#post-op

read from right-to-left

After slaving over this comic for ~2 years, I've decided I'm not gonna finish the last few pages I had planned and that this is fine enough. I'm simply too impatient to show it off. (Comics take me so fucking long, man)

This is a scene that takes place during chapter 3 of Terminal Status, although it's going to end up looking a bit different in the actual game. Still, I love this conversation and found myself wanting to draw it. (Spoilers: Post-Op and Concuss end up agreeing to fake-date after this, and it's sooo funny. They hate each other.)

1. ocean spray apple juice. not mott's. i cannot emphasize this enough, it's so much better

2. if you can have apple juice you can almost certainly have apple cider for the ✨autumn vibes✨ (get the ones made from honey crisp apples, trust me on this)

3. buy a cane. oh my gosh buy a cane. didn't think i needed one because my main issue was getting out of bed, but here's the thing YOU CAN USE THE CANE TO PUSH OFF THE WALL YOURE LEANING ON! 100,000% easier to get up that way, its incredible. you can move all the muscle work to your arms and off your stomach/knees/legs

4. if your fridge is far from where you're sleeping during recovery, consider buying a mini fridge (my roommate found mine at a yard sale for $10) and maybe bring your tea kettle to wherever you sleep if you like tea. its helped me so so much

5. didn't do this but i wish i did- take your least favorite sweater (or buy one at a thrift store for like $2) and cut off one of the arms just above your elbow, cause otherwise you can't wear a sweater if they put the iv in your elbow and hospitals are damn cold

6. buy a button up pajama top!!! (or if you're crafty you could try altering your current pjs to have buttons) much easier to get dressed after if putting your arms above your head is difficult l. ALSO makes it way easier for doctors to place things like an ekg overnight and not make you freeze to death with it pulling down your shirt. also ALSO doctors can do exams on your stomach without your whole chest being on display if that's a thing you want to avoid. overall one of the best decisions i made and it only cost me $5

I was discharged yesterday evening and friends picked me up. You don't really get good rest in a hospital. especially not when there's a person in the room next door who needs a mental health bed. The pain is better today, and I've had so much sleep. I have to do my respiratory therapy once per hour with a little inhaler that moves a cylinder, and I get on the stationary bike every two hours for 15 minutes.

I have four big holes in my body and while I went in with one IV placement, I came out with three. The surgical report was encouraging, but I lost five more lymph nodes. Still waiting for the pathology on those.

The kitties nag at me every time I get out of bed. My sitters told me that Moki had a lot to say about my absence, too. He has definite separation anxiety because after all his first mom never came home from the hospital. He seemed okay with a man as a sitter, but definitely not friendly or flirtatious as he is with women. He stayed out of reach, the tip of his tail flicking and looking stern.

[ ID by @julietianboy: A flag with six horizontal stripes, in the following colors: dark green, cold gray, purple, light yellow, orange-yellow and muted red. /End ID ]

Post-transition: someone who passed through transition; anyone who transitioned, as opposed to pre-transition. Not essentially the same as being post-dysphoric. Usually meaning post-HRT or post-OP, but could refer also to social transition.

I am happier. I cry more easily. I recognize the specifics of what I'm feeling and process the emotions much more readily. I am still sleeping more than usual, and much more than usual when I have exercised that day. I still feel funny twinges and pulls in my abdomen. I still have pelvic floor sensitivity. My PT exercises for those lingering surgical effects are enough, and recovering from surgery does not distress me.

Being profoundly weaker than before surgery is an interesting exercise in feeling vulnerable. I rarely felt physically vulnerable pre-op. I have always been very strong, and almost limitless. I had the strength to do anything and the stamina to do it as much as I'd wish. Now I regularly have the disconcerting experience of running out of energy. Like a car out of gas, instead of a slow, winding-down of ability with rising clumsiness as a warning that tomorrow I will be slow and sore. The effect is more like running out of energy when I'm sick with a fever than the process of tiredness I am more used to.

But it doesn't distress me. I was distressed most of the time, before. Endo flares would leave me furious, feeling sick in my soul, betrayed, and hopeless. And in agony, of course. I was in pain most of the time.

I dream of being pregnant so much more lately than I ever have before. But instead of being trapped in a syrupy nightmare of unwilling gestation, now I realize in my sleep that this is impossible. I'm sterile. and the dream changes in a blink of an eye to something totally innocuous.

I have fewer nightmares now, and I remember my dreams more. Usually I don't even remember that I have dreamed. Now I often wake up with linger flashes of awareness that I was dreaming, and a little knowledge of the context that fades quickly. I know that I dream almost every night, instead of only knowing that I had a nightmare once every few months.

So many interesting, unforeseen effects. I wish I had been able to have a hysterectomy when I was fourteen, and started having menstruation so painful I curled into the fetal position and was unable to straighten for days on end. What a different life I would have had! Free, for nearly all my adolesence. From the first time I learned what menstrution was, I was horrified and sickened by the idea of being subjected to it. And it was truly horrible. Free now, and free to reclaim as much of the childhood I wanted, now. But grieving the years of being medically suffocated and physically tortured by my incurable and previously untreated condition.