Sophie

Local time: Tuesday, 5.15pm

Sophie is the main administrative contact at the Suporn Clinic - the one who responds to emails requesting information about surgery, handles booking of surgery dates, etc. Her written English has been excellent in our email communication, and today in her class I got to find out why: she's British. She also comes across as super-authoritative and self-crediting, like a sort of self-appointed second voice of Dr Suporn. This seems to hinder her credibility a little, and rubbed at least one of the other patients the wrong way, but nevertheless, the information she divulges seems like it will be very useful.

Much of it is, as Sophie herself states, derived from her own experience as a post-op SRS patient and from the many patients of the clinic that have been through under her administration and post-operative care. She's apparently to be the first point of contact for patients once we leave Thailand, and gives out a booklet covering her class material pretty comprehensively. The information contained therein is very much of a "this will happen, don't be worried, here's what to do" nature (presumably driven by a need to prevent overloading Sophie with emails from worried newly post-ops); a lot of it concerns the less pleasant aspects of recovery, like sloughing of dead skin, granulation tissue, "secretions", and so on. Also a lot of common sense stuff that I guess not everyone knows.

Interestingly, there's a large emphasis on dynamic dilation technique, and it appears what Dr Suporn explained was only a simple part of a whole. Sophie's dynamic dilation regimen involves applying firm direct pressure (to stretch "depth-wise") for 15 seconds, then a rotary pressure (to stretch "width-wise") for 15 seconds, then alternating, for a total of 15 minutes a session, ideally for three sessions a day (though she concedes that most people will end up doing two, due to the impracticality of dilating, say, in a stall in the ladies' room at lunchtime). "Firm" pressure, in these cases, is apparently "until it hurts too much"...

This dilation technique seems to be a development on the so-called "static dilation" traditionally employed post-op for SRS, as simple insertion and placement of a dilator cannot by itself negate the contraction (and thus reduction in width and depth) of the vagina. The evidence of its effectiveness is apparently (according to Sophie) borne out in the statistics (loss of depth over time) between patients who used the static technique and newer patients who used the dynamic technique.

After the class, I had a check-up with Dr Suporn, who arranged my revisive surgery session this Friday. No food or drink after 7am, into the clinic by 1pm, discharged sometime that afternoon. He explained local and general anaesthesia and suggested that I'd be given a general one (all good with me - my experience with local anaesthetics has always been with dentists, and never pleasant). There are two goals: firstly, to correct the sutures in the labia so that cosmetic healing occurs more easily (apparently the labia would have spontaneously healed in the long term anyway); and secondly, to reduce the haematoma so that there's no swelling when it eventually completely heals.

Depending on how all this goes, we might head home a couple of days earlier than planned. I think both mum and I are a little homesick, and the stresses of recovering from surgery look like they'll continue for a bit longer than I'd expected so doing a lot of exploration is going to be out.

That does raise the question of when I'll return to work, or indeed, attempt to return to some of my more physical activities, though. Hmm. Guess we'll take it as it comes. I have a feeling a normal day-to-day life is still a little while away.