There is a report in the Voice of America, telling the story of a woman, Abi Sanon, who has had reconstructive surgery after having been circumcised as a one week old baby. The surgeon who performed the reconstruction was Michel Akotionga, one of the doctors trained by Dr Foldès.
Apart from Abi Sanon's own story, there is a quote from Benjamine Doamba. She was circumcised herself and campaigns against FGM. She says she feels no less a woman for having had it done and has no need to have reconstructive surgery, but fully supports anyone who does.
She raises an interesting point by saying that she worries that the publicity surrounding reconstructive surgery deflects attention from the more important campaign to eradicate the practice. Additionally, she is afraid that if parents are in two minds about whether to have the procedure done on their daughters, they may have it done anyway, because it's reversible later on anyway.
I can understand how that thought could come about, but if the education which must be part of the campaign against FGM is done well, parents will realise that they could be inflicting years of physical and mental pain in the meantime. Reconstructive surgery can only do so much.
Read Papillon's story.
Showing posts with label operation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label operation. Show all posts
Friday, 20 July 2007
Wednesday, 27 June 2007
Dr Sébastien Madzou
Dr Pierre Foldès, although probably the most well know, is not the only surgeon in France to perform reconstructive surgery for women who have undergone female genital mutilation (FGM): in Angers there is Dr Sébastien Madzou.
He had originally read an article about Dr Foldès in a women’s magazine. Although Dr Madzou originally comes from the Congo, where FGM is not practised, he frequently comes across circumcised women in his gynaecology clinics so he got in touch to find out more. Dr Foldès asked if he would like to be trained in the technique and now Dr Madzou himself trains others.
The first surgeon he trained was a colleague, Dr Ouedraogo, with whom he had studied in Tours. Dr Ouedraogo suggested Dr Madzou go with him to Burkina Faso where he has now trained about 25 surgeons in the technique. Of these, 6 or 7 are women, though there appears not to be any concern amongst patients over having a male surgeon.
In an article by Habibou Bangré on Afrik.com (in French), Dr Madzou tells of his time in Burkina Faso. His patients of all ages came from all levels of society, having heard about the operation by word of mouth. Although he worked without charging fees, there nevertheless was a cost to the patients, however it was obviously considerably less that travelling to France. He even had one patient from Belgium who travelled specifically for the operation, and another from the USA who happened to be visiting relatives when she heard about it.
In France he works at Centre Hospitalier Universitaire d'Angers, 4, rue Larrey 49933 Angers. His own contact details.
Monday, 14 May 2007
The Week of the Butterfly
This week, on Wednesday 16 May, Papillon will have her operation, the reconstructive surgery to repair the damage done by circumcision carried out when she was four years old.
If you haven't read the account of her journey this far, her blog is called "Le Chemin de ma reconstruction" and can also be read in English here.
Tuesday, 17 April 2007
Dr Pierre Foldès
The clitoris is now known to be much larger than the external glans, a relatively small structure which is removed during many forms of female genital mutilation or FGM, and so the possibility is there for reconstruction.
Dr Foldès is the surgeon in St Germain en Laye who is one of the few who perform clitoral reconstruction after FGM. There are plenty of others who perform repairs, or reversals, but do not rebuild the clitoris. Even reversal though, is a great step forward for women who have undergone more extreme forms of FGM. One report follows up some women who have had reversals done and found them very happy with the outcome.
As mentioned in one of Papillon’s posts, Dr Foldès has trained some Burkinabe surgeons in the techniques. There is an interview of one of them published online in January by the journalist Ochieng' Ogodo. He himself has now trained 50 surgeons in Burkina Faso to do the operation and is happy to pass on his expertise to surgeons in other African countries.
Christine Aziz has interviewed two women who have been patients of Dr Foldès, one French, originally from Somalia, and one Sudanese living in London. Their accounts are similar but well worth reading. A French journalist has written a book, Victoire sur l'excision, about this "modest and profoundly humanitarian doctor".
