So fun fact. While
@transscribe was working on this story, I was shopping around for this sort of surgeon, and being the paranoid sort, asking everyone I could think of for who's good/who's bad.
https://jezebel.com/when-surgeons-fail-their-trans-patients-1844774990/amp?rev=1597854733082&__twitter_impression=true&s=09…
As it happened, at the time, the only surgeons my insurance was willing to cover were... some guy who apparently just decided one day that he was going to start doing these despite not really knowing how to, and Rumer. The former ceased to be an option like a week after I heard he was on the list, and the latter I then had to go with.
I wasn't given the option of a consultation over the phone/internet, for whatever reason, and had to actually show up, in person, at like 10 AM. Several states away. Skipped sleeping, paid all the money I had at the time for a ticket on a train I was boarding sometime around dawn had a heck of a walk from the station to find the place, dead of summer. And... I have literally never been in a situation with anyone in any medical field with more of a "screw you, I don't even want to be here today" attitude. Just, rushed through an explanation of things while rapidly flipping through powerpoint slides, "any questions?"
So, the first thing I asked was what her complication rate was, which as I understand it is a pretty standard thing to ask before any surgery and... she just straight up refused to answer. Just, "all surgeons have some unsatisfied patients, especially with the number of people I operate on. Also your BMI is way too high. Don't come back to this office until you've lost 150 lbs."
This incidentally was without checking my height or weight at all, and an amount I don't, in fact, have available to lose.
But, you know, THIS WAS MY ONLY OPTION, so I went right ahead and spent the next several months starving myself and exercising hard enough that I might have straight up had a small heart attack at one point. And sometime around when I was seriously considering which organs and limbs I could maybe look into ridding myself of to hit that ridiculous target weight,various people continued to urge that no, seriously, even with no other options, Rumer is not the way to go. So, thanks yet again for that everyone.
And sure enough, another option did crop up eventually, where the only weird thing to come up in the consultation was "if there's some look you'd like for the final appearance feel free to bring in a photo" and like... is that a thing people have strong opinions on? Is there some sort of catalog I should be browsing?
Because honestly, thinking about it, being asexual, the only other woman whose crotch I think I've ever gotten a good look at is in that one early scene in Return of the Living Dead (and maybe 2 or 3 other movies I've seen that same actress in because that was kind of her thing).