FtM Chest Surgery Diary - Eight Weeks On

On the 4th December 2014, I had my chest surgery (sometimes called top surgery) at long last, with surgeon Catherine Milroy at St George's Hospital in London. This procedure served to change my previously female-appearing chest into a male-appearing chest as part of the process of gender affirmation/reassignment I've been going through over the past few years. For me, this has been truly life-changing already, because as I outlined in this previous post, having breasts caused me a great deal of distress as a transsexual man and created practical difficulties due to the need to bind them and through them causing me to be misread as a female.

 

In the hope of being helpful to others contemplating having chest surgery, I thought it may be useful to document the process as I go through recovery and adapt to my changed body.

 

The procedure I've had done is called a bilateral mastectomy with a nipple graft, meaning that the breast tissue that blighted my chest has been removed, a male-appearing chest has been crafted, and my nipples have been cut down to size and placed in the right part of my chest. I had to go down this route because my chest was quite substantial (DD cups - God has a sense of humour!), but smaller guys can have a keyhole procedure more akin to liposuction. This has the consequence that, as the photo below shows, I have scars around where my pectoral muscles lie which will fade with time but never entirely disappear. However, it does mean that I can now feel comfortable when I look in the mirror for the first time since I hit puberty, and can wear whatever I like without worrying about how visible my breasts are, both of which are awesome!

Eight weeks after chest surgery

In preparation for the surgery, I lost two-and-a-half stone so that my risk of an adverse reaction to the general anaesthetic would be reduced and to try to ensure a smoother recovery. Things didn't quite work out like that, as I got an infection in my left nipple and needed antibiotics to sort it out. I'm told it won't look as good as the right one, in that it won't have the pigment in it that it should, but it will discernibly be a nipple! I was initially worried that it would be permanently disfigured. However, despite this setback, I think the exercise and weight loss was very definitely worth it, as I bounced back quickly and my scars have healed very well and effectively.

The whole procedure meant spending a total of three days in hospital; this is something that a trawl of the internet suggests varies from surgeon to surgeon. Immediately after, it didn't hurt anywhere near as much as I'd worried it might, because my only previous experience was breaking my leg, and that was absolute agony when I came around. In the following days, I had to wait for the drains they'd put in to suck out the blood remaining around the wounds, so I wouldn't get swelling or an infection. Carrying them around everywhere with me was a bit odd, and they did hurt somewhat and restricted my movement; taking them out was the only really painful - as in enough to make me scream - part of the whole thing, though. Afterwards, I could move much more freely and felt a lot more comfortable.

Upon getting home, I began the slow process of recovering and getting back to normal. I'd been told that while I needed to go for walks, keep moving and do as much as possible, I couldn't lift more than a couple of kilos for a fortnight and therefore needed help with some tasks. I couldn't do things like housework or cooking, and not being able to reach too high meant Sally had to prepare things for me and put out plates and such like for me to use. However, I did find that, quite quickly, I could do a good range of normal things and that my chest would soon let me know if I was overdoing it! It was useful for Sally to be about to give me a bit of reassurance taking a shower, for example, but it wasn't long before I could do that myself without worry.

After four weeks, I was able to stop dressing my scars and nipples (it took me a while to get the hang of doing this myself and to build my confidence), and now have to massage my scars with fragrance-free moisturiser for ten minutes twice a day. They don't hurt, and indeed haven't very much since I left hospital - I stopped painkillers once free from infection, and even then I was relying on them more to stop me getting feverish than for pain management. Six weeks after my operation, I stopped wearing the compression vest that I was told to wear twenty-four hours a day. This was a relief, as I needed to sleep on my back and even with the special pillow Sally bought me, it became very painful. Trying to sleep on my side pulled on the parts of my scars reaching around to my armpits, and while they're now fine, it was very uncomfortable at the time. The vest also caused tingling sensations in my scars, which weren't very pleasant, but wearing it resulted in a better shape than would've otherwise emerged and preventing swelling.

So now life is getting back to normal, eight weeks on, and I can manage getting to and from work and going about the tasks of daily life without problem. I've got used to the feeling of clothes against my chest; I didn't have the panic about not binding some guys have described, but it was very odd not needing to tuck clothes under my breasts to prevent chaffing! Reprogramming my brain to not worry about covering my chest or being seen topless has taken time, but I think I've got there. Being able to wear whatever I like and not worry about how my chest looks has been liberating, but the expense of needing to get clothes taken in or replaced due to the big drop in my chest size wasn't something I'd factored in beforehand. Suiting is the hardest thing to adapt, and I've got rid of four large bags of clothes, including my favourite blazer. I can now wear smaller stuff, but will need to get rid of my belly to get into stuff that ideally fits around the chest.

Hopefully this gives an honest flavour of what it's like to have this operation and go through the process of getting back on one's feet. I have absolutely no regrets, and having been through three psychological assessments and nine months of physical preparation to be able to do this, am relieved to finally have gotten to this point. I can now get on with my life as a confident and happy young man who no longer has to pretend to be something I'm not, and who can now put the energy that was going into repressing the truth into making the most of things and looking to serve others. The healing that's occurred over the last few years means, I think, that I'm better able to love God and others, and that can only be a good thing.

