Has it really been almost a month since I last updated? According to the dates, it has. I won't say that the diary's become a chore, but many times I've had the urge to update it, only to say "I'll get to it soon enough and I'll just post it all at once," with the inevitable effect that I've forgotten a large part of what I wanted to address in the realm of all things new and interesting.

Jessie got a LiveJournal account last night, or early this morning depending on the context. Having run my diary now, in fits and spurts to be sure, for over two years without the need for any special software or such, I look at
such tools with a dubious eye. Perhaps it's elitist, but I wonder what it is about LiveJournal and other tools of the sort that make it so much better than a set of pages.

Of course, there's an obvious answer to this, but for me it's not a positive one: the community attitude. I'll give an example, because I know that seems highly questionable. One of my family has a LiveJournal. She says it's easier to update her diary that way. I suppose, whatever, if it works. I know I just got done saying "I don't see it," and I guess what I should say instead is "I don't see it for me." If others benefit from it, fine. She does, actually; she adds stuff on a fairly regular basis. However, there's a drawback: most of what she says about anything really important is vague and deliberately obscure. I can't always tell to whom she's referring when she says things, and sometimes whole events will be reduced to statements like, "went to visit people" or the like, and a lot of detail that would make understanding what she's trying to discuss will be pixellated and self-censored.

She's actually made mention, at one point, about how she wishes she could be more open about things like that, but she can't lock her LiveJournal to "friends only," because some of the people she wants to have see what's going on her life don't have LiveJournals, and apparently the locking mechanism that LiveJournal uses allows only other LiveJournal members to read entries. This is, in fact, the only reason Jessie got the account in the first place: to get on her Friends list and make it easier to see what's going on with her.

When ICQ first shat itself onto the internet, everyone around me became instant and early adopters. "You can see who's currently online!" That's all well and good for people whose access is spotty, but it did absolutely nothing for me. If I was online, I was reading my email and sitting on IRC somewhere. If I wasn't answering my mail or sitting on IRC, I wasn't available. I don't get online without keeping one of those channels open. Thus, it really didn't give me any added benefit. The code was unstable, and a lot of people I knew had problems with it crashing their computers. Yet, they all clung to it and stuck with it, citing it as this brilliant advance for which I had absolutely no use.

Now, I've gotten myself involved in a GBA development team; Jessie got involved as a musician and then I heard that they needed coders, so I volunteered to pick up ARM and Thumb assembler to add to my list of languages, and at this rate it looks like I'll be taking over the memory manager. The hitch, of course—as if by this minirant you couldn't have guessed—is that the development team meets weekly, by how? ICQ. Well, AIM specifically.
"It's really advanced; I mean, you can set up these group-chats where everyone involved can see each other talking, just like an IRC server!" Excuse me? Why couldn't we use IRC? "Well, we all already had AIM
accounts." I don't, and I run an IRC server. You all have IRC clients, too, do you not? "Well, yes, but you can get an AIM account!"

I will, at this point, grant that I am not an early adopter of much in the way of technology, unless the benefit is blindingly obvious from the word "go". This has happened, I think, twice: once when my primary development language switched from C to PERL for work (I do mostly large-scale textfile manipulations and database interactions), and again when I saw the disk space savings that OGGs would give me over MP3s on my hard drive for the same sound quality. Other than that, I tend to lag behind the curve simply because what I have works, and I'm happier using what I know for as long as it serves my needs.

Now, though, I feel as if I'm being dragged into things not because they actually benefit me, but strictly because the early adopters have succeeded in driving the market in those directions. I have no need of a LiveJournal. I have no need of AIM. Yet, it seems that others around me are expecting me to pick up these things not for my own sake but for theirs, and the price of not doing so is just unpleasant enough to make things frustrating.
They're things that, on my own, I would have no interest or need of doing, but that because everyone else has I feel left out of the loop.

It shouldn't bother me as much as it does, but there's a part of my brain that craves companionship and approval, and things like this always make me feel awkward, for reasons that seem "silly" when stated explicitly. I want to be an active part of my circle of friends, but my friends are doing things that I wouldn't normally choose to do and, it seems, hoping that I'll do them too or at least altering their behaviors because they know I'm not doing them. This leaves me with the unpleasant choice of doing things I don't want to do because I want to be part of my peer group, or not being part of my peer group and standing by my principles. It's a no-win situation on my
end, because any choice is going to leave me feeling uncomfortable. 

So much of my life feels like it's like this sometimes; I should be used to it by now.

---

For a few days, I had made a change to one of the links pages off of my site. I had done it in frustration, and looking at it last night I realized I shouldn't have, but at the moment I did it, it seemed like the least painful
option.

I have a knot of emotion about Lurene that I can't explain except to try to pick loose threads from it and point to the threads and say that they're all part of the whole, but the whole itself remains frighteningly tangled. I still very much care about her and feel that she is my sister, but about six months after she got to college, it seemed like she became someone I didn't know, or didn't want to know. It feels like she's entered this little bubble of unreality vastly different from what I'm experiencing in my own life, or even what I experienced in university, and much of how she leads her life now seems less like the person I came to love in the years I saw her grow from a child
to a mature-for-her-age teenager and more like a caricature.

I can't even say that there's any one behavior pattern that sets me off and says that she's changed, but everything all sums to the viewpoint. Her headfirst leap into "lesbian subculture," from reading "On Our Backs" to using "dykey" as a positive adjective; her habit of punctuating her speech with meows and other "cute-kitty" actions;
her views of Objectivism that seem so skewed from my own; even her advocacy for OpenBSD and seeming hero-worship of figures like Theo de Raadt; all feel to me less like actions of a person and more like actions of a character in a poorly-written novel. She's stopped feeling "real" to me, and in that she makes me very nervous.

We tried to share a room at Anthrocon. At the time, we all thought it was a good idea. Things very quickly went sour, and Jessie and I ended up leaving the hotel to stay at our apartment for every night past the first. Shortly
after that, Lurene cleaned out her account on my server. I don't know how long it was between the end of the con and the purge, but when I found it I just tarballed the remainder and deleted her account. It felt like saying goodbye. 

The most painful part of this is just how much I still do care about her, and thus how hard it is for me to see what she's become and reconcile it with my views of her from our shared past.

When I was in my first relationship, I grew apart from a lot of my old friends. Six years can change people a lot, and in the times between when I met Rod and when I finally had the courage to leave him, both I and my old
peer groups had evolved. When I went back to them, we all tried to act as if we were the same people we had been before, and we all hurt each other very badly in the process. One of them told me my new mate wasn't welcome in his apartment, and I stopped speaking with him for quite a while at that point. Then when we started to reconcile from that, world events blew up in everyone's faces, and my rather unorthodox response led to a whole new round of hurt feelings that isolated us from each other again.

It's like we keep trying to interact with each other as if the intervening years had never happened, and we keep running into discrepancies between who we were and who we are, and learning to reconcile those takes time. Now I just have to figure out how to do that with my youngest sister, if I can.

Has it really been over a month since I last updated this? I keep telling myself that I'm not going to spend so much time away from the diary, 'cause when I do I end up with a batallion of things that I want to discuss, and I inevitably end up forgetting something that I considered utterly vital at one point. However, if I spend all day updating my diary, nothing ever happens that's worth noting. It's a classic problem—the polling problem, actually—in computer science, but that doesn't matter.

Anyway, the first thing of import that happened in the last five weeks was Anthrocon, which went far better than
I feared it would. Being on staff, I think, helped immensely. I even got the chance to help lead two panels with the guest of honor, Lisanne Norman. When the programming director of the con handed me the books and said "Go
read these," I was initially dubious, and the first book took a while to get its sea legs under it, but after that I've found them well worth what I spent on them. Ms. Norman managed most of the interviews herself, but she
said she was glad to have had my help through some of the rougher bits. 

In fact, the only thing that didn't go so well at AC was the room arrangement. The people with whom we were staying brought someone into the room that neither Jessie nor I knew while we were in the shower and then just sat there looking surprised when Jessie and I got miffed at them for not warning us we had company or, better yet, waiting until we were dressed to invite a stranger into the room. Then, they invited a fifth person—another person we didn't know—to sleep in the floor of the room without asking us first. True, their names were on the room and ours weren't, but there's this little niggling thing called common courtesy or so I thought. In the end, we left a check for half the room rate, expressed our disappointment and drove home for Saturday night. We didn't sleep there but one night, so in reality I probably shouldn't have paid more than fifty dollars, but I wanted to meet our "hosts" more than halfway.

