Day 17 - Home

10:01pm - Blair and I have just boarded the flight home. It's hard to believe that the trip - my own little journey - has finally come to an end.

We said good-bye to Donna this morning as she headed off to work. After walking to lunch, we made our way to Dr. Meltzer's office - Blair for an initial consult, and myself for a little post-surgical exam and one last time to look things over.

Since Blair still needed to fill out paperwork, I was taken back first. Exam room, black robe - the usual. Walking to lunch wore me out so I started taking a nap in the exam room. Linda peeked into the room and woke me up after a few minutes, then Dr. Meltzer came in with Janet.

My list of questions:

- My clitoris seems to be bleeding: He looked it over and said that I probably had some pooled blood or swelling that was finding it's way around some of the incisions around the clitoris. Basically, nothing to worry about and things would get better with time. He said things were healing quite well.

- A patch of skin on my stomach below my belly button was numb: He said that's where he lifted the skin and sensation would return in time. He also pointed out the internal suture that caused the dimple above the mons area. Supposedly there were originally two, but I've only ever noticed the one.

- The last 2 inches (50mm) of dilation seem the hardest: Keep dilating and things will get easier. Janet reiterated that I might lose some depth as the swelling goes down, which I noticed.

- What areas need to be cleared for labiaplasty?: He said they had a diagram, but basically the hair needs to be removed 1cm around the clitoris. Since Amber ended up with a little more hair around her clitoris, my hair zapper zapped a little wider swath around the top of the base of my penis. Since I asked for my clitoris to be a little lower than Amber's, or maybe because her's was a little high to begin with, I definitely have a little more cleared area than 1cm around the clitoris. He said he could cut some of that skin out if needed.

After answering my questions and concerns, we concluded the exam, surgery, and trip with a hug. He tried to give me a hug on his last trip to my room before I was discharged, but I was dilating, so the chair and sitting dynamics didn't work so well.

Afterward, I ended up talking prices with Carol. I have the price for labiaplasty alone, but I wanted to see how much labiaplasty and body contouring around the waist would be, and how much all of that and a breast augmentation would be. It looks like the labiaplasty is around $4,200 with body contouring adding $2,500 - $2,700. The breast augmentation adds almost another $6K so the works would be a quoted $12,745 while just the labiaplasty and body contour work out to about $7,000 at the worst. Based on prices, I'll probably be skipping the boobs yet again. That might be the best since I can have my nose revised again at the same time as doing my boobs. That will give my nose more time to heal since it is still stiff.

Janet and Linda also worked on filling out my state disability forms, which couldn't even be submitted until 9 days after I became disabled. All of this disability stuff sucks, but it's nice being paid while I'm unable to work...and actually, I've already paid for the state part of it with my taxes and stuff, so why not get a piece back of what I've given them.

Our flight out was set for 9:40pm since we weren't sure we could make the 4:50pm flight. There were no other non-stop flights back into home. Robin thought we could make it so we headed to Donna's to pick up the bags while Blair was still being examined.

After picking up Blair, we actually did make it with about 40 minutes before take off, but they wanted almost $100 to change each ticket. So, we just sat around the airport for a while, ate dinner, and did a little souvenir shopping.

Just after eating dinner, I dragged Blair over to a window in order to see the sun slowly descend over the valley mountains, signaling the end of my days in Arizona and the end of a long journey - a journey I thought would remain only a dream.