- I'm glad you appreciate the diagrams.
- I didn't intend that to be insulting, but I've encountered a worrying attitude of people saying "the surgery is always the same, so yours is, too" and discounting everything I'm describing. It seems like a lot of people don't realize that surface appearances can be deceiving, and they're assuming that Dr. Slama's method is the same as every other surgeon's because it looks similar on the surface and generally most surgeons do use a method similar to the diagrams.
- I never saw any of Dr. Slama's healed surgical results prior to my surgery, except one example which I now realize had dim lighting which concealed the very things I'm surprised by now. I remember thinking that some of the immediate post-op results he showed me looked weird, but I think he presented it as a newer, more refined method that improved upon the old way of doing things. And I think he also said that the reason they looked so different is that everyone's body is different so you can never know how the surgery will turn out.
Also, I have memory issues from regularly dissociating due to trauma and dysphoria, and I was dissociating throughout the months leading up to my surgery with Dr. Slama, so I was not accurately remembering everything we spoke about previously. Other surgeons were so insistent and consistent with how they described the process of vulvoplasty/vaginoplasty that I assumed anything in my memories that didn't agree with that must have been me misunderstanding or milsremembering. I still don't know for sure how much of this I may have known about before.
4. I don't think mine is a good result by the standards of typical vulvoplasty, but that doesn't mean it's not a good result in some other way. But it's not the kind of result I was led to expect based on my research and consultations about vulvoplasty. I don't think Dr. Slama is a bad surgeon, and I'm not trying to disparage him unfairly. At most it seems like he is a surgeon who is simply not very knowledgable about surgical techniques.
But I do think that he and BMC in general do not communicate exactly what these surgeries entail in a way that is as clear as other surgeons do, and that is an issue. It should not be possible for me as a patient to go into surgery expecting one thing and wake up to find something else. And it's concerning for me to have questions about my surgery and not be able to get them answered. Every other staff member and doctor at BMC has told me that only Dr. Slama knows how the surgery works. Had someone not set up an additional post-op appointment with Dr Slama for me, I would have been in the dark without speaking to him face-to-face about this for a total of 4.5 months. That doesn't seem right to me.