They cashed the check and haven't tried to contact me about reimbursing me the extra, so I can only guess they're happy with how things happened.

That one minor scuffle aside, though, the rest of the event was quite fun, even if I did spend most of it running around looking for people and helping out in the Con Ops room. Next year, we're getting our own room and I'm going to try to get the days of the con as vacation so I'm not having to drive to work in the middle of it.

The weekend after that, of course, was the Bash, and that went far better than expected. This year's host and Jessie and I had had some personality scuffles leading up to the event, most of which were successfully resolved
when we had the chance to talk face to face about things. I gave a talk on all the things that nobody had warned me would happen as I transitioned, which went very well even if it did almost not happen thanks to my anxiety
problems—more on that in a bit. The Monday after the Bash is typically a sight-seeing trip, on which I'm almost never interested in going and Jessie only is insofar as it's a chance to socialize with people who're going. We
thought there'd be other people at the hotel with whom we wanted to spend time, but they either all went to Mt. Rainier, or else they went on an impromptu day trip to downtown Seattle, so we spent the day watching television in our hotel room and bitching about the lack of other Bashers. We did get a few rounds of Mao that night, though, which is always a good thing. 

I know I've mentioned my anxiety issues before, and they're no less present now than they were, but the big situations that I feared would lead to my social paralysis seem to be behind me for the moment. I'm not saying I don't want to treat them, but right now I'm going to need to go see my doctor to get any medication to help or find a therapist willing to treat it that will take my insurance. Unfortunately, I have no vacation days left right now,
thanks to the Bash and my surgery from earlier, so now my options are take a day off without pay, try to get my boss to footniblick things to not make me lose any more time, or wait until I get some more vacation time. It's a
crappy set of options, but thanks to how things spilled out earlier I really don't have a better one.

Right now, I'm in a holding action with my own psychoses. Part of me knows I'm copping out and that if I really needed the time off of work I could use my non-vested annual leave, but another part of me is trying to save that for a real emergency since I have no sick time at all remaining until January of next year and there aren't any situations I'm facing in the immediate future that will necessitate me being medicated. I hope.

My sister Tanya just left. Jessie had invited her over for the weekend, and I said at first I wanted her to visit, which is very true. I haven't really gotten the chance to talk with her in nearly five months, only briefly when
she came to pick us up at the airport and bring us home from the surgery trip. I thought, at first, that it would be good to have her around, but very rapidly I went to hell. Not things in general, but me personally.

Two nights before she arrived, I exploded all over Jessie in the local supermarket, saying all manner of impolite and unwarranted things very loudly. Jessie was understanaably shocked by the vehemence of my response, but zie did zir best to mollify me and keep me from yelling too much. I wasn't happy with my reactions, but at the time I told myself that I was justified in my actions, and in some fashion I'm sure I was, as nothing I had said was untrue, though much was probably exaggerated.

Then Tanya arrived at the apartment, and instantly I was on edge. She didn't do or say anything to make me feel uncomfortable; I just was. From the first moment she was there until Jessie told me she'd walked out the door half an hour ago, I felt completely uncomfortable, even in my own bedroom. It was everything I could do not to hide in the bathroom when we went out to dinner, and then when we came home I nearly ran to the bedroom
to hide. She and Jessie went for a walk, but I begged off saying my heel hurt too much.

This morning, the two of them went to lunch and I again excused myself, saying that I shouldn't eat at a buffet while I'm trying to diet, which was the truth, but only half of it. I spent almost all the time they were gone in the
bedroom, most of it in the bed, playing Civ3. Then, when they got back, I hid some more, until Jessie called me out to come watch something, which I did for twenty seconds before discounting it as stupid and returning to my
sanctum sanctorum. After another few hours, Jessie came in to ask me if I wanted to watch a movie, and I said yes I would after I got a shower.

I nearly had a crying fit in the shower, and then when I got out I got back into bed and did have one, during which Jessie came into the bedroom and held me while I cried myself out, mumbling to myself about how much I
hated being this way and how I wished I could face interacting with her. I couldn't even go to the kitchen for a soda because I was afraid of being stopped in the living room to socialize and the very thought of it made me
sick to my stomach.

This has been as long standing in my head as my gender issues, but I've been able to avoid having to deal with them, just like I did the other, by clever manipulation of my environment. I never had enough friends at any one
time to make me uncomfortable being around them all at once, and I would avoid every party I could. The ones I couldn't I either wandered about the whole night aimlessly, stood at the snackbar and noshed myself into oblivion
or monopolized the attentions of a few people the entire evening. In the times when I couldn't do that, I became the Grand Observer, cutting myself off emotionally from the scene and laughing cynically at everyone around me
scurrying about and partaking of their silly social rituals. Now, one by one, facing my gender issues has forced me to discard the barriers that I used to protect myself from my worst secrets, and this has come back to hit
me square in the muzzle.

Tanya didn't do or say anything wrong to upset me. The problem was entirely mine. Five months of silence interspersed only with a few bouts of what felt at the time like her dumping her problems on me led me to feel like I wasn't safe around her. I know that she never meant to hurt me, and I know that she was as scared of talking with me because of how poorly I reacted to her that I was of trying to talk with her about anything, but I didn't and still don't know how to overcome that. Every time I thought about trying to speak with her and explain how I felt and what was wrong in my head, I tensed up and felt nauseous. A part of my brain rose up in indignation proclaiming that it was her job to speak with me about the things she did wrong, and another part panicked and froze solid at the idea of having her speak with me at all. I became a total wreck, and the time I tried to force myself into interaction with her and pretend that it wasn't a problem only made the feelings worse.

I've sent an e-mail to my doctor asking him if he knows any therapists qualified to deal with social anxiety disorder or if he can prescribe any medication to help me deal with this. He's about the only one I trust other
than my mate right now not to try to tell me that either my gender problems caused my social anxiety or vice versa. These are both problems, and maybe they're both symptoms of a third underlying cause, but they're not related to each other as far as I can tell.

I just hope that I can find some way of dealing with this. It hasn't gone away in twenty years. I don't think without medication that it's going to go away now.

I've been sitting in my cube at work falling apart for the last hour, so I figure I'd better write some of it down before it passes and I try to tell myself and everyone else "it's nothing, really." It's not nothing, I don't think, or maybe that's just the frustration talking. 

I hate free-association socializing. I've never felt comfortable in large groups of people without direct purpose. I can sit in any sized meeting or lecture without a problem. I can even lead such an event if I have a reason to be there, but just "hanging out" with more than a very few people makes me feel isolated, alienated and exposed. I don't know why. I don't like feeling that way, but I don't know how to make it go away. Also, the number of people that I can handle in this fashion drops rapidly when people I don't know are involved. I don't even know if it's insecurity or self-consciousness or what. I can't fix the problem if I don't know what the problem is, and I have no way of telling what it is. I just... don't feel safe.

So, of course, one of my friends in the area is keen on turning all of the little get-togethers that had been happening in the area into large get-togethers, with lots of people I don't know present for no reason other than to hang out. Monday nights have traditionally been one of these regularly scheduled meets, and for a long time they were restricted to five or six people. Restricted's the wrong word, but we never had more than that many show up at once, and I had a blast. Over the last three weeks, though, more and more people have begun attending, including a lot of people I've never met before even online, and I've been more and more strung-out and stressed coming home afterwards as a result. It's nobody's fault, except my own if you can assign blame to it, but even there if it were something I could just fix then I would. It's something I don't know how to cure, or even to treat.

Last night, a number of things had all gone wrong over the course of the weekend prior. It had been the third weekend of not having any time to myself with Jessie, and we had just finished a thirty-six hour roadtrip to Michigan to rescue a friend from potential homelessness. I'd forgotten to pack my hormones for the trip, so for two days I was off my pills. I woke up yesterday morning and tipped the scales at 280, which is the highest I've been since before I started my diet two years ago. Then I went out to eat with a bunch of people, including a host of people I didn't know very well and one person that actively irritates me.

