Whew. This post is going to be a mouthful because I have a lot to report over what’s happened in the last few days. Let’s see, it’s now Saturday, 4/16 and I had the procedure on Tuesday 4/12.
Where to start… Where to start… oh that’s right- The weeks before my surgery I crammed in as many shoots because I wanted to be prepared for the absolute worst case scenario where maybe I wouldn’t be able to shoot for something like months. I pretty much met my goals of coming up with 10 photo or video shoots, even if I had to cook the books a little bit and factor in previously-shot-but-so-far-unused material to reach it.
Whenever I have an early morning flight I rarely sleep the night before. I don’t know if I’m terrified I’m somehow not going to wake up, but I’m a naturally anxious person and just the anxiety itself will keep me awake. Plus I rarely can ever get a wink of sleep on the plane itself, so I knew I was in for a pretty rough day Monday.
Boo Hoo. Tara gets NO sleep ever on these flights. EVER. This is why I will never go to the far east for surgery. 24 hours of straight flying will probably kill me.
I didn’t even take off my makeup from my Uranus shoot, that’s how close to the wire everything was. Actually, Sunday night went mostly like this. Uranus shooting from 7pm to 10pm. Then from 10pm to 3am I edited 100 pictures of “Green Dragon Corset”. From 3am to when my ride arrived to take me to the airport- I finished all the buttons and web pages and uploaded the set.
I got the the airport at 5 for a 7am flight, switched over in Houston, where I had to bolt across from one terminal to another to catch my flight to Guadalajara. It’s a good thing I packed only a carry on bag. I knew a lot of my time there would be sleeping and recooperating so I really didn’t need to bring many outfits.
I tend to be prone to anxiety attacks and when they gave us the custom forms I realized I had no idea the address of where I was staying. It was probably in all the documentation that transop.com sent to me, but I somehow had it in my head that I didn’t need to worry about it since they were handling all transportation for me. So I freaked out and bought wifi on the airplane minutes before touchdown, to get any address of any place involved with the business. I jotted down the hospitals’ address, and of course, customs didn’t even bat an eyelash or care what I put down. So one crisis averted.
I touched down in Guadalajara at about 2pm to see how nutty Mexico can be. On one of the taxiways there sits a run down and clearly abandoned jetliner. Did it run out of gas or break down there 10 years ago? Who knows! But like Mexico itself it’s fascinating and not at all what I expected.
Or is this the equivalent to having a parts car up on cinder blocks in your driveway?
I see this and of course always think "Who do I need to talk to in order to shoot my stewardess porn on a real plane"?
Arriving at the terminal I quickly found my traveling companion who is shooting a film about me (I’m not sure how in depth I want to go about that project, but trust me, you’ll be hearing more about that this year- LOTS of big projects involving me are in the works).
The liason from Dr Cardenas’s Transop.com was a little late, because I’m the sort of person who just thinks that everything is going to go wrong, but once we were on our way (Vicente was his name), I was quickly assured that I was in very good hands.
The way things were planned, as this was Monday, I needed to fly in early enough in the afternoon so that we could do the cardio exam and the blood test, and then the actual consultation with the doctor (even though we had discussed via email what exactly we were going to do, and he looked over pictures of the areas we were going to fix).
Anyway, I’m running of fumes, and of course, I’m also dressed for sub- 60 degree weather, so I’m getting pretty hot and tired. I wore a wig on the flight down, because my natural hairline isn’t really the greatest passable thing in the world (which is the very reason I’m getting FFS), but after the first meeting, I was like fuck it, I’m not wearing this thing again on this trip. When I go home, I’m going to travel with my natural hairline, dammit.
And really, seriously, I would love to hear from anyone who keeps insisting that I don’t need FFS. Simply put, I didn’t have a passable hairline- because I lost a fair amount of hair before I transitioned in my late 20’s/early 30s. This was and is the best solution, and of course, guess what fuckers? It’s too late to bitch about it now!
So the consultation took forever but was very hopeful that in the end I’d have a more pleasing hairline, and even though I will still need some hair transplants to fill in the top corner area, I’m very happy with the results so far. But oh no! I’m getting ahead of myself!
Here’s a “before” picture if you don’t believe what I’m saying… You can also see how I had something of a prominent brow ridge. I was able to hide this very well under wigs that had bangs and that’s why for years everyone would swear up and down that I didn’t need surgery, but let’s be honest, this isn’t what you’d call passable. It just sorta screams “trans person”.
So we got settled into the recovery suite which is in a pretty nice area of town. Of course, having never been to Mexico (I guess the closest thing would be Jamaica) I didn’t know what to expect from the architecture. I found it to be a lot like Los Angeles to be honest. There are nice parts and not so nice parts. The recovery house is pretty large, with each room set up with it’s own bathroom, many with skylights that also serve as tiles for rooftop sun deck. One of the rooms in the front faces the road with a balcony almost at arm’s length to a big grapefruit tree. It’s all really pretty and well decorated. It’s best described as a bed and breakfast, and they prepare meals for the patients as well.
