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As I mentioned before, I had a bilateral orchiectomy (radical for the right and simple for the left) with Dr. Karen Boyle at Chesapeake Urology's Woodholme Ambulatory Surgery Center from 2pm-4pm on Monday, 11 March. I've spent the last nine days staying with the group of friends I call the "Lesbian Coven" while recovering. Staying with them has been really helpful: it is a very supportive environment and they're people I'm very close to and trust a lot.
My recovery has gone very well, physically speaking. I was able to stop taking opiate painkillers about two days after the surgery, and only needed to take over-the-counter naproxin for one additional day. I never felt really serious post-surgical pain, which surprised me. And I didn't have nausea as an after-effect of the general anesthesia: I ate a full dinner on the evening of the surgery.
The whole process created a lot of awkwardness with my parents, which I discussed in my previous post. However, I'm hoping that that mess will manage to die down without further conversations with them about it. We will see how that actually goes, though.... I also haven't yet gotten the cytology report back on the tumor that was taking over my right testicle, which means that there's a lot of potential stress waiting to happen, depending on what the results from that are.
In any case, though, today is the day that the first stage of my recovery is complete. I took a shower for the first time since surgery this afternoon, I'm having therapy for the first time in about a month tonight, and I'm spending the night at home for the first night since surgery. It will still be about a month until I'm fully recovered and all the restrictions on physical activity are over—I'm going to consider Easter the day when I get to return to full normalcy—and I still have post-surgical bruising that hasn't faded and some self-dissolving stitches that haven't come out. But today is the day that I'm making a conscious decision that it is time for my life to return to a sort of normalcy.
If today—20 March 2019, the vernal equinox as it happens—is the first day of the rest of my life as a real eunuch, it certainly seems like it should be deeply important day for me. I'd initially wanted to mark it with some sort of public ritual-of-transition to mark the change, the irrevocable break from any risk of being a man. (From having an excuse for worrying that I'm secretly a man in disguise, a man who is just pretending to be a woman because he wants to be one even though he isn't really one. And yes, this is absurd, but it's an absurdity my brain can't stop worrying about.)
I didn't manage to have the time or energy to write such a ritual, and today wouldn't have been a practical day to do any sort of public ritual with friends present, anyway: it just doesn't work, schedule-wise. But I did at least manage to do a short private ritual of my own. I'm not going to go into all the details here—it was private, after all—but I do want to explain a bit of it in case it's useful for other people in my situation.
After I finally removed the post-surgical underpants I'd been wearing continuously for nine days, I took a shower for the first time after surgery, took a long time to get very clean and untangle my hair, and did my regular ritual for removing miasma after a shower. And then, when I was clean—physically and spiritually—I spent a few minutes to pray to five goddesses who I think of as important to my role and identity as a eunuch. I thanked Inanna, who is one of the household guardians of the Lesbian Coven, for protecting me as I recovered, and asked her, along with Artemis, Athena, Hestia, Hecate, and finally Athena again to accept me and guide me in this new role and part of my life.
I'm not going to go into detail about the prayers and vows I made, though I do hope to put some of them into poetry and, if I do, I will post the poetry here. I am still not entirely sure what my feelings about being a eunuch are, or what exactly I mean by it, or whether I'm a "real" binary woman or non-binary, or what. But there is one thing I'm sure of today, and it makes me quite happy: what ever else is true, today, and from now on, I am not a man.
My recovery has gone very well, physically speaking. I was able to stop taking opiate painkillers about two days after the surgery, and only needed to take over-the-counter naproxin for one additional day. I never felt really serious post-surgical pain, which surprised me. And I didn't have nausea as an after-effect of the general anesthesia: I ate a full dinner on the evening of the surgery.
The whole process created a lot of awkwardness with my parents, which I discussed in my previous post. However, I'm hoping that that mess will manage to die down without further conversations with them about it. We will see how that actually goes, though.... I also haven't yet gotten the cytology report back on the tumor that was taking over my right testicle, which means that there's a lot of potential stress waiting to happen, depending on what the results from that are.
In any case, though, today is the day that the first stage of my recovery is complete. I took a shower for the first time since surgery this afternoon, I'm having therapy for the first time in about a month tonight, and I'm spending the night at home for the first night since surgery. It will still be about a month until I'm fully recovered and all the restrictions on physical activity are over—I'm going to consider Easter the day when I get to return to full normalcy—and I still have post-surgical bruising that hasn't faded and some self-dissolving stitches that haven't come out. But today is the day that I'm making a conscious decision that it is time for my life to return to a sort of normalcy.
If today—20 March 2019, the vernal equinox as it happens—is the first day of the rest of my life as a real eunuch, it certainly seems like it should be deeply important day for me. I'd initially wanted to mark it with some sort of public ritual-of-transition to mark the change, the irrevocable break from any risk of being a man. (From having an excuse for worrying that I'm secretly a man in disguise, a man who is just pretending to be a woman because he wants to be one even though he isn't really one. And yes, this is absurd, but it's an absurdity my brain can't stop worrying about.)
I didn't manage to have the time or energy to write such a ritual, and today wouldn't have been a practical day to do any sort of public ritual with friends present, anyway: it just doesn't work, schedule-wise. But I did at least manage to do a short private ritual of my own. I'm not going to go into all the details here—it was private, after all—but I do want to explain a bit of it in case it's useful for other people in my situation.
After I finally removed the post-surgical underpants I'd been wearing continuously for nine days, I took a shower for the first time after surgery, took a long time to get very clean and untangle my hair, and did my regular ritual for removing miasma after a shower. And then, when I was clean—physically and spiritually—I spent a few minutes to pray to five goddesses who I think of as important to my role and identity as a eunuch. I thanked Inanna, who is one of the household guardians of the Lesbian Coven, for protecting me as I recovered, and asked her, along with Artemis, Athena, Hestia, Hecate, and finally Athena again to accept me and guide me in this new role and part of my life.
I'm not going to go into detail about the prayers and vows I made, though I do hope to put some of them into poetry and, if I do, I will post the poetry here. I am still not entirely sure what my feelings about being a eunuch are, or what exactly I mean by it, or whether I'm a "real" binary woman or non-binary, or what. But there is one thing I'm sure of today, and it makes me quite happy: what ever else is true, today, and from now on, I am not a man.