I didn't handle things very well.

I didn't yell or shout or scream or make a scene, but I did hunch over feeling vaguely sick to my stomach most of the night, nervous and uncomfortable. I kept feeling exposed and vulnerable, for no good reason. Nobody made any unkind comments, nobody did anything to hurt me, and I don't think anyone would have tried to do anything, but I just didn't feel comfortable. I felt unwelcome at a table of close friends and family at Thanksgiving last year
because I was the only one not eating an appetizer, so I know it's my problem, not anyone else's, but that didn't make my hasty departure last night any more comprehensible or acceptable.

Jessie asked me last night if I wanted zim to try to talk with the one that originally organized the dinners about what had happened and explain that I wouldn't be making it any more, and I said yes. So, of course, this morning
zie did, and then zie called me on the phone to say that the organizer had gotten very upset and to inform me directly that I would  would continue to go to Monday night dinner with the rest of group, until either I learned how to handle being around large groups of people in a social setting or I ran screaming into the night, whichever came first.

For the life of me, I don't know what to do now.

I hate being like this. I don't want to feel uncomfortable around people I like. I don't enjoy feeling so vulnerable, and I want to get over whatever it is that's causing me to feel this way. However, I don't even know what the real problem is, and I can't solve what I don't understand. If I don't know what's wrong, I can't make it right, and right now all I have is the sense that something is broken in my head without indication of how to repair what's damaged.

Now, though, I feel like anything I do with respect to Monday nights is going to make things worse. If I go, I'm going to feel like nobody wants me there because they all think I don't want to be there. If I don't go, I'm going to
wish I had and feel even more isolated than I already do. I'm caught, and I don't know how to get out. The problem is in my own head, and I know  it is, but I don't know how to fix it.

I want things to go back to the way they were before, but that's not going to happen now. The only way for them to go back to how they were would be to tell other people they're not welcome, and I'm not going to do that. I wouldn't even if I had the power, because it's not fair to them. The problem is with me, not with them, and I have to be the one to fix it, not them. 

I just don't know how.

I never quite seem to manage unmitigated good news or bad news any more. I think the sign that life has hit the long stretch from maturity to the grave is the realization that everything evens out on a long enough time scale,
and that positives and negatives will, in any life, happen with equal frequency. The secret to happiness isn't avoiding the bad stuff that can happen; it's focusing on the good stuff instead.

Of course, that doesn't help those of us who are by nature pessimistic worriers and perfectionists, but it's a nice idea anyway.

I missed Jessie's birthday on Monday, and I didn't even realize it until zie said something to me last night. Zie'd been out of sorts for a few days, but I couldn't figure out why and zie didn't really tell me until we were curled
up in bed last night, and suddenly zie reminded me of that and I felt like a total schmuck.

Now, in my defense, I don't have a good head for dates. Not only do I rarely remember what day it is, I don't place "today is the nth of xtember" with "the nth of xtember is a special day for this reason" until at least the (n+2)th, sometimes not even until the middle of ztober. It's kind of embarrassing, really; I don't even remember it's my own birthday some years. 

So, on top of everything else, for me to have forgotten such an important day—important because I say it is, and always have—was seriously bad juju. I'm still upset about it this morning, though at this point anything I do to correct the mistake will make me feel worse, not better. Now that the damage is done, bandages on the wound will only call more attention to the wound; they won't help it heal.

On the up-side, I finally had the proof that everything through which I put myself, all the torment and abuse I faced going through my transition, proved a few nights ago to be worthwhile. I had my first post-operative orgasm.

Something of such phenomenal importance, one might think, would get mentioned as soon as it happened. It would, but the truth is that there's absolutely no way for me to describe it. It was... it was right. My body responded as it felt like it should. I felt at that moment like I could've pushed myself into damn near anything and succeeded. I probably could've gone for two or three of them, in fact, if sleep hadn't claimed me almost immediately afterwards.

Like I said, the ups and downs tend to come in even measure after a while. It's focusing on the positives that makes life worthwhile. "It isn't that I don't suffer; it's that I know the unimportance of suffering." My mate will probably get pissy with me for quoting from That Damned Book, but I think this time it's more than reasonable.

Right now, I don't know how I feel. Rather, I know how I feel, but it's a set of disjoint emotions, the cumulative result one of confusion and ambivalence.

Tonight, after twenty-seven months of prepartion, two years of hormones, eighteen months of RLT, fifteen months of waiting for surgery, three weeks of hospital time, two weeks of physical recovery time and seveneen seconds of foreplay, Jessie and I made love for the first time with my new body.

The results were... inconclusive. 

I was horribly nervous when we started, like some twittering virgin on her first date. In many ways, I was. I'd been dilating for weeks, of course, but I'd never had anything up there that wasn't hard plastic or visibly being
guided by someone else. I'd only ever put my own fingers in there a few times, and that was more to prove to myself that I could more than anything else. Jessie had trouble keeping an erection, and several times before we even managed to tie we'd had to pause for more lubricant or other things.

Finally, after about fifteen or twenty minutes of trying to find some position that would work, I lay on my side and Jessie took me from behind, which took a little effort but seemed to work fine, with the one caveat that I couldn't
really feel anything except pressure around the opening and inside. When Jessie began actively thrusting within me... well, frankly, it hurt. I wasn't tense, and I don't think Jessie had the wrong angle or was doing something incorrect, but every push hit the back wall, and the repeated hits started to get sore after a while.

Part of me wanted to call a halt to everything, but I knew I needed to see this through to the end and so rather than say "this hurts" or some other damper on the situation, I simply lay still and tried to let Jessie enjoy things. Except, Jessie wasn't enjoying it either. My mate was so nervous about hurting me, about my not enjoying things, about everything that could go wrong that zie couldn't achieve orgasm, and eventually zie had to pull out of me to take things into zir own paw until zie was so close that anything could have set zim over the edge, and then within half a dozen thrusts within me again zie was done, and all I had was blood and lubricant on my sheets, bodily fluids all over my thighs and a pain in my crotch.

Before I started transition, masturbation was necessary, and it was physically enjoyable but emotionally crippling. During transition, masturbation was an infrequent need, physically stressful but usually fun if my arm didn't grow
fatigued first, emotionally upsetting but still stimulating. Now, there've been fun moments, but on the whole sex was just painful, and it wasn't even emotionally stimulating. It was just... there. A part of me felt good knowing
that Jessie was in the "right" hole, but it just... wasn't what I expected.

In my first relationship, the first month my boyfriend and I were together, I didn't climax once. It took four tries for Jessie and I to achieve an orgasm together when we first moved in with each other. This is no different in its own way. Unfortunately, while I'm consciously aware that this was my first time, that sex is no different from any other act and takes time and practice to get good at performing and that we were both too nervous to really
actually enjoy the event, there's still the part of my brain that bought into the hype that sex would solve all the problems I'e had with my body and that this would be some magical act performed instinctively by any two people in love with each other.

More than anything, I think I'm embarrassed and upset with myself at having fallen for another Big Lie. Society is filled with them, like "the media try to be objective," "the two-party system is a success," and "the earth is round." They're falsities so pervasive that they take on a semblance of truth just because of the number of people who believe in them, but that really have no basis in fact. I've tried so hard to be honest and open about myself, my transition and my expectations of everything as a result, but here I fell for the classic motif hook, line and sinker.

Of course, looking at it afterwards, there's a lot of other facts that I know are important factors in what happened but that don't make me feel better. I was incredibly nervous, as I said, and so was Jessie. Zie was, in fact, so
nervous that when zie did climax, it wasn't fun for zim either. It had been too much effort. It took forever for us to find a position we could use. We had no experience. I could go on, but the point is that I shouldn't have expected it to be this grand thing the first time, and I let myself get swept up in the hype and anticipation and then I let myself get hurt when it wasn't like that.

I feel like a fool.

I can only hope that when next we try this, we take the time to do it better and remember what we did this time so that it's better for both of us. I refuse to accept that this is how sex is going to be for the rest of my life.

---

In other news, I've been back to work for a week now, and it's as if I've never left. No work has amassed since I left, though many projects are waiting for someone's authorization or signature or something to start, and others are hovering on the edge of being released from the drawing board to start being implemented. Meanwhile, I'm playing a lot of Freecell and reading Slashdot and the Register.