It is evident from all these stories that his patients have nothing but praise for the doctor.
Contact details for Dr Foldès:
Clinique St. Germain
12, rue Barone Gerard
78100 Saint Germain En Laye.
Dr Foldès is the surgeon in St Germain en Laye who is one of the few who perform clitoral reconstruction after FGM. There are plenty of others who perform repairs, or reversals, but do not rebuild the clitoris. Even reversal though, is a great step forward for women who have undergone more extreme forms of FGM. One report follows up some women who have had reversals done and found them very happy with the outcome.
As mentioned in one of Papillon’s posts, Dr Foldès has trained some Burkinabe surgeons in the techniques. There is an interview of one of them published online in January by the journalist Ochieng' Ogodo. He himself has now trained 50 surgeons in Burkina Faso to do the operation and is happy to pass on his expertise to surgeons in other African countries.
Christine Aziz has interviewed two women who have been patients of Dr Foldès, one French, originally from Somalia, and one Sudanese living in London. Their accounts are similar but well worth reading. A French journalist has written a book, Victoire sur l'excision, about this "modest and profoundly humanitarian doctor".
It is evident from all these stories that his patients have nothing but praise for the doctor.
Contact details for Dr Foldès:
Clinique St. Germain
12, rue Barone Gerard
78100 Saint Germain En Laye.
- tél : 0033 1 39 10 26 26
- tél : 0033 1 61 30 22 15
Thursday, 6 July 2006
Hip hip hooray!
Thursday 5 July 2007
It was raining very heavily on Tuesday afternoon when I left Paris for going to my second post-operative consultation at the Louis XIV Clinic. My feet were soaked but nevertheless I was feeling tranquil. In the RER which was taking me to St Germain en Laye, I felt nothing particular.
However as the station approached an irrational tension took hold of me. As I walked towards the clinic, through the sunny town, the tension grew and my legs started to go numb.
As I had arrived early I stopped at a café, the same one that I had waited in before my first consultation. The tension that gripped me changed into a more diffuse fear.
What concerned me most was that the healing was possibly too slow and that I was perhaps going to have to return to St Germain en Laye. I didn’t want to return. Not for a long time anyway.
There were very few people in the waiting room. Few people and no black women. I was surprised with that but I didn’t have time to think about it because, hardly had I sat down than I noticed Dr Foldès who was moving towards his secretary. And strangely, I wasn’t as worried or concerned to see him as I was the times before.
I almost didn’t have to wait at all. Leaving his secretary’s office, he came into the waiting room and called me. It was at that moment that I noticed my fear had returned.
In his office, he started by joking about my guitar (I was to have a lesson a bit later in the day so I had to cart it with me to the clinic). He was smiling and seemed in an excellent mood.
He started by asking me the date of my operation.
He was in the process of consulting a multicoloured file carrying my name when a telephone call interrupted him. Apparently it was about a woman who wanted to arrange a date for an operation. He turned the pages in his diary and I could see that every Wednesday and Friday were full of African-sounding names, circled in light blue ink. Perhaps they were the names of the women he was going to operate on?
After turning several pages, he asked the person at the other end to contact him again at the end of July. Then he put the phone down and gestured me towards the end of the room where his examination table had pride of place.
As he got up, he asked if I still had a discharge. “Almost none” I answered. “That’s normal. It will stop altogether soon” he assured me.
After a rapid examination he enthused: “Perfect! You have a magnificent clitoris! Good position, good size, good colour. It is per-fect! Are you happy?” “Oh how I am” I replied, really proud. In truth I was more than happy. I felt delighted and strangely relieved that all went so well.
“From now on you are no longer a circumcised woman”. That sentence brought tears to my eyes. I considered I was no longer a circumcised woman once I left the operating theatre but to hear that, from his mouth, that really touched me. It was as if he were liberating me from something. As though he were absolving me.
