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So, okay, but in any case, you were miserable enough at this point. Well, obviously, then you’d be looking for, what, further alleviation of your psychological symptoms. And you said the binding was very uncomfortable and troublesome, and so that also led you to conclude that it just might be simpler, all things considered, since you were already on the pathway to being a boy just to go down the surgical route. Yeah. So you were 14 when that happened? I was 15 at this time. I was in my sophomore year of high school. You were 15? They also started to treat my depression. They put me, they decided to medicate me for it. And, you know, from what little I knew about medicating depression, I often heard that SSRIs have all these terrible side effects. So I asked that they put me on something with as few side effects as possible, and they decided to put me on Wellbutrin, which I didn’t know until after I stopped using it. But it actually has a huge black box label warning on it for use in children and adolescents. And it actually made me feel more suicidal over time. Okay, okay. All right. So now you’re 15 and you go see a specialist in relationship to surgery. How were you evaluated at that point? When you actually moved forward for the surgery? I don’t remember much of it, but it was… I mean, obviously they didn’t really do an evaluation of my mental health. It was just like, oh, so you’re transitioning. You identify as a boy and you’ve been on hormones for such and such amount of time. So that was, that was all. And after my first appointment, I was, that was, the surgeon told me about a top surgery classroom that was taking place in the hospital building and encouraged me and my parents to attend it. And I went and it was, I learned basically the same things that I learned in the surgeon’s office, you know, about like the different types of incisions and how it benefits gender dysphoria, basically just propaganda. There were maybe about like 15, 12 to 15 or so other families in there. I noticed right away that all the other kids in there looked to be either younger than me or like they hadn’t even started on hormones yet. And I was shocked that they were already seeking surgery. But it kind of, I didn’t really question it much at the time. They were just like, oh, I guess this is just normal and I’m not the only one going through this. The current administration’s New Year’s goals are to tax, spend and turn a blind eye to inflation. If this is at odds with your goals, if you’re tired of the government playing games with your savings and your retirement plans, then you need to get in touch with the experts at Birch Gold today. 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You’re already in a couple of years, you know, and that’s a long time when you’re only 14. And so so it was on to the next step. So that happened when you were 15. And so what was the consequence of the double mastectomy for you? What’s been the consequence? By this point in time, you know, I was two years, two or three years on testosterone, and I’d been binding for roughly the same amount of time and my breasts had lost their shape. They didn’t look like they used to move forward. They didn’t really have, you know, they didn’t. They didn’t. To me, it just looked strange. And I actually just started developing more and more insecurities of my body as I went through my transition. You know, like I had like these masculine features pop up, but it was all still on a female body. And there is like an incongruence between different features on my body and especially my breasts. Like it was this masculine looking body with quite a bit of muscle. And yet these these things were there and they weren’t really in the best shape. And it became a source of insecurity for me. And, you know, I thought that even if I wanted to, I would, they would, my chest would never be the same again. And so there was not really any point in keeping it. And before I went under the knife, they did tell me that I was going to lose my ability to breastfeed. But it was like, I’m going to be a man and men don’t do that. I also I also wasn’t really thinking about being a parent at all because I was I was a kid. Actually, this was this is kind of reminiscent of the of one of the appointments for for getting the testosterone. My endocrinologist asked me some questions that were very adult in nature. I was basically being sexualized by my doctors. It was like, are you are you aware that you may experience vaginal atrophy or are you aware that this may affect your ability to have children as an adult? And I just went along with it was like, oh, yeah, I know that I don’t I don’t plan on having kids. And I also hadn’t had I had I never had sex by that point. So I didn’t know just what what effect any of that would have on my body. But I was being treated as if I were an adult with the mental faculties to be able to consent to all this and understand what I was consenting to. But I wasn’t. I was just a kid. OK, and so what happened in the aftermath of the surgery? What was that like for you? You know, when I when I woke up and I was fully conscious, all the meds had worn off and I realized what just happened. I was actually quite happy. You know, it was like, wow, I just this is a huge accomplishment. This is a huge step. And, you know, I can finally be myself. And I was looking forward to being healed and eventually being able to go out and swim and work out and just hang out without a shirt and look like all the other boys and not have to worry about wearing this uncomfortable restrictive thing. And, you know, I got it was an outpatient surgery. Got sent home pretty soon after that. And I had a comfy, I guess you’d say, few weeks after that, because my mom had to take some time off work to just help me around the house. It was a major surgery in my upper body and I lost a considerable amount of my range of motion. I couldn’t even lift up my arms over my head until maybe about like three or four months afterward. So I wasn’t really in a state to be going out on my own. But after about a week or so was when reality started to hit. I had to get my stitches taken out a few days afterward. And the sensation was just insane. Like, they had to cut and rearrange some of their endings. So it was like it was numb, but I could also feel everything that they’re doing when they’re taking out the stitches. And I was. It felt so disgusting. And once I went home and I was able to finally bathe again. That was when I started having to. That’s when I had to take off the surgical binder and the dressings and look down at what was left of my chest. You know, I had these big scars and all these markings from a surgical marker. And on top of that, I will just a warning. I will get into graphic detail here. But the type of incision that I got was called a double incision with nipple graphs, meaning that they would not only take out the breast tissue and contour the chest to look more masculine, they would also remove the way it was explained to me, I guess because I was young and they were trying to make it more digestible to a 15 year old, was that they would leave like a deep scrape on both sides of my chest, kind of like a deep knee scrape, but more controlled. And they would remove my nipples and then place them in that area of scraped skin. And they called it a more masculine positioning and shape. It’s barbaric to say the least. And when I took the dressings off, when I looked down, they were the graphs, they were black because, you know, during the surgery, during the operation, the blood supply was cut off and so the outer layer of skin had died. And they said that that was how it was supposed to be and that was just part of the process. But I couldn’t bear to see that part of my body. And I had to see that every night. I had to change my… That was what I had to look at every single night after every bath, after every shower. What happened to you in relationship to sensation? Because that’s a long term physiological and sexual consequence. And so you lose the ability to breastfeed, obviously, and there’s a profound physiological alteration in your appearance. But what happens to you on the sensation side? What has happened? It’s certainly not the same. It’s gotten a lot better over the years. Initially, I would get like a lot of… It felt like sparks electricity as the nerve endings grew back. But it’s strange. Like I can move like a hand over a certain area of my chest and it’ll feel like it’s in my arm or something. And I have basically no erogenous sensation in the grafts.