I still haven't got my diary from Thailand into shape for posting as entries in my journal proper, but that can be tomorrow's project, I suppose. I spent most of Wednesday unclogging a mailing list, and I've been debugging some configuration issues that have arisen from the server move. All in all, my life is starting to return to pre-trip levels, whatever those are. 

I'm glad I went, but I'll be a hell of a lot more glad when I can really enjoy the body I bought while I was away.

I'm lying awake in the hotel room in Phuket for what will be our last night in Thailand, once I finally manage to get to sleep. In just under fifteen hours, we'll be en route to Singapore, and then to Heathrow to spend five days with Chloe before returning home. It's been nearly five weeks since we arrived in Phuket, and I've come down with my typical case of insomnia. I'm used to it by now; the night before any major trip I usually get three or four hours sleep at most, then crash immediately upon arrival. This will likely prove to be no different.

In a way, it's hard for me to imagine leaving. I've heard claimed in multiple print sources that it takes three weeks for the brain to adjust to any major change, from phantom pain in amputees to not reaching for the missing
cigarette pack in the pocket after stopping smoking. We spent just over that in the hospital, and leaving was something of a shock. Now we've been here over a month, and returning to England is going to be something of a culture shock, to say nothing of Philly. At least it'll be a few more days before I have to remember not to drive on the left side of the road. 

I woke up this morning incredibly aroused, the first time I'd actually been overwhelmed by raw physical desire since getting out of surgery, and it took effort to stop myself from trying to relieve it by whatever means necessary. I'm still healing down there, and Jessie and I are both under medical orders not to do anything for six weeks. We technically violated that two nights ago, but nothing got done that hasn't happened during dilation or showering, so that doesn't really worry me too much. Actively trying to climax, though... that's another matter entirely.

It's hard for me to believe that the changes are finished, in one sense. In another, it's hard for me to imagine how it was before the hospital stay. I can mentally remember how I looked, how it felt, et cetera. Just like the memories of myself from before my transition, though, the ones of my sex life prior seem... disjoint. They don't seem like mine. They are, and I won't try to pretend that I was always possessed of what I have now, but it feels alien to think about what used to be between my legs, even as I still find myself looking in the mirror and wondering why I look different.

I was hoping to see Dr. Sanguan one last time before departure, but the last time I called the hospital to arrange the appointment, I found out that Pim was out sick and likely wouldn't be back to work for the rest of the week.
Right now, I don't even know if they've scheduled a driver to come to the hotel to take us to the airport or if we're going to have to hire a taxi for the job. Being in the hotel has put all of the medical staff in the distance,
and things have seemed very out-of-touch as a result. I've felt stranded on a number of occasions. At least in the hospital I could hit the nurse call button if things got really bad. Out here, once the receptionist goes to bed,
we're cut off from the outside world unless I walk to a pay phone. It's made getting anything major accomplished seem more daunting than is necessary.

At least the hotel staff here has been very understanding. The front desk clerk asked us when we were leaving tomorrow and said we didn't have to check out of the hotel until 15h00 since flight wasn't until 19h. I've never
found that kind of accommodation in the US, or anywhere else for that matter. They've worked their cleaning schedule around our sleeping habits, and Jessie only had to remind them once not to turn off our air conditioning when they came into our room. It really is a nice hotel, and if we had been possessed by aliens or brainwashed by the government into coming to Thailand for a vacation, I certainly might have considered the Kata Poolside Bungalows for several seconds before turning it down in favor of someplace that had phones in the rooms. Still, it's hard to complain too much for under twenty American dollars a night, plus breakfast for both of us.

I should sleep, but I'm not tired. At least, I'm not mentally tired. I'm physically exhausted, but my brain is running on overdrive right now, freely spinning over a hundred ideas and never pulling anything conclusive out of any of them. Jessie and I talked briefly before zie fell asleep about the times in the hospital that I went into surgery, and how zie dealt with it all and how zie felt, and it's left me that much more aware of just what zie means to me, and how fortunate I am to have someone in my life that's so close to me. Right now, I almost wish zie were awake, so that we could cuddle more actively. As it is, I'll probably end up passing out snuggled up against zir back, arms around zir waist.

This whole trip is finally coming to a close, and I don't know how I feel about it. Everything I've done has, in the long run, been far more worth doing than I could possibly put into words, and at the same time there have been some experiences that I can only describe as traumatic and emotionally distressing, but necessary. I've felt alternately that I had made the best decision possible and that I had thrown away my only means of physical
pleasure. I've gone nearly two months with only testosterone, three weeks without even that, and now almost ten days with only estrogen and whatever my adrenal glands are generating, with all of the emotional rollercoastering
that that entails. I've discovered some wonderful local cuisine and spent nights dreaming of homemade chili and jambalaya. I've shared incredible emotional intimacy with Jessie and yearned for the company of others.
Ultimately, I think that this trip will fade into mostly pleasant memories, but a few bouts of pure terror will remain in my mind as dark patches in my rose-tinted hindsight.

I'm glad I did it all, but I hope I don't have to do it again. If I decide on the colon graft extension, I can't think of another surgeon I'd rather have do it than Dr. Sanguan, but that'll be many many months in the future, if at all.

---

I'm dating this entry according to local time back home in Philly, the time recorded on the computer, because at the moment I have no idea in which time zone I'm actually located and thus what time it really is. I'm on the plane,
stuffed into an economy seat nxt to Jessie on one side and someone sleeping on the other, one of the only people still awake on the whole plane aside from the cabin crew and hopefully the pilot.

I got, at most, four hours of sleep last night. I started to get cramps and pain around my groin at something like four in the morning, which necessitated me getting out of bed and spending an hour or so in the shower to keep the problem from getting out of hand, and then at some point after that I passed out cold, only to be jarred violently awake by a member of the cleaning staff pounding on the door calling me to the phone. I don't take kindly to being woken in that fashion, but as it was a call I'd been expecting, I can't really complain too heavily.

I spoke with Dr. Sanguan, and he told me that the insurance paperwork that both he and his assistant, Pim, said would be faxed to Hartford Life was, in fact, not complete and not faxed, which explained why I had received an email from my boss telling me to contact HR and find out why Hartford Life was balking at paying for my medical benefits. I explained things in an email to my doctor at home, and I can only hope that the matter will be resolved by the time I get back, but I anticipate much bickering with paperpushers when I return to Philadelphia.

Once the details of the insurance were resolved, Dr. Sanguan began questioning me about my progress with healing, how I was sleeping, whether I could urinate and control it, how often I was dilating, and so on and so forth. After he heard my responses, he said that there didn't seem to be a need for me to come to the hospital and that if I had any problems once I got home I could email him directly, which meant that we had only to wait for the hospital driver to arrive at 15h00 to take us to the airport. Needless to say, Jessie and I were both very pleased with that news.

The flight from Thailand to Singapore was easy, but the leg from there to London has been hell so far. I don't sleep well on planes in general; I never have. However, with so little sleep this morning—or is it yesterday now?—I feel utterly exhausted. Unfortunately, because I'm still healing from surgery, no matter what I may like to claim, there aren't any really comfortable positions for me. Every way I've found so far to squeeze myself
into this chair has put pressure somewhere uncomfortable, and a few times has led to outright pain. I'm back to sitting on the donut seat, which has a slow leak leading me to have to stand and reinflate it every so often, and either my neck or my back or my butt hurts from something not being supported or getting pushed into the wrong position.

At some point within—I hope—the next hour or so, I'm going to simply pass out cold from sleep deprivation, but it's equally possible that I'll be awake from one source of irritation or another until the plane touches down and I walk to Chloe's car. I'm almost certainly going to nap on the drive back to her house, though, and likely well into the local afternoon.

Three days left in Thailand, or rather three nights, and I do feel well enough, thankfully, to get up and go walkies on a pretty regular basis. We've seen very little of the local area, still, but that's mostly because the climate itself is inhospitable, and there really hasn't been much of interest that we've wanted to find in the area.