He explained that the first part of my healing, the most difficult, was over. I now had to approach the second part which would give sensitivity to my clitoris.
This second part, he told me, was at least as important as the operation itself.
And the good news had started to flow.
So, finished with the iodine cleansing four times a day.
Yippee!!!!
Goodbye to the roving washbag! Goodbye sterile swabs! Goodbye washbottle! Our history stops here! I am free of you!
From now on, for six weeks, I need do only two washes per day, one in the morning and one in the evening and .. Marseille soap. He made a point over not using either intimate gels or shower gels for washing my clitoris or labia. He said Marseille soap was the only cleanser which wouldn’t harm the area.
Each morning (and only in the morning), after my shower, I have to apply a small amount of cream called JONCTUM to my labia minora and clitoris. It need only be a very small amount to form a fine protective layer.
This miraculous cream is going to be a sort of dressing which will make “the operation zone more comfortable” to use his terms. Moreover it will let the skin form and cover my clitoris again. Finally, the application of the cream will have the effect of making my clitoris more sensitive.
Taking advantage of a pause in the conversation, I told him about my anxiety over my labia minora which I still couldn’t see. He explained that was normal, that they were certainly there at the base of my clitoris but that the latter, which still hadn’t returned to a normal size (excellent news, I found it still to be just too big) was masking them somewhat. What’s more, they are quite small, the process of reconstruction chosen having been to inject the flesh which had escaped the knife of the circumciser. So I will see them better (if I can say that as I have never had the honour of seeing them at all) in a few days.
He carried on by saying that he had given me back my clitoris and that it belonged to me. “It’s as if I had given you a finger or your nose, it would be part of you and, accordingly, it belongs only to you”. He explained that to rediscover its sensitivity, I shouldn’t depend on men or anyone else. “It’s for you to find this sensitivity by familiarising yourself with your clitoris little by little”
He said that the unpleasant sensations that I was feeling currently when touching my clitoris would disappear gradually in the next few weeks and that it would take about six months before it would be completely sensitive again.
I asked him when I could start up sport again and he said I could do it from now on. The same with swimming.
I also asked the question about sexual relations. And I can restart those too from now on. He said it wouldn’t be terribly agreeable to start off but it would soon be more comfortable. Joking, he asked if my man was in a hurry. When I answered that my love wanted to wait for the green light before doing anything, he answered it was to his credit.
Then there was silence. Then I said to him, “Thank you doctor, many thanks”. My voice was faltering as I spoke. I wanted to clarify to him exactly why I was thanking him, explain this “thank you”. But nothing came out, I had a lump in my throat.
He nodded his head, silent and smiling…
Accompanying me to the door, he said, while shaking my hand, “Good, now we have to convince other young women to come for the operation!” So I told him about my blog and its subject. He said it was a good idea, that reading the story of women who undertake the operation could perhaps encourage others to take the plunge.
It’s really because I don’t chat easily in public that I satisfied myself with smiling. Because it was extremely difficult to prevent myself from purring contentedly.
“You can write on your blog that I am only a doctor. I cannot push women to have the operation. It’s their choice. Theirs alone. I will accompany them, operate but the decision to reject this custom and to want to rediscover their bodies belongs to them. I can’t take it for them, “he added.
“Good the, I’ll see you in December for a little update?”. On these words and on my “Yes, of course” rather strangled by emotion that Dr Foldès and I took our leave of each other.
Going to his secretary to pay for the consultation, I was smiling broadly. Sitting down opposite her to write the cheque for 50 euros, I couldn’t stop myself exclaiming that I was so haaappy!!
She asked me why and I explained to her that it was because everything had gone so well. Smiling she said “You doubted it?”
Leaving, ecstatic, I wanted to skip about like a kid. I called my man and I submerged him in my joy, poor thing (he didn’t take anything in, he had to wait until I explained everything again once I had got home).
