Chapter 51 – The aftermath

“Good, then let’s get you into the surgical suite and start your new life!”

Thinking is difficult but I try to keep that tidbit of Dr. Montgomery’s speech in my mind as they start wheeling my bed down the hallway. My new life? I mean, yeah, my sinuses have always been a problem, and the docs all say it will only get worse as I get older, but… a new life? And why were there three surgeons? And why are we in the hospital?

My thoughts continue to float around my head until my bed bangs the doors into the surgical suite open and I’m pulled up next to the surgical bed. As I turn my head to look nervously around, I have to suddenly close my eyes as the simple motion makes me dizzy. Before I shut out the world and try to regain my balance though, I see that there are a LOT of people in here. Stephen said there would be five people in the surgical room. Him, the anesthesiologist, his surgical assistant, and two nurses. On one side of the surgical sweet I counted at least eight people and that was before I had to close my eyes. There was at least a half dozen conversations going on and I could have sworn I saw four different tables of surgical equipment.

Before I can replay my mental video of the surgical suite, I hear the nurses tell me that they’re going to move me to the bed and I feel the sheets under me lift up, move over, and settle down again. When I open my eyes, I’m looking up at a new person, masked but obviously smiling. “Good morning, Paris, I’m sorry I couldn’t see you in your room earlier but I’m Dr. Lithgoal, your anesthesiologist. As Dr. Gold told you we’ll be putting you completely under, so you won’t feel a thing for any of these procedures. Once you lose consciousness here, you’ll feel like you immediately wake up in recovery and have no memory of anything that happened. We already have your IVs set up so we’re ready to go once they confirm your procedures. Just lie back and relax.”

Dr. Lithgoal gently pats my cheek and backs out of my vision. I try to sit up with one terrifying thought rolling through my head – not one procedure, but plural procedureS - but the dizziness overwhelms me, and I lie back again, closing my eyes and trying to stop the room from spinning. Vaguely I hear a nurse taking control of the room around me, though her voice keeps fading in and out as the Ativan keeps doing its job in making me sleepy even around my sharp concern. “Okay everybody, we have Paris Beaufort, male transitioning to… years old. She’s here for many procedures to be performed by Dr. Montomery, Dr. Patel, Dr. Nguyen, Dr…. then we’ll move on to the septoplasty while at the same time Dr. Nguyen will move on to the gastric lap band… finally finish with Dr. Montgomery’s facial sculpting and… into recovery. Are we all prepared? And are the second and third teams at the ready in the prep areas? Good because if… a total of 30 doctors, techs, and nurses for Miss Beaufort’s total facial and body transformation. Congratulations everybody!”

I keep my eyes closed, not wanting the dizziness to take over and wait for Dr. Lithgoal, knowing she’ll get my okay before starting the anesthesia. That’s when I’ll be able to state my absolute refusal for all of this and explain that there’s been some kind of…. Before I can even finish the thought, I hear Dr. Lithgoal’s voice above my head, “The pre-procedure Ativan is already working and Miss Beaufort is out, so I’ll begin the anesthesia. There, we’ll just give it a second before…”

For some reason I can’t see anything as my eyes flash open, and I shout as loud as I can “NOOOO!”

What comes out of my throat is a hoars cry that barely sounds like my voice and what comes to my mind is pain. My face feels like it’s being stretched to the point of ripping apart all while being on fire. My chest feels simultaneously like it’s being stretched and over inflated while at the same time it feels compressed and wrapped. My whole belly feels achy with a line of sharp electric pain closer to my groin and around my bellybutton. Even my butt, hips, and legs hurt. It’s so overwhelming that it takes me a couple moments to recognize that Trixie is there. I feel her patting my hand gently and nervously talking above me, “…it’s okay, it’s okay, I’m sure the nurse will be here soon, oh I hope you’re not awake yet, you’re okay Paris, you did so well, just rest, let the medicine keep you asleep, you don’t need to be here now, you’re beautiful now, you’re almost a full woman, I’m so proud of you, it’s okay, where the frick is that nurse, you’re okay, you were perfect, everything went okay…”

When I next come to, I feel better. Numb. I try to open my eyes, but I feel something holding them closed. When I try to flex my arm, I feel too weak to fully lift it up and at the same time feel the tightness from the IVs in my elbow. At the same time, I notice someone gripping my hand. Trixie’s voice floats down again, calmer and softer than it was before, “Paris, are you awake? Don’t try to talk, your throat isn’t healed yet. Just nod if you’re awake and I’ll get the nurse.”