Actually, that's a misleading statement. We've both been very keen on the idea of finding clothing in the local style, but doing so in our sizes is no easy task. We easily tower over most of the natives, and the typical Scandinavian tourist looking for Thai clothes visits one of the numerous "quick tailors" that pepper the island, and apparently the country. Finding one-piece swimsuits—the specific item for which Jessie and I have both been searching—that would fit us ultimately took us to the local Tesco's, the British version of WalMart, where we found one item that would fit our needs.

Speaking of Tesco, we've been doing most of our shopping there since we got out of the hospital. It's not American by any stretch of the imagination, and yet in the short time we were staying with Chloe, we both felt so comfortable and at ease that Tesco's here has quickly become "a taste of home." Jessie's fallen in love with the store-brand ginger nut biscuits, and I don't start the day without a box of pre-mixed Milo, complete with hypodermic straw. It's a small comfort, but one that's helped keep us sane while we've both felt
trapped in this strange country.

Dilation is now at twice a day for about an hour, less often than suggested but for longer periods of time. I couldn't face doing it three times in the same day; if I did, I wouldn't be able to get anything else done at all. It's
not like I have anything to do but dilate, granted, but there's a limit to how often I'm going to do this to myself. There's still something debasing internally over spreading my legs and forcing hard plastic objects into myself to see how much I can take for a given timespan.

Dilation really isn't the big problem I have now, actually. When I went into surgery, I had long before resolved the self-image issues, but learning to actually adjust to my new physical arrangement has taken some effort. It's not that I didn't really want it. Far from it, in fact. The sensation of Jessie's finger within me, rubbing against the inside walls of my sex, has made it all worth it. However, everything has been repositioned, and stimulation that goes to one location might set off old nerves in my mind. Plus, arousal right now hurts, or it did for a while, while the tissues were still healing, and it's not helped that Jessie's been even more sexual than normal.

Everyone that's said I've been so lucky to have a mate that's been with me through the whole of the transition hasn't seen this side of things, I suspect. Healing after the surgery takes time, and it's only been two weeks, tops. Every time I've gotten aroused, it's caused me a great deal of pain. There really isn't any blunter way to say it. And with Jessie being more active than usual, it's been a lot of stress having to say "I can't do this right now." Turning down my mate, saying that zir advances have been physically distressing in ways I don't like, has really been upsetting. This is the sort of thing that I've never heard discussed, and I'm not sure myself how to handle it. I'm doing my best, and as always Jessie has been nothing but understanding, but that only makes the situation manageable; it doesn't make it go away. Only time and recovery can do that.

I heal quickly enough; I can only hope that this holds true this time as well.

We've been in a hotel—more like a bungalow room—for three nights now, and more than ever I'm ready to go home, or at least into some kind of accomodation that has a truly hot shower, twenty-four hour front desk and
cleaning staff, and phone lines in the rooms. To be sure, the hotel Pim found for Jessie and I is nice, but it lacks just enough basic amenities to be irritating without lacking enough basic Thai necessities to make our complaints sound real and not just like whiny American tourists.

I've again contracted food poisoning, again from the Heinz salad cream, and this time I've managed to run myself out of toilet paper at such an hour that there was no way for Jessie to fetch more from the front desk. I thus spent
the night more or less awake, getting up every hour or so to purge my intestines and then stepping into the shower to clean myself. As soon as Jessie is awake enough for me to shake violently awake, zie's going on a mission from Goddess to retrieve several bog rolls from the hotel staff.

I tried yesterday to call about getting the tickets changed myself, but the local QANTAS/British Airways office—which is in Bangkok—isn't open past 13h on Saturday, meaning my call missed their agents by an hour. Neither Jessie nor I could justify spending $1.40/minute, the best rate we could find, calling England to argue with their emergency staff over flight details, and so at the very least it's going to wait until tomorrow. Also on the agenda for then is a call to Pim to discuss the details of our accomodation and a request to find someplace more... well... American, for all the the word connotes.

I should've done this yesterday, but Jessie and I have been having some strange undiagnosable computer problems that appear to be related to hardware failure on the laptop. I hope the drive doesn't die on us; I'll be very upset if it does.

The surgeries all appear finished, so now of course I have the indignity of stomach flu or food poisoning or something to add to my discomfort. I haven't been able to keep down anything but water for the last thirty-six hours, and the aftertaste of some kind of weird salad dressing on the "salad" I got with dinner from a local restaurant a day or so ago, probably about the time the migraines really started getting bad, so I wouldn't be surprised to find out that I'd picked up some ptomaine or something else of the like.

I've given some samples to the nurses here and they said they could find out what was wrong and give me something for it, one advantage to getting sick while staying at a hospital. Now I just have to wait for them to do it and hope that it happens sooner than later. I don't want to be sick on the flight home.

---

Events transpired so fast today that it scarcely seems like we've had time to process them all, but at the end of the day I've had a little time to think about everything.

First, Dr. Sanguan came to the room this morning to make a last-minute inspection of the surgical site, and he said that one of the grafts was looking very good, and the other had a few problems but they were minimal and that I wasn't going to lose the graft, only the outer tissue around it, which means I have what looks like a crescent-shaped gouge around it. However, that won't take surgery to heal, only time and antibiotic ointment, which I'm to apply after dilation and showering. Further, he said I was in his medical opinion ready to leave the hospital and could check out tomorrow.

Pim then came to the room to collect the money for everything, the stay, the procedure, et cetera. The total came to USD5,500, almost half of what I had been expecting to pay at the outset. This puts me far ahead in the money
game, which means when I get back to the U.S. I can afford to pay off one of my credit cards almost immediately, and more importantly that when I get back to England, I can afford to take my sister and her friends out to a really nice meal somewhere.

Pim also said she'd take a look at our tickets and see what arrangements she could make to get us back to England as early as possible. I can arrange the onward transit from there to Newark by calling Continental's offices, but Pim's the expert in getting the out-from-Phuket routes hastened, and Jessie and I are both eager to get home, or at least out of Thailand. We've had our fun here, as it were, but now it really is time to go home. We'll probably have to spend a few days in a hotel here waiting for our flights, but that's far preferable to two weeks of delays.

I got up and about for real today for the first time since getting the first surgery, and Jessie and I got dressed and went to the local Tesco/Lotus market for lunch, and we picked up some tidbits here and there for other people,
which I hope will be well-received when we do get back home to deliver them. I of course overtaxed myself thinking myself to be Ms. Marvel, and by the time we made it back to the room I was on the verge of collapse, but it just felt so good to be mobile without that damn catheter that I was willing to push things, even if I shouldn't have done so.

I then came back to the room and handled dilation, by myself, for the first time from beginning to end. Unfortunately, I can now only handle Borodir; Aaden is just too big for me. I seem to have lost some diameter in the few days I wasn't actively stretching myself, but I'll get that back with reinforcements. I'm going to need it if I ever intend to put my new body to its intended task. It still feels a bit like a chore, three times a day every day for at least half an hour, but I'd rather do it and get used to having something up there of the appropriate size than not do it, lose more depth and diameter and then get torn the first time Jessie and I try to make love.

Then for dinner, we got dressed again and went down to the Big C, the other major shopping center in the area. This one doesn't involve a taxi, just a short walk down the road behind the hospital. We ate at the Japanese restaurant, during which we had a rather interesting talk that led to a few odd conclusions. I've often made the statement that what someone has between zir legs was unimportant to how that person should be perceived and treated socially, and thus Jessie has presented me with with challenge, or perhaps the order would be more accurate seeing as it did come from my master, of telling people "does it matter?" when asked if I've had the surgery yet. Having made such a big deal of my transition, now to work to elude the question of whether I've taken the "final step," or to avoid giving a direct answer, will be challenging.

Of course, I say "final step," when really the final step of my social transition was several months, perhaps even a year ago. This is isn't even the final step in my physical transition; I have much more electrolysis to do, and I anticipate more changes from the hormones now that I don't have the testosterone to fight. So, why then is this called the "final step"? What is it about the surgery that makes it the all-encompassing conclusion to the process? It's not the only irreversible step. It's not even the last in many cases, including mine. Why does it matter so much
what one has between one's legs? Others before me have said that we live in a society that intertwines the notions of sex and gender, and others after me will say it, and doubtless I won't be any more loudly heard than they
have, but still I feel the compulsion to point it out and decry it, even knowing that my protestations will be futile.