Then, when I going to the station, I remembered a question that I hadn’t asked Dr Foldès. I called him and told him that in my happiness I had forgotten to talk to him about these dratted stitches which had still not come out. He answered that it was imminent, that it would happen within the next two weeks.
Yippeeeeee!
God I am so happy.
Since the consultation I have the feeling of being incredibly light. There is lively music in my head all the time.
If that is what joy is like, I wouldn’t be at all surprised!
[Original in French]
Next post
It was raining very heavily on Tuesday afternoon when I left Paris for going to my second post-operative consultation at the Louis XIV Clinic. My feet were soaked but nevertheless I was feeling tranquil. In the RER which was taking me to St Germain en Laye, I felt nothing particular.
However as the station approached an irrational tension took hold of me. As I walked towards the clinic, through the sunny town, the tension grew and my legs started to go numb.
As I had arrived early I stopped at a café, the same one that I had waited in before my first consultation. The tension that gripped me changed into a more diffuse fear.
What concerned me most was that the healing was possibly too slow and that I was perhaps going to have to return to St Germain en Laye. I didn’t want to return. Not for a long time anyway.
There were very few people in the waiting room. Few people and no black women. I was surprised with that but I didn’t have time to think about it because, hardly had I sat down than I noticed Dr Foldès who was moving towards his secretary. And strangely, I wasn’t as worried or concerned to see him as I was the times before.
I almost didn’t have to wait at all. Leaving his secretary’s office, he came into the waiting room and called me. It was at that moment that I noticed my fear had returned.
In his office, he started by joking about my guitar (I was to have a lesson a bit later in the day so I had to cart it with me to the clinic). He was smiling and seemed in an excellent mood.
He started by asking me the date of my operation.
He was in the process of consulting a multicoloured file carrying my name when a telephone call interrupted him. Apparently it was about a woman who wanted to arrange a date for an operation. He turned the pages in his diary and I could see that every Wednesday and Friday were full of African-sounding names, circled in light blue ink. Perhaps they were the names of the women he was going to operate on?
After turning several pages, he asked the person at the other end to contact him again at the end of July. Then he put the phone down and gestured me towards the end of the room where his examination table had pride of place.
As he got up, he asked if I still had a discharge. “Almost none” I answered. “That’s normal. It will stop altogether soon” he assured me.
After a rapid examination he enthused: “Perfect! You have a magnificent clitoris! Good position, good size, good colour. It is per-fect! Are you happy?” “Oh how I am” I replied, really proud. In truth I was more than happy. I felt delighted and strangely relieved that all went so well.
“From now on you are no longer a circumcised woman”. That sentence brought tears to my eyes. I considered I was no longer a circumcised woman once I left the operating theatre but to hear that, from his mouth, that really touched me. It was as if he were liberating me from something. As though he were absolving me.
He explained that the first part of my healing, the most difficult, was over. I now had to approach the second part which would give sensitivity to my clitoris.
This second part, he told me, was at least as important as the operation itself.
And the good news had started to flow.
So, finished with the iodine cleansing four times a day.
Yippee!!!!
Goodbye to the roving washbag! Goodbye sterile swabs! Goodbye washbottle! Our history stops here! I am free of you!
From now on, for six weeks, I need do only two washes per day, one in the morning and one in the evening and .. Marseille soap. He made a point over not using either intimate gels or shower gels for washing my clitoris or labia. He said Marseille soap was the only cleanser which wouldn’t harm the area.
Each morning (and only in the morning), after my shower, I have to apply a small amount of cream called JONCTUM to my labia minora and clitoris. It need only be a very small amount to form a fine protective layer.
This miraculous cream is going to be a sort of dressing which will make “the operation zone more comfortable” to use his terms. Moreover it will let the skin form and cover my clitoris again. Finally, the application of the cream will have the effect of making my clitoris more sensitive.