I try my best to nod but I’m not even sure if I do, as I can’t feel anything above my shoulders. It’s as if I don’t have a neck or head or face at all. Evidently, I did move though as I hear a voice call out from some kind of intercom “Nurse’s station, what can I help you with?”

Trixie answers calmly, “She’s awake again. This time she squeezed my hand and nodded when I asked. You said to call when she could do both of those things.”

A few minutes later a nurse comes in and introduces herself as Nurse Dorthea but says I can call her Nurse Dot. Nurse Dot tells me that I’m still coming out from under the anesthesia. She reassures me that my pain will be well managed and that I shouldn’t be feeling anything right now. After telling me that I should avoid speaking for the next few days, she asks if I’d like to take some of the bandages off.

My attempt to nod must have been visible as Nurse Dot takes some bandages off my face. The fact that it takes her several minutes and that she has to move my head around this way and that just to get the bandages off is concerning. I also recognize that in addition to the pain meds, they have to have me hopped up on anti-anxiety meds as I’m not completely losing my mind or freaking out, even as I recognize what must have happened.

When the pads finally come off my eyes, I can barely open them. Nurse Dot holds a mirror up for me to see and says that I shouldn’t worry about what I see because the swelling is at its worst right now, but she wants me to be able to see that I’m still me. And as my eyes flit back and forth and look at the reflection before me, I realize she’s right. I am still me. My face is swollen from my hair line all the way through my neck, but it’s still me. I can make out some of the surgical incision points, though like Stephen said of their healing process, I can’t see where my skin was cut, only the redness from the irritation and the few stitches they had to use. But where I had expected to see two or maybe three of those red areas around my nostrils, I now see them around my hairline, my eye lids, both sides of my nose, my cheeks, and around my lips.

Nurse Dot sounds very reassuring as she tells me, “You’ll be surprised at how fast this swelling will go down. Later this week you’ll have a far better view of the new you. For now though, it’s time for your pain meds. As a reminder, a big part of the Sculpted Dream healing process is keeping you as pain free as possible and as calm as possible, so you drifting in and out of consciousness for the next day or so will be normal. Just relax and we’ll get you through this Paris, I promise.”

I feel like I’m stuck in a loop as I try to fight through the brain fog. Obviously, the nightmare scenario came true. They didn’t only perform the septoplasty, they did part or maybe even all the feminization list that Stephen and I talked about. The fantasy one. The one list that I absolutely didn’t want. The face, the breasts, the… I don’t know what all they did but they talked about being able to do the entire list of procedures in one day. And worse than trying to focus on that fact is the fact that I’m not freaking out. They have to have me so **** up that the fact that I’ve been radically transformed isn’t even registering as something to scream and rail against.

And for the next while… the next day? The next two days?... I fall into that loop over and over. I wake up, Trixie is there, she calls the nurse in that’s mostly Nurse Dot but occasionally is someone else, they talk to me in a calming way, take some more bandages off, show me more of what they did, then inject my IVs with more meds and I pass out again. In these little flashes I see the huge mounds on my chest. That nurse said that my breast implants will have to be kept under wraps for another few days as they stretched my skin to the very limit. I saw my nipped in waist. It was still swollen from the procedure, but I could see that curve from my ribs into my waist and out to my hips that looked like the corset pulling me in. And speaking of my hips, they were wider than before. Nurse Dot promised the swelling would go down but that I’d still have the ‘seductive wide childbearing hips’ that I was promised. They showed me the little red areas on my belly and told me how they’d gone in and moved the fat from my abdomen to all over my body and even was able to get the lap band in laparoscopically.

Each time I came to more bandages were off, more swelling had gone down, and I was feeling more sensations. Some of it was achy, but it wasn’t nearly as painful as I thought I’d experience considering how much work they did. I learned that from being wheeled into the surgical suite to rolling me into recovery took thirteen hours. Five surgeons were involved, and dozens of surgical assistants and nurses were all there working in shifts.