At any rate, everything for me to do in Thailand is finished, at least for now. Perhaps in the future I'll feel ready and interested to come back for the optional hardware upgrade, but for now the trip is finished, and in my
opinion, not a moment too soon. It's a wonderful place, but I'm ready to go home.

Dr. Sanguan stopped by the room about an hour ago, and he said that tomorrow
he's going to change the dressing on my side and my groin, and if everything
looks good he'll let me stand for a bit and walk around, but he still wants
me to take things carefully for a day or two, and then once he's removed the
catheter I should be able to get up and walk around without discomfort.
Already I don't hurt much, though I am sore from just lying still, and the
packing inside me isn't helping any with that.

Mostly what I'm fighting for pain right now is the steady but inconsistent
stream of migraines that have been hitting me at odd hours. It's always in
the same place, too. It feels like someone's shoving an ice-pick through my
left temple, and my vision swims while it's happening. I've had four of them
in the last two days. I have no idea what causes them, or how to get rid of
them other than lying back and trying to nap or else asking for massive
doses of painkillers that I don't even need for my surgical sites any more.
It's a little distressing to think that the headaches hurt worse than the
surgery wounds; the latter will heal in time.

Now it's just down to a waiting game. Waiting to change the packing. Waiting
to check the graft. Waiting to get the catheter out. Waiting to go back to
England. Even, as much as I'm looking forward to seeing Chloe again, waiting
to get home. I'm very weary right now, and I want to spend a night in my own
bed without any tubes or nurses around.

Hopefully it won't be too much longer.

I've apparently overcome the sleeping pill I took last night, and the pain medication doesn't seem to be doing its full potency job this morning. Then again, I should get another around of medication to take after breakfast
that includes pain meds, which should help.

My groin, already still somewhat sore from the first two surgeries, hurts the worst. My side is a hot ache, but not so intolerable. However, the cumulative effects, along with my sore rump from being bedridden and the chill in the air have all fused into one grand hurt that refuses to go away regardless of what pills arrive to make the pain more manageable.

I'm also concerned about the amount of pain medication I'm taking. I don't want to become reliant on the stuff to get through the day, but at the same time I have trouble focusing well if I don't take it because everything simply hurts too much. I'd go back to sleep as it is, but, of course, my back hurts on top of everything else and there's just no finding a comfortable spot in this bed.

It really is the home stretch now, assuming everything goes according to plan, but it's hard to see it that way sometimes. This is, at least in memory, the worst—and the most different places at once—that I've hurt since
getting into the hospital, and so it's difficult for me to say now that from here it all gets easier, since it's really only gotten more painful the longer I've stayed. However, there shouldn't be any more surgeries, they do keep me
doped up when I request it, and I've got someone here to help me make sure I don't request it too often.

Pain aside, my biggest issue is the whole bedridden thing. I've done this before while being here, and it's just not easy for my head to accomodate. Despite my fantasies and my desires, the reality of being medically incapable
of taking care of myself is painful to accept, and it's frustrating in the extreme. I had to awaken Jessie to ask zim to get me something out of the refrigerator with which I could take some medication; I couldn't go get it myself. I'm under strict orders not to get out of bed for three days, not even to use the bathroom.

Jessie assures me that zie understands and doesn't mind helping me, but that doesn't make it any easier, even though I believe zim. The block is in my own mind, and I have to learn to overcome it. I just hope that I'm not in bed long enough for me to have to learn to overcome too much of it. I really could not face another round of this, not for a long time.

At 14h15 this afternoon, the gurney arrived to take me down to surgery. This time, Jessie came with me, as well as Praxis, and they both helped pass the forty minutes that I spent on the operating table waiting for Dr. Sanguan to arrive and get started. There is little so daunting, in my mind, as the time spent in anticipation of something one doesn't want but must have, like sitting in the waiting room at the dentist's office in anticipation of a root canal, or in the boss's office waiting to be fired.

The first time I went into surgery, I had a general anaesthetic. The second was supposed to be under an epidural but ended up being general when something went wrong with the spinal block. This time, I had the option of going totally under again—an idea no-one particularly liked—or having everything done solely under a local where needed. Now, in the past I've made my share of jokes about watching the procedure as it was happening. I even wanted Jessie there to take pictures or get a video or something. However, faced with the idea of being awake while the surgeon cut on me, I began to quietly panic. Unfortunately, the epidural wasn't an option this time, and nobody was happy with the idea of me having to go under general anaesthetic three times in such a short span, and so I agreed to have it done with just the locals.

Lying on the bed, Dr. Sanguan testing areas on my side to find out if I was numb enough for him to remove a hunk of flesh to act as the graft donor site, I about fainted, I think. Jessie kept me mostly coherent, telling me I was doing well and reminding me to let zim know about any pains or twitches, letting me squeeze zir paw when I felt something unpleasant or just needed to release tension. I think if Jessie hadn't been there, I'd have had a
full-blown panic attack.

In hindsight, the whole experience feels like having been in-scene to an unsafe master, Dr. Sanguan. Let me state right now that the man has brilliant hands and that I can't think of anyone I'd recommend more highly for the procedure than him, but because of how my head is wired, about half an hour into the two-hour process, I began to get very nervous and twitchy. I'm in very poor shape, and so limbs that lie still too long begin to lose
circulation. My arm started to tingle after about half an hour, and I had to ask one of the nurses for permission to move it because it had been tied down to the bed to keep me from flailing around with it. Shortly thereafter, my
butt started to get sore from lack of motion, and I tried to shift it but Dr. Sanguan told me to stop moving, and of course there was no option for me but to comply and wait.

I told him what the problem was, and he said when he was done with my side he'd let me adjust myself while he worked with the graft tissue. I did get the chance to move around on the table when he'd finished sewing up my side, but not very much, and by the time he was ready to numb up my groin to do the graft itself, I was still sore and not looking forward to another bout of enforced stillness.

He removed my catheter, something that hurt very briefly, then put in a new, shorter tube, which hurt a little more, but neither pain lasted very long. Then came fresh packing into my vagina, to keep me nice and stretched for the
three days I'll be stuck in bed, which he inserted with a speculum and nowhere near enough lubricant, or maybe it was just a larger size than to which I was accustomed. Either way, the insertion was stressful, even painful at points, and then he had to pull it out and do it again because he'd made it too long, which was another round of pain ending in discomfort at having something just slightly too big stuffed between my legs. On top of the catheter change it felt very much like I had to go to the bathroom, though I couldn't have done so even if I'd really wanted it. 

After all these steps, the nurses put my legs up in stirrups, effectively cutting off their range of motion and the circulation below my knees, which meant that inside of fifteen minutes of Dr. Sanguan stitching on the grafts, my legs went numb and I had to get Jessie to explain to the nurses what needed to be massaged. Then my butt followed suit and what followed really was little more than forty-five minutes of extreme discomfort, but no way to safeword, no way to say "stop" and have it mean anything, no way to pause while I got my bearings, my breath, my sense of safety. All I could do was lie there, let Jessie stroke my hair and endure the sensations.

Nothing ever hurt, except for the pinpricks of the syringes and a few misplaced jabs with the suture needles. That was, I think, the worst part. If it had hurt, I could've said something it all would've stopped right there. Nothing ever did, but they were as annoying and discomfiting as possible without passing the line at which I could've legitimately complained and been heard and had something done about the problems.

As I said before, I'm back to enforced bedrest. Dr. Sanguan's said I can't stand, can't walk, can't do anything that would put the graft or my side at risk for three days. After that, he'll remove the packing, check all the stitchwork and let me know how things have gone. I hope like hell that the grafts take this time. If they don't, I'm going to have to do this again, and I'm really not looking forward to that.

If I do have to have surgery again, I'm requesting the general.

Last night, I woke up at about midnight, and then again at two in the morning, in pain. I have no idea what caused it; it had happened a few times prior but it had always gone away fairly quickly. This time it wouldn't stop, and after about ten minutes I asked Jessie to go ask the nurse for a painkiller and a sleeping pill. Whatever it was, it went away and it hasn't come back since.