Taking advantage of a pause in the conversation, I told him about my anxiety over my labia minora which I still couldn’t see. He explained that was normal, that they were certainly there at the base of my clitoris but that the latter, which still hadn’t returned to a normal size (excellent news, I found it still to be just too big) was masking them somewhat. What’s more, they are quite small, the process of reconstruction chosen having been to inject the flesh which had escaped the knife of the circumciser. So I will see them better (if I can say that as I have never had the honour of seeing them at all) in a few days.
He carried on by saying that he had given me back my clitoris and that it belonged to me. “It’s as if I had given you a finger or your nose, it would be part of you and, accordingly, it belongs only to you”. He explained that to rediscover its sensitivity, I shouldn’t depend on men or anyone else. “It’s for you to find this sensitivity by familiarising yourself with your clitoris little by little”
He said that the unpleasant sensations that I was feeling currently when touching my clitoris would disappear gradually in the next few weeks and that it would take about six months before it would be completely sensitive again.
I asked him when I could start up sport again and he said I could do it from now on. The same with swimming.
I also asked the question about sexual relations. And I can restart those too from now on. He said it wouldn’t be terribly agreeable to start off but it would soon be more comfortable. Joking, he asked if my man was in a hurry. When I answered that my love wanted to wait for the green light before doing anything, he answered it was to his credit.
Then there was silence. Then I said to him, “Thank you doctor, many thanks”. My voice was faltering as I spoke. I wanted to clarify to him exactly why I was thanking him, explain this “thank you”. But nothing came out, I had a lump in my throat.
He nodded his head, silent and smiling…
Accompanying me to the door, he said, while shaking my hand, “Good, now we have to convince other young women to come for the operation!” So I told him about my blog and its subject. He said it was a good idea, that reading the story of women who undertake the operation could perhaps encourage others to take the plunge.
It’s really because I don’t chat easily in public that I satisfied myself with smiling. Because it was extremely difficult to prevent myself from purring contentedly.
“You can write on your blog that I am only a doctor. I cannot push women to have the operation. It’s their choice. Theirs alone. I will accompany them, operate but the decision to reject this custom and to want to rediscover their bodies belongs to them. I can’t take it for them, “he added.
“Good the, I’ll see you in December for a little update?”. On these words and on my “Yes, of course” rather strangled by emotion that Dr Foldès and I took our leave of each other.
Going to his secretary to pay for the consultation, I was smiling broadly. Sitting down opposite her to write the cheque for 50 euros, I couldn’t stop myself exclaiming that I was so haaappy!!
She asked me why and I explained to her that it was because everything had gone so well. Smiling she said “You doubted it?”
Leaving, ecstatic, I wanted to skip about like a kid. I called my man and I submerged him in my joy, poor thing (he didn’t take anything in, he had to wait until I explained everything again once I had got home).
Then, when I going to the station, I remembered a question that I hadn’t asked Dr Foldès. I called him and told him that in my happiness I had forgotten to talk to him about these dratted stitches which had still not come out. He answered that it was imminent, that it would happen within the next two weeks.
Yippeeeeee!
God I am so happy.
Since the consultation I have the feeling of being incredibly light. There is lively music in my head all the time.
If that is what joy is like, I wouldn’t be at all surprised!
[Original in French]
Next post
Friday, 30 June 2006
Six week update
Friday 29 June 2007
On Wednesday it was six weeks since I had the operation. The time has come for a little assessment.
Pain: 1/10
My period of post-operative suffering is over. In the end it lasted about a fortnight. Then for two or three weeks there were gnawing pains and serious discomfort when I stood up for too long, admittedly a diffuse pain but definitely present if I really overdid it. But still, it happened only once or twice (I quickly learn how to take it easy when the alternative implies suffering). Lastly there was the awful time while my hair was growing back. I so much wanted to scratch myself for about a week.
But now, the war of the physical pain is over. Strangely I have almost forgotten what it was like.
Hallelujah.
Healing: 8/10
My clitoris is still quite pink.