When Dr. Montgomery came in to see me, Nurse Dot held off on giving me more meds so that she could go over all the procedures with me while I was more or less clear-headed and conscious. At least as clear headed as I could be on these anti-anxiety ****. Per Dr. Montgomery I had the whole suite of procedures. The contoured my forehead, reduced my brow, and lowered my scalp. They performed lifts to my eyelids and brow as well as touched up the bridge of my nose. They performed facial fat grafting using fat from my abdomen and she personally performed facial sculpting, slightly altering every curve and contour of my face. She performed a lip augmentation, again using my own fat from my abdomen, and another doctor did a vocal cord shaving hence my inability to speak. All the hair on my body and face was removed using their chemical and electrical process. I’d never have body hair again. For my belly they took out almost all my fat and pulled in the musculature taking inches and inches off my waist. With the gastric lap band in place, it would be almost impossible for me to eat enough to gain that fat back and she reminded me that I’d probably need to augment my diet with vitamins and protein shakes due to not being able to consume enough calories. Fat grafting and muscular work was also done on my hips, my butt, and my thighs, making them all curvier and far more feminine than before. And the pièce de resistance of course were the breast implants. Not only were they state of the art nano-textured, gel-filled, aesthetically shaped, and fat enhanced, they were implanted with the newest techniques ensuring that I would have minimal scaring, if any at all. They even added the permanently implanted **** dispersion device right beneath my areolas that should increase the size of my nipples and areolas. Per Dr. Montgomery, within a couple months, once everything has settled down and healed, my breasts should look perfectly natural and only a plastic surgeon would be able to tell I hadn’t grown up with them.

That was yesterday and was the last time that Nurse Dot or anybody has given me enough medication to knock me out. I’ve spent a lot of time crying. Trixie has surprised me by staying with me almost all the time. She gets here as soon as visiting hours allow and stays until the nurses kick her out, which is well past normal visiting hours. When I used the pen and paper to ask why her response was earnest, “I wouldn’t let my best girlfriend go without someone by her side!”

Today they insisted I get up and walk for the first time. I received another shock when they removed the catheter as I still had the prosthetic on. I didn’t have the energy to ask about it and instead just added it to my list of complaints. My list of possibly litigious complaints. While walking down the hall the nurse had a belt around my waist with one hand gripping it in back, helping me stand while I pulled along my IV stand. The walking itself was achy, having been lying in bed for the past four days but more than that, everywhere they worked on my muscles hurt. My thighs, my hips, my butt, my chest, and especially my entire abdomen. On top of that I couldn’t seem to find a way to walk without my new heavy breasts swinging to and fro, making them ache all the more.

When the red light came on just outside one of the doors and the urgent alarm started to blare from inside of that room, my nurse patted my shoulder and told me to stay put while she rushed in to lend a hand. Trixie by my side put her arm gently around my shoulders and in her eternally chipper voice told me that I was doing very well and that she was proud of me. When I started to shuffle my feet and turn around Trixie seemed a little worried, “Oh Paris, maybe we should wait for the nurse. I know you wanna get back in bed, but you don’t want to fall.”

Trixie was right on both counts of course. I did want to get back into bed as it felt like my legs were going to give out at any moment and I didn’t want to fall. But considering that three other nurses had rushed into the room and they were calling for the doctor, I doubted my nurse was going to make it back out before I fell from simply standing still. So, I started my slow shuffle back toward my hospital room.

My fall wasn’t something that happened quickly. My legs began to tremble on each step a few feet from my room. Trixie helped by gripping the belt around my waist, but she wasn’t nearly as strong as the nurse and provided almost no support. My arm on the IV pole added its own tremor as I put more and more weight on it as if it were a cane or a crutch, but it simply wasn’t designed to hold up someone and predictably it’s wheels spilled out behind me throwing me forward as Trixie’s hand lost grip of my belt and my legs simply gave up on holding me upright.

I closed my eyes and tensed up, trying not to imagine how much this was going to hurt, when I felt arms wrap around me and not only pull me back upright, but lift me up and cradle me in their arms like a child. I opened my eyes and looked up at my savior only to see Mal’s smiling face, “Now now, we can’t have my pretty girl falling down now, can we?”