Notes from My Convalescence

I'm alive and titty-free!! PLUS: pre-op anxiety + post-op pain, video games as benzos, and a body horror watchlist

Hello slugs,

I didn’t mean to disappear on you, but I also didn’t expect the amount of brain fog I would experience after top surgery.

Optimistic to a fault, I’d imagined myself languishing in bed with a stack of books and my laptop, tapping away at my various projects and posting through it, but I literally could not put a coherent paragraph together for weeks. My notes app is just full of stuff like:

Most painful poop of my life, icing my armpits every moment I am awake, falling asleep with an ice pack on my chest (emotional support ice pack) measuring cups of my own blood every night 

This is not the absolute worst experience ever, as surgeries go (a traumatic tonsillectomy still takes the cake for me) but it is proving to be the most hardcore confrontation with my own body, in all its gooey, gross beauty, that I’ve ever experienced, and a true test of my own sluggy philosophies.

After trying to ignore the fact that I had a body for so long, surgery recovery has plunged me into a new and necessary mindfulness. It’s sore, and it’s itchy, and I am alternating ice and heat like it’s my damn job, but I also can’t remember ever feeling this excited to be a body.

Sometimes I catch myself resting a hand flat on my chest and I think, Oh, thank God.

Change freaks me out, especially when it’s sudden and I have no time to process it, so I’d expected to be shocked somewhat when I closed my eyes on the operating table and woke up different. I’d seen other people discussing that moment where they looked in the mirror for the first time after top surgery and cried, or felt soaring euphoria, or almost fainted — but none of this happened to me.

Pretty much as soon as my tits were gone, I forgot what it was like to have them at all. The first time I saw my chest in the mirror, all I felt was relief, and perhaps a bit of cautious delight.

For now, I am practicing what I preach, and moving very, very slowly. I don’t know if I’ve ever had to think this consciously about which muscle groups I’m using, or if I truly realized how connected they all are until a big chunk of them on the front of me needed weeks of total rest.

self-portrait as the seven pillows I need to sleep rn

Many thanks to everyone who graciously supports me with funds so that I can afford to move so slowly, to my partner who is getting the World’s Best Nurse award, and to my queer elders for baking us bread and cookies and stuffing us full of homemade mac and cheese. I would not be here without all of you.

I’ll be getting back to regular writing very soon, but to ease back into it, here’s a round-up for paid subscribers: thoughts about the link between pain and catastrophic worry, some stuff about video games as drugs (in a good way though), and the best of all the body horror movies I’ve been consuming (is 2-3 daily horror movies a problem?? I can’t stop).