In many ways it’s small and cozy, but so well decorated with lots of interesting decor that it’s one of the better places I’ve stayed, and far nicer than any hotel. There’s a fridge filled with things like yogurt (after that first night after surgery you want some liquid meals) and each room has a Roku with Netflix and fill internet wifi (I was worried they might not have that). You can also call the USA from their landline, a cordless phone in your room- that’s included in the price. So they really did think of everything. Each room’s bathroom has a shower but lacks a tub, but I can see reasons why they probably don’t want the patients having tubs.
So Monday night I finally got some real sleep, and we had to be up at 7am Tuesday, which in Guadalajara is way before the crack of dawn (it’s further south and at the very western edge of the Central time zone). Vicente takes me and another patient to the hospital, which isn’t really so much a hospital as a state of the art plastic surgery specific facility. It’s really brand new, having only opened in the last year or two. It’s pretty much as modern of a place as you’d expect, and on par with, if not better than most clinics in the United States. Plus pretty much everyone who works there is pretty gorgeous themselves too. The pretty people in Latin America are very very pretty.
Of course, I haven’t eaten anything since midnight the night before, and I pull off my pajamas and put them into a locker and get into the jonny they give me (is that what they’re called?). They roll me on the stretcher and then I briefly see the operating room.. Nobody even tells me they’re administering the anesthesia but apparently they did (no one seems to use the gas any more- when I got my boob job in 2014, they used an i.v. too.). I kind of wish they did the countdown, because I aways need to brush up on my spanish numbers..
I think the surgery was around 8 or 9 am. I wake up in the recovery room and it’s maybe 2pm. I look like this:
It’s immediately clear that something is different but it’s hard to tell. I look weirdly pretty in these first pictures, because the black and blue bruising of the eyelids looks like makeup.
The other thing I can’t quite put my finger on is that when I had my very first email consultation, I mentioned a desire to have my nose done, but couldn’t afford it. I didn’t want a drastic nose job, just to make it more ski jump and less Wicked Witch of the West. And I had that on my list of things that maybe I’d do later. But seeing these pictures, I can almost swear that while he was in there, he took a little off the top of the nose when he shaved down the brow. If this still looks like this once I’m healed, then I won’t change anything else about my nose. But you can see from these pictures that the brow is a lot smoother and less prominent.
So I’m in this room, for hours. And hours, and what seems like hours and hours. I mustv’e woken up at 2pm, but my friend didn’t find me until maybe 4:30. I have vague memories of doctors coming in and telling me that the surgery went very well, and that there were no complications. There’s a staff of nurses there, but none speak English, and I don’t speak Spanish. There’s no tv, no radio (though I swear at one point I heard Madonna faintly in the background.). The only sound in the room is the cursed heart monitor, and after countless hours of this I’m literally starting to be driven crazy by it.
This damn thing. Curse you. Curse you forever.
Countless hours of my brain having nothing to engage it except the off key binging of this machine really starts to wear me down. I have discovered that I can withstand physical pain, but like the torture of a dripping faucet of a binging machine will drive me to insanity. Adolf Hitler himself could get me to tell him where the troops were landing on D-Day if it just meant turning this thing off. I think this video describes my descent into dementia. I’ll post a few of the other ones up to my tumblr.
They keep telling me that I’m going to be going home in a few minutes. My friend finally finds me (the insanity portion was before she did), and later on she gets me my phone and I keep my sanity by quietly playing songs on it to my ear. After a few more hours finally we can go, although when I’m walking around I do get a hot flash and feel faint. I have to sit down and let it pass, but once I’m ready to go I’m really ready to go.
My sentiments at the time.
So I finally went home after that evening, though I’m not sure why it took so long or just my state of mind plus nothing to do made the time just stretch.
The next day I spent mostly in bed but soon discovered that the medication I was on (which I think was a combination of pain killers and anti-inflammatories) sorta kept me awake at night. I was expecting something nice and soothing to take me out of things, but instead there was a stimulant in there. I can’t tell you how much I was craving some pot- this would have been the perfect place for it, as it would have killed the pain and taken me out of it, but maybe it would have kind of taken me on a bad trip, I’m not sure. I later heard that pot is still pretty illegal in Mexico, even for medical purposes. So I just had to tough it for a while.
I really look like mummy as they wrapped my legs up for some reason. Did they take my brain out through my nose and stuff me with natron while I wan't looking?
NOTE: So, I’m going to post this- As I write this, actually a week has passed, but this post only covers the first 3 days of my trip (though it was written later in the week). Yeah, I know, I’m confused too.
I’m back home now and I have a lot to report, but I’ll so a part 2 and a part 3 and post them in a few days, and bring everyone up to speed
-Tara
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