Pondering the Turner Prize 2014

As part of the candidating process for ordained ministry, I have to reflect theologically on a theological book, a non-theological book, a film and a cultural event. For the latter, I have chosen to look at the 2014 Turner Prize, with the exhibition having been held at the Tate Britain in London. I managed to get along a couple of times to see the four artists’ work; the nominees were James Richards, Clara Phillips, Tris Vonna-Michell and the eventual winner, Duncan Campbell.

Richards was nominated for his video Rosebud, which manipulates and weaves together photographs taken from, among other sources, images found in a Tokyo public library censored to remove anything that might be considered erotic or arousing, VHS videos rescued from charity shops and original close-up footage shot by Richards himself. The result is a thirteen-minute collage overlaid with a soundtrack made up of amplified incidental noises in response to the visuals, which according to the exhibition guide results in “a restricted set of image sensations” that explores the joy of the act of looking. Some of shots are quite shocking, such as a close-up of a boot pressing hard on a man’s head; others retain a clear eroticism despite the censor’s best efforts, and many explore the boundaries between interior and exterior, public and private. The images quickly shift from one to another with the key action often taking place out of shot, more implied than spelt out, and the guide argues that the close-ups and high definition presentation makes even the mundane sensual.

Vonna-Michell’s work, Postscript, consists of two short films and a collection of images of such disconnected objects as fragments of old letters and a half-eaten Creme Egg, some of which feature in said films. These are both performance pieces in which the artist tells stories of searching for clues to help him make sense of his identity as a German-born man raised in Southend. They’re delivered at a breathless pace in brief snippets, sometimes repeated and often disjointed and anxiously delivered, a bit like the verbal equivalent of a random walk, while we watch a collection of slides that bear varying degrees of relationship to the narratives, but which in places provide something of a springboard for them. The first involves a search for the French sound artist, Henri Chopin, who lived close to where the artist grew up and whom his father says can illuminate why Vonna-Michell ended up in Essex, and the second an attempt to make sense of his parents’ stories about Berlin at the beginning of the Cold War. There is a vulnerability in this work, as childhood experiences and longing for meaning are interspersed with fictional twists, resulting in ultimately frustrated journeying.

Phillips is, unlike the other three, a print artist and her exhibition for the Prize involved the bringing together of various previous works. Her style is predominantly collaborative, and this was reflected in the spoken alphabet booth, the words having come from conversations during some printing work with women’s groups in 2010. The walls were adorned with recurring prints, most abstract-appearing (Phillips utilises mistakes and quirks in the printing process) and others various poses by a female model, and there was a large ‘OK’ on one of the walls. Finally, a large sculptured letter ‘K’ was used to present various prints from previous collaborations.

Campbell’s winning contribution was a film called It for Others, which I have to confess I didn’t see in its entirety, but which offers a profound and compelling discussion of the impact of commoditisation of art. It was inspired by a 1953 film by Chris Marker and Alan Resnais called Statues Also Die, about the “objectification and fetishisation” of African art in the face of western consumer demand, focusing on the Benin sculptures in the British Museum. As Campbell’s anxious female narrator points out, when discussing them, the Museum’s director conveniently overlooked uncomfortable aspects of and questions around colonialism when interviewed, and robbed of their original purpose and meaning, these everyday items become dead. Campbell takes this further, and as we’re shown various African masks, we’re also invited to ponder how art is ascribed its monetary value. A later part of the piece uses anthropomorphic food advertising using various scenarios around a dining table. Another section features a striking original piece of choreography by the Michael Clark company, spelling out ideas from Marx’s Das Kapital. Perhaps the most powerful bit of the film, though, is an exploration of how images of IRA martyrs came to be used for commercial and political aims during the Troubles – the famous image of Joe McCann by a fire ended up on Christmas cards!

My reaction to the four pieces, which I’ve outlined in the order one was directed around them in the gallery, was varied. Richards’ film got me thinking a little about quantum mechanics, in which the act of looking determines the state of an object (think Schrödinger’s Cat); seeing things very close-up and/or from the edges lends a different perspective to the act of looking, in which meanings aren’t always clear, yet to be fully formed by seeing clearly. I wonder how much of our perception of God is like that… I found Vonna-Michell’s films fascinating as well as frustrating; they invite us to ask ourselves what forms our sense of identity: how far is it to do with our parents and origins, especially in an age where many are keen to trace family trees, the things of our past and inner sense of who we are, or something found by looking beyond this to the bigger picture of the story of God?

I must confess that Phillips’ prints didn’t particularly grab me in any meaningful way, but I did find Campbell’s film compelling. The questions raised around the value we place on objects and indeed people are highly pertinent, especially in this neo-liberal and consumerist age with its Black Fridays and appropriation of seemingly anything for monetary gain, and they link in with some of the themes in my non-theological book by Owen Jones, which I’ll explore in a later post. Moreover, it got me thinking about how things might be different if we viewed the world not in these terms, but through a lens which tries to reflect the value God puts on people and things.