Dilation is basically routine now, but it's frustrating. It feels a little dehumanizing with the nurse helping me do it, though at least she doesn't stand and watch me now. I get about half an hour between when she leaves me with one of the stints inside and the next prepared, and when she gets back to clean the area and change my bandage. That half-hour is one of the most boring imaginable, because I can't really do anything more than watch TV or participate in any activity that takes more than one hand, I'm stuck on my back with my legs in the air during it, and I've got something probing uncomfortably up inside me at the same time. If it weren't a chore, it might be enjoyable, but then, usually when something becomes a job for me, it stops being fun.

Dr. Sanguan came by the room while I was trying to work on this entry, and he just confirmed that I did indeed have a bacterial infection, which is probably what cost me the penile graft. He's assured me that the scrotal graft is safe, and he's switched me onto a specific antibiotic to fight the infection that I have, and so I should be set to go under the knife again on the first. He was cheerful about the whole thing, and so it was kind of hard for me not to be as well, at least then.

Realistically, though, right now I'm just very upset, or at least I was when I first heard about this. Originally, I thought I'd be in the hospital for five weeks, and I was grimly determined to survive it. Then suddenly it looked like we'd be out in three, and Jessie and I were ecstatic. Now it looks like we're back on our original schedule, and for some reason we're both just incredibly bothered by that. Ennui has settled, and I'm still catheterized and tied to the hospital as a result. Jessie is going stir-crazy, and I'm having to fight to keep from getting incredibly frustrated at my inability to go out and do things away from this room.

At least hopefully we won't have to extend our stay.

Dr. Sanguan just took a look at my wound areas, and he's said that before he can perform the surface skin graft, he's got to wait for the culture test on my vaginal swab to find out if I've picked up any bacteria that could damage the graft, and that'll take another two days, so it won't be until Thursday at least that I have what I hope will be my last surgery. Once that's done, it should be reasonably fast that I heal enough to remove the urine catheter, and then from there things should start to take on a reasonably normal tone.

Also, today I had my first experience with dilation. The surgically-sculpted vaginal canal has to be kept stretchy and pliant, or else over time it shrinks and penetration becomes painful and difficult, something I certainly want to
avoid. Thus, the vaginal canal must be slowly dilated through the insertion and gentle movement of increasingly larger stents to ensure that the skin is kept flexible and ready to accept penetration. This also ensures that the
opening itself doesn't shrink over time, so that I'll be ready to accomodate whomever or whatever, within reason.

Lying flat on my back, a mirror between my legs, I watched in fascination and a small amount of arousal as Dr. Sanguan pressed the first stent up inside me. Again, it's an experience for which I lack the vocabulary. I didn't feel this one against the sides of the canal, only the pressure at the tip when it bumped into the back wall of the tunnel. With that, he removed it and went up to a two.

I made it up to a five today, whatever that means. Five inches' worth, in fact, for what good that does me. Supposedly with practice, pressure, diligence and a bit of luck, I can gain an inch or so of depth by pressing back. Five, however, has left me sore; it actually stretched a bit, which is necessary to add diameter, but in so doing, it did hurt somewhat. 

Unfortunately, the nurses are going to have to do this for me at least for a while, because I still have open wounds in the area where the skin grafts aren't, and those are what really hurt right now. The nerve endings at the edges of the good healthy skin are raw, and the stretching and tugging against them caused more than a little irritation.

This is the sort of experience to which I'm going to have to grow accustomed over time. Unfortunately, right now, time is something I have in abundance.

Today has been an adventure in more ways than one.

First, this morning, around 09h00 give or take, Dr. Sanguan arrived to change the dressing on my surgical site and remove the packing and such from my vaginal canal. The moment of truth, as it were. The nerve endings around my groin are, at the moment, generally irritable both from hair regrowth—the nurses shaved me there for surgery—and just the amount of surgical abuse that's been done to the area, and so I clutched rather tightly to Jessie's paw during the tape removal. Dr. Sanguan commented as he looked that around the outside, some of the external grafts didn't appear to have taken very well, which meant that I'd need a skin graft from probably my hip to cover the open areas. However, this is, he assures us both, a very simple procedure and one that can be done under an epidural, hopefully this time a properly administered one.

Removing the packing itself from the vagina was odd to say the least. When I had a cystectomy performed at the base of my spine, my mother had to pack the wound with fresh gauze every night and then remove it the following evening so I could shower and wash out the wound. That hurt, in no uncertain terms, and so I was exceptionally tense as Dr. Sanguan positioned his surgical tweezers. However, when he began pulling, I only really felt a sense of pressure, a bit of friction, and a strange release as the amount of gauze stuffed into me slowly subsided. Jessie quipped at the time that any minute now zie expected the doctor to pull a hat out of this bunny. Then the "solid" core came out with a wet slither, and everyone present, Dr. Sanguan included, made a slight gagging noise at the smell.

The nurse pointed a flashlight at my groin, and Dr. Sanguan peered and probed inside of me for a few moments while I sweatily clamped onto Jessie's paw in a death-grip, until Dr. Sanguan announced very pleasantly that my internal skin graft appeared to have taken without a hitch. My mate and I breathed sighs of relief, and then the nurse gave me a mirror and Dr. Sanguan let me look at my new arrangement.

I almost started crying right there.

Right now, four long rows of stitches run the length of the genitalia, holding everything in place, which make me look like Frankensnatch. However, Dr. Sanguan gently pulled apart the labia minora, still somewhat swollen beause of the surgery, and pointed out my clitoris. In so doing, he poked it with the end of the tweezers, maybe an accident or maybe to confirm that it was sensitive, but either way I jumped, rather startled by the sensation, which made him smile. Then he moved his fihgers down and showed me my new vaginal opening, and then without any foreplay he proceeded to push almost all of his middle finger into me.

I quite literally cannot describe the sensation now. Physically, there was pain, pressure, pleasure, a blend of signals that seemed totally irrelevant compared to the mental sensation of having someone's finger inside me that
way, of having the capacity to be fingered in that way. I just sort of went into autopilot for a few seconds, staring up into Jessie's face who was smiling at me, watching my response. Both Sanguan and the nurse seemed quite
amused.

After that, he changed the dressing on the remaining open areas and said he'd schedule a fresh skin graft from my hip for a few days from now to give everything the chance to heal a bit more, and then he said I could get out of bed, walk if I felt capable, even get a shower if I thought I could handle it. More enticing words I had never heard, and as soon as the dressing was finished and everyone save Jessie and I were out of the room, I got up and hobbled to the bathroom.

Now, not two days ago I had spoken with someone else about experiences just coming out of surgery, and she warned me that her stamina was next to nil and that taking a shower required her to sit down regularly and recuperate. I, however, felt myself invincible on having received such wonderful news, and proceeded to get into a tile shower, still attached to the wall by a urethral catheter, absent of any safety bars whatsoever, and cranked the heat up to just shy of scalding, after three days of enforced bedrest following a bad run-in with mixed anaesthestics.

As one might predict, hijinks did indeed ensue.

Inside of about five minutes, I started to feel light-headed, and I commented as much to Jessie. Zie said I should sit down, but by the time zir statement had registered in my mind, I realized that I was too unsafe on my feet to risk moving or else I'd fall over, and I was too far from anything useful to grab to sit down. I suggested to Jessie to grab the wheelchair in the bedroom that had been doubling as our adult bedpan, and so of course as my body went into power-save mode, I dutifully sent away my only possible point of stability to fetch an awkward implement too large to fit into the bathroom. 

It is a small miracle that I did not die falling face-first into the tile. 

I did, however, suffer a short-term blackout and when I awoke, I was on my butt, the urine catheter having been pulled loose, thankfully not from me but from the rubber tube to which it was attached, the one leading to the bag
hanging on the wall. None of my stitches were damaged, and I don't think I suffered any concussion, but whatever dignity to which I may still lay claim will likely be laid up in traction for a while.

Ultimately, I ended up sitting in the shower on the inner tube that Jessie bought for me to serve as the donut cushion that Dr. Sanguan advised we bring with us on the trip that I had forgotten to get before leaving for Thailand, head down, letting warm water run over my body. I washed my hair twice and had Jessie scrub the last of the medical tape remnants from my back. I think that's the most glorious shower I've ever experienced.

