Well as you all know I left on Oct. 14 for supposedly sunny Thailand. Little did I know that I was getting there in the beginning of the rainy season! Also the typhoon that struck India sent us a lot of wind and water. I spent the first two days just laying around trying to recover from the 45+ hours I was up going over there. I don't sleep at all in aircraft or airports so I'm just up till I arrive and can find a bed. I was called on Saturday by "Pim", Dr. Sanguan's assistant. She asked me if I would come in to see Dr. Sanguan on Sunday to discuss my surgery and let him examine me. Then on Tuesday morning I was admitted to the hospital, had blood tests, chest x-ray, EKG, and all the other little tests ran. I was told that my initial surgery would be on Wednesday.

Dr. Sanguan now uses a two step procedure. The first step is to remove the testicles and make the outer female genitalia and create the vaginal canal then pack it with gauze. Then he waits two days for the area to start it's healing process before taking the scrotal and in my case an additional skin graft from the crease between my thigh and abdomen to make the vaginal lining. He said that after he started using this procedure he found that the grafts take much better.

I had my initial surgery on Wed. morning starting at 10am. Things went well and I was awake before I was even off the operating table. I was in ICU for only about 45 minutes and then taken to my room.

At about 8:30pm that night I looked down to see how much drainage I had from under the pressure bandage and saw a rather large pool of blood. I immediately informed the nurses and was quickly taken back to the OR where Dr. Sanguan once again went in and found that I had a vein leaking under the sutures. He went back in and cauterized the bleeder and remove the accumulated blood before suturing me again. I was awake during this procedure since I was administered an epidural during the first operation and it was to be left in place until after the graft surgery.

My roommate there, Elizabeth Wilcox from Texas took photos of my initial surgery for me, in fact it was over 115 shots of the whole 6 hours of my initial surgery! Elizabeth had wanted to watch a surgery and I wanted pictures of mine so we compromised and both got what we wanted! Dr. Sanguan said that if Elizabeth was strong enough to stand there for the entire surgery then it was fine with him.

Well my graft surgery was scheduled for Friday originally but I got a call from an Australian guy who was an interviewer for a program called "Insight Asia" out of Hong Kong wanting to interview me before my graft surgery and get some video during the surgery if I wouldn't mind. They were doing an article on plastic surgery in Thailand and had already interviewed Dr. Preecha in Bangkok and wanted to interview Dr. Sanguan also. I told them that if it was a human interest story and not some Jerry Springerish piece of trash then I would be happy to do it. I was assured that it would be. We did the interview and it went very well I thought then on to the OR and as the camera man was setting up Dr. Sanguan asked if I wanted to be asleep or awake during the surgery.

With the epidural I could be awake but numb from the waist down and still be functional. When I said that I wanted to see what was happening the camera man left the OR only to return a few minutes later with "Rob" the interviewer who was also now in scrubs! So here we went again only this time the interview continued with both Dr. Sanguan and myself as the surgery progressed! *G* Talk about weird! I got the interviewer to promise to send me a VHS copy of the program when it airs because I doubt that it will ever be shown in the US. It was pretty kewl though, Dr. Sanguan loves to listen to music as he operates and we listened to Mariah Cary and some other female pop singers during my late night return to surgery and during the graft surgery we were listening to some female Chinese singer. Dr. Sanguan may have understood what she was singing about but darned if I did! LOL

Their was also another documentary being done on an Australian girl named Robyn, who was my roommate after Elizabeth went home. They were following her journey from Australia all the way through her SRS and did a small interview with me also since I was her roommate. Dr. Sanguan did an Ascending Colon Vaginoplasty on her. The first one that Dr. Sanguan and Dr. Torinid (the abdominal surgeon) had ever done.

I'm just now starting to get over the horrendous trip home from Thailand. I was up for over 50 hours coming back with only one small catnap on the leg from Tokyo to Chicago to keep me going. I hadn't been able to dilate for over 2 days when I got home so my first dilation when I arrived here that first night was very painful and I had already lost about 1/2 inch of vaginal depth. I'm happy to report that now my dilations are starting to go much better with me doing them 3 times a day and getting ready to go to 4 times per day and am now using all the way up to the #3 stent. Dr. Sanguan said that I shouldn't try to increase me depth until after 6 months when the graft tissue and scars soften but after that if I dilate faithfully and apply pressure I can "possibly" obtain some extra depth if my skin is elastic enough to stretch.