pipes, clattering trolleys etc turned into music for a day or so!! Polyphonic, instrumental, choral… I gather that that can happen when your body has been through something major, but I’d not heard of it before. It had never happened to me before and has never happened to me since. I watched Touching the Void (though my fingers at one bit that I couldn’t bear to watch but couldn’t *not* watch) and read the book and I remember Joe Simpson relating that he was hearing Brown Girl in the Ring as he was crawling back to Base Camp. I was certainly warmer, more comfortable and in better shape than Joe but I know exactly what he was talking about.

Although I still wasn’t allowed to eat I wasn’t actually hungry which was just as well, because when I’m under the weather, everything tastes very strange anyway. Even water tasted strange. On the Thursday evening, a nurse came to refill my water jug and then said “I tell you what, I’ll make you a nice hot cup of tea. How does that sound?” Reader, it sounded wonderful. It tasted wonderful as well. I was allowed more tea on the Friday, and in the evening I had a cup of minestrone soup. That was a new variety for me, and I truly savoured it.

Saturday

Quite a big day! After a cup of tea and a pot of yoghurt, it was time to remove my dressings (including my, errm, internal packing) and catheter, which was duly done, and I was gifted some aftercare items. If you’ve been there, you’ll know what I’m talking about! I was told I could now get up and walk around, but that I would need to take it gently. They were right about that; I managed to sit up, and had to hold onto the bedhead for the next half an hour. If I’d actually tried to stand up at that point I’d have fallen flat on my face! I managed, a while after that, first to stand up and then, a little later still, to walk to the window and back — a round trip of some 15 feet, at a guesstimate. I needed to lie down for half an hour to recover. One thing stands out in my mind — I could see a particular tree from the window; before I’d been confined to bed, it was russet of leaf but the leaves hadn’t fallen. Now, a week later, the tree was bare and there was a perfect disc of leaves, matching the tree’s circumference, on the ground. There must have been a couple of very cold but still nights during the week. More prosaically, I’d managed to wee by the allotted time of 11:30 which was one of the targets.

Lunch was a sandwich! Real, solid, actual food! And, as an extra treat, my boyfriend arrived to spend the afternoon with me. He’d anticipated that I’d be pretty weak; I’m not sure how I fared against what he’d expected. He’d also restarted smoking so we laughed with each other and then we very slowly walked down the corridor to an area you wouldn’t find indoors nowadays.

Sunday — Tuesday

Recovery continued, slowly but surely. I learned to use my aftercare goodies. I got some more stamina/mobility back as (and no doubt because) I got to eat some more solid food. On the Monday morning the surgeon stopped by to see how I was doing before he went up to theatre for his next masterpiece.

My sense of taste returned apace with my recovery, and I remember that the burger I had for dinner on the Monday was absolutely wonderful. I was definitely starting to feel better in general terms.

Tuesday, just over a week after my surgery, was the day I went home. My boyfriend and a good friend with a car came to collect me for the 80-odd mile journey.

Stepping out of the hospital exit, the cold evening air tasted like nectar. Yes, London’s city air!! Our friend had come straight from work so we stopped off for something to eat on the way home; I had one heck of a job getting up off the chair to leave afterwards, I didn’t have much by way of strength or muscle tone at that point.

Home felt almost strange but very welcome. The dogs (two border collies) were allowed to welcome me home with the stern instructions ‘sit’ and ‘nicely’, then it was back to bed for a solid night’s sleep and the start of a good recovery at home.

Overall, there was a lot less pain than I’d expected, but I hadn’t known I wouldn’t be allowed to eat for a week or that I’d be quite so weak afterwards. There was less access to information then than there is now, this was pre-internet and pre-smartphones, there was no social media where you could ask the hive mind about surgery and recovery. I had never met anyone who’d completed everything so no-one had been able to tell me what to expect.

It took me a good few weeks to be properly mobile, and it was a couple of months before I was fit for work. I’ll tell you one thing, though — the relief at finally having ‘girl bits’ was amazing. Nothing beats that feeling!!