The rest of the day from there is kind of a blur. After that harrowing experience, I've just been on a sort of glaze, not really focusing on anything. Jessie and I spent the better part of the afternoon talking about video games and my simultaneous inability to get along with the majority and desparate desire to be part of it while zie sat on IRC, and then we experienced the wonders of homemade peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches with Milo while I again sampled something "exotic" off of the hospital menu: spaghetti.

My meals are part of the package deal for which I'm here, so there's no reason for me not to order something at every meal for Jessie and I to experience, even if we've ordered out for pizza or zie's gone for KFC or something, but most of the menu items, I won't eat, and of the ones I won't that Jessie will, zie won't enjoy eating that much. Every morning now is scrambled eggs and bacon for me, pancakes or eggs and bacon for Jessie. Lunch for me is chicken fried rice if I think I can face it again, maybe chicken with baby corn and steamed rice otherwise. Dinner is whichever I didn't have at lunch, usually, but I'm going to start ordering breakfast for dinner if I can't find something on the menu I can enjoy that isn't something I've already grown sick of eating. Jessie has taken to buying things at the local shopping center and putting food together on the fly, which is why the PB&J was such a treat for me.

The trip appears to have been extended for a few days, but nowhere near as long as we'd originally planned.

Two days have passed, roughly, since I last updated my diary, and I'm of mixed feelings on that. On the one hand, I did promise that I'd generate a thorough recording of the trip here, and on the other nothing "unusual" has
really happened. We did identify that the bedsores on my rump have been standard pressure sores that have gone away over time, and last night I was able to lie in bed comfortably for the first time in several days which I have
to say has been a blessing unto itself.

Last night, we ordered Thai pizza online, which I must say was far more of an experience than it needed to be,
but well worth the effort in the end. One of the local pizzarias had left a laminated menu at the nurses' station, and at the bottom they'd listed their website, amusingly hosted by the same company providing our dialup access. So, we decided that rather than try to go through the nurses, ordering through the staff and then dealing with cash hassles and such, we'd just take care of the entire transaction online and pay with a credit card, as they said we
could, which would make things nice and convenient.

Of course, nowhere on their site could I find a place to enter my credit card information, and then it said that it would email the details of the transaction to my listed mailing address, which I had marked as nobody@menagerie.tf to prevent any unwanted advertizing. So, I went through the entire ordering process again to get the details of the order, only to fail to have the email materialize at all. Right after that, I managed to
knock my catheter bag into the floor, and shortly thereafter I had a crying fit all over Jessie's arm.

The pizza itself was quite good, once it did arrive, though. I was so shocked when the delivery man arrived at the room—ahead of schedule, no less—that it tasted far better than I expected it would, even given that the sausages on my "meat deluxe" were curried. The cocktail sauce that came with our breadsticks tasted sufficiently of peanuts to give me pause, but Jessie adored it, saying that zie lacked any equivalent in Western cuisine and that for that alone it was brilliantly weird. 

This morning, I got myself out of bed and did my own cleaning in the bathroom. I still can't shower because of the epidural needle, so my hair is a horrendous mat on the top of my head, but I could take a washcloth to my own
skin, brush my teeth without having someone hand me the spit-tray, et cetera. There's something heavily empowering in being able to do one's own toiletries after so many days in bed. I could have gotten up any time along the way and done this, but until now sitting up hasn't been an option because of the bedsores, and before that I couldn't get out of bed at all.

Of course, now I'm getting out of bed and able to really walk around and such just in time for another few days of enforced bedrest. Dr. Sanguan came to the room just after I'd finished cleaning myself and inspected things, and he said everything looks set for the skin graft either tomorrow afternoon or Friday morning, so either I can have breakfast and not lunch, or lunch and dinner but not breakfast the next day. However, it also means that I'll be three procedures down, and only one to go before I should start being able to look at return flights to England to see Chloe again.

In a way, this whole trip has been an incredible vacation, despite the painful medical procedures under which I've gone while I've been here. I've gotten to see one of my extended family, I've gone through the last major stage in my transition, I've gotten to see two foreign countries I'd never visited before, and I've actually met a number of people here that, in one way or another, I'm glad to have gotten to know.

In a very small way, I'm going to miss Thailand. Not much, and not often, but it'll probably happen.

I have once again hit the point at which no matter in which position I put myself, something's going to hurt, so I might as well hurt sitting up at the computer. Getting sleep consists of putting my arms under my buttocks to try to relieve some of the pressure sores and then getting between fifteen and thirty minutes of nap until my arms go numb from the weight on them. Then I remove my arms, shift onto my side and crush the packing between my thighs for a few minutes, shift to the other side to do the same, then lie back again on my back, return my arms to beneath my rump and start the whole process over again. This worked remarkably well for the first day. It hasn't
worked since.

Tomorrow, hopefully, Dr. Sanguan will clear me for short walks out of bed, and at that point I can stand up and move around some and take the pressure off of my rump so that when I do lie down it isn't an instant muscle cramp with numb soreness along my buttocks. I haven't had weight on my feet in the last three days, give or take, I think. I was still walking around on Thursday. Today is Sunday morning, so it hasn't been that long on
recollection, but it feels like it has been.

The packing is, in and of itself, a minor demon sent from some level not quite hell to torment me. It's wedged up into the neovaginal canal, which isn't lined yet with anything, to ensure that the opening heals properly while the
skin which is to line the neovagina is in the skin graft bank, being carefully stretched and measured. Every time I shift positions, I can feel the thing rubbing painfully against the exposed nerves within, and it's needless to say
an unpleasant sensation. 

In the interest of completeness, I'm doing my best to keep these diary entries as genuine as possible, but if I keep typing on this one, it's going to degenerate into unpleasantries. I know when all is said and done that I'll have considered this whole experience worthwhile, but as it stands now I can't help but wish in some small part that I'd never started down this road. I know that's the pain talking, not my true feelings, but at the moment, there's a
lot of pain and it wants to have a say.

---

I've been out of bed three times now since Dr. Sanguan came around to check on my recovery. I'd managed to pop the covering to the packing, and he came in on his day off to check on my packing, tape it closed again and then clear me for short bouts of standing on my feet and walking around the room. I still have to be exceptionally careful, and my balance isn't too good because I still have the packing in place, but it has been wonderful just getting out of bed again, even if only for short bursts.

Tomorrow morning I go back to the OR for Dr. Sanguan to change my packing, which should be only under an epidural. The anaesthesiologist put in a special tube for that when I had the vaginoplasty performed, so with any luck I won't ever be totally unconscious again for the rest of the time I'm here, except when I'm sleeping, and that should become easier as well as I continue to heal. I'm really not in that much pain any more, despite what I was saying earlier today. A lot of that, I think, has just been from the ability to get off of my butt for short stretches, something I've been doing a lot lately. 

As I type this, we've had yet another brown-out. I say yet another because it's been the fourth since our arrival. Jessie was asleep for the first one, so when the second happened during dinner a few nights ago and zie noticed,
being able to say "You missed the first one" generated the most beautiful expression on zir face. I didn't say it to be mean, though; at the time I was pretty doped up on painkillers and in the middle of enjoying the first meal I'd had in several days that actually tasted good.

I said at one point that the worst thing about this place was the food. I lied. The worst thing about this place has been the company. Dr. Sanguan has his own ward in the hospital where all of his patients stay, and the general
attitude of everyone within the wing seems to be "We're a little family here," which I'm sure most of my extended family will realize doesn't sit well with me even under the best of circumstances. One of the girls in the group looks like she's had one too many facial reconstructions, her breasts are too large for her body in my opinion, and she claims to be an expert on the process because she came out as female at age nine and has been in treatment for twenty years. I managed to put up with her coming into my room for a brief visit while she detailed her experiences, but it was only by supreme force of will that I didn't ask her to kindly shut up and leave.

I'm probably going to have to speak with Pim about getting our return tickets changed. We're almost certainly not going to be here the full five weeks at this rate. I probably won't be able to extend the trip to England by much since I have to be under a doctor's care at all times or else I'm no longer on medical leave, but I can justify some amount of travel time based on the fact that my hospital stay took less time than expected.

I just hope when I get back to work that it hasn't all blown up in my face and that I'm not out of a job.