Congrats on finally getting your top surgery, hon! I wish you as smooth and quick a recovery as possible 💕
Thank you!! I’m officially three weeks post-op and so far everything has been healing well! I’m feeling really good overall and really excited about continuing to heal over the next couple months. and the weather is gonna get warmer in tandem and I’m gonna be able to wear t-shirts (!!!) and I am genuinely just so excited about this being My New Existence
right now I’m in that in-between phase where I feel pretty recovered (no pain, not tired, etc), but I still have restrictions on my arm movements until the end of the month, and I still have to wear a compression vest 24/7 so I’m not completely free of That Familiar Binder Feeling yet. Mostly I’m just impatient to get through this stage, so I can go back to carrying things and lifting my arms above my head! (though I’ll be through this phase before I know it! The first week post-op when I couldn’t do Basically Anything seemed slow when it was happening, but now it already seems like The Distant Past. I’m honestly so impressed with how much noticeable improvement there is week to week. it’s genuinely impressive)
tbh, I feel very at home with everything. Just like, really settled and peaceful. Visually I’m still at the phase where there’s still some swelling and the incisions haven’t scarred yet and—rather comically—I still have all these purple lines drawn on my chest in surgical pen (oh the perils of not being able to scrub that area when I shower!), but when I look at my bare chest in the mirror I’m just like “yeah, that’s normal. that’s EXACTLY how that’s supposed to look.” even with those silly surgical pen lines, it looks way more Correct than it did before. it’s a really peaceful feeling.
(and of course there’s still a long way to go before it’s like ~glorious new photographable chest. but also, that’s fine! that’s the process! I’ve been thinking a lot about how—for totally understandable reasons, given we live in a society that’s constantly trying to discourage any kind of transition—there’s this instinct to package our transitions as these really neat and tidy Before and After, no intermediary stage, because it’s more palatable to the general culture. but like, yeah my nipples are still kinda ~oogie, but they’re RIGHT! they’re healing and they’re doing what they’re supposed to do, and I’m being who I’m supposed to be. there’s even a kind of relish in the parts of the healing process that aren’t fun or photogenic, like changing the dressings on my grafts every day. sure it’s an odd process, like the hatching of fleshy little baby birds. but I’m proud of it all, because it’s evidence of one of the Best Damn Decisions I let myself make. anyway, that’s a whole Cultural Analysis that I could write but I won’t. but healing is a process and it can be weird AND joyous, and joyously weird and weirdly joyous. and I’m just, chillin in that space right now!)
so yes! my tl;dr is a sense of rightness. this was a loooong time comin, but it’s been worth every single second. and I’m so excited for every single second Yet To Come, because I feel like I am exactly where I’m supposed to be. it's like coming home. it may be new, but it’s also so, so familiar.