On the other hand, all the area around has returned to a normal colour. The swelling has gone down in all that area and is no longer sensitive.
Talking of sensitivity, contrary to what I thought, I still don’t feel my “interior” clitoris. It no longer hurts, I can feel it “outside” when I cross my legs, but that’s all for now. I’m being patient, being patient.
I’m continuing with the personal hygiene using dilute iodine. The most often was 4 times a day but more and more often I’ve been forgetting the afternoon session so reducing myself to 3 washes.
Normally this treatment would be modified next week. I have an appointment with Dr Foldès and he said to me that he would prescribe a cream to perfect the healing. I hope there won’t be any more of these intimate ablutions to do because I’ve had enough of them.
The stiches haven’t yet dissolved. They are going to become embedded in my flesh if this continues, I’m sure of it.
The other great annoyance that I’m experiencing, is that I still can’t distinguish my labia minora. It may be it’s because I’m hopeless at female anatomy (but I have done my research) or perhaps there is a problem and they are still too swollen. As a result the skin is stretched, they merge with the labia majora and so I can’t see them. Anyway, that’s the theory I worked out this morning. Verdict next week.
Gait: 9/10
I’ve regained my gait. I’ll even go so far as to say it’s more feminine, seeing that wearing skirts makes me wiggle my bottom. In reality I like it more and more, walking around in a skirt or dress. I am becoming more and more used to the sight of my legs (their prettiness depends on your point of view. From my direction they are just OK, my legs after all). I’ll almost go so far as to say I like my silhouette in a skirt…
Still, if I’ve regained my cruising speed, I still can’t really run. I daren’t go all out and I content myself with trotting carefully. Even in the pouring rain. That’s to say that it’s at that point I’m afraid of hurting myself. One day I’m going to have to launch myself, but for the moment I’m scared stiff.
Morale: 7/10
I have highs and lows. Neither euphoria nor deep depression but my problems with my parents have left their mark. I haven’t spoken to them for 3 weeks and I don’t at all feel I want to. It’s as though I’m indifferent. I need to put some distance between us. But I don’t know for how long or what will happen in the end. From the point of view of my therapy too, I’ve put my parents to one side. I need time to assimilate what happened on the last occasions. At the moment I’m working on the myths which I have built to maintain my self-esteem. I’m at a stage where I no longer need these props and I need to get rid of them. It’s ridiculously hard I’m finding. Because I’m afraid of what will happen when I have to move on without these crutches. It’s like when you remove the little wheels from the back of a child’s cycle…
In retrospect, I realise the invaluable help given by the opportunity to put my feelings into words. With my therapist of course. And also here on this blog. I really believe I would have poisoned myself by not expressing things I have undergone in the past and still now…
Sex: 3/10
I worry more and more about taking up, very soon I hope, my sexual life again. We miss it, my man and I.
But I’m really afraid that the jumbling of bodies will hurt me. Already rubbing against my clitoris makes me freeze in terror. Seeing the effect my poor jeans had on me , I dare not imagine what the skin and movements of my love could cause by way of pain. In fact, for now, I associate all contact with my clitoris with the idea of intense pain.
At the worst, I’m less afraid of penetration because there are positions which allow there not to be any rubbing against my clitoris. But I fear even that a lot.
I believe, besides, I need a green light from Dr Foldès before starting off. I want to be sure that I run no medical risk. I don’t want any complications or I don’t know what else unpleasant which I would be able to avoid by not romping about wildly.
Physical shape: 6/10
I don’t know if it’s linked but I’m exhausted. Frankly worn out. It’s simple, I’m dragging myself about. It’s as if, after a sustained tension, I have relaxed and I’m visibly affected. I’m sleepy all the time and I fall asleep as soon as I lie down. Can’t wait for the holidays ….
Sport 0/10
I am the first to be astonished but I miss my sessions (sporadic I admit) at the swimming pool, or out jogging.
Nevertheless I’m waiting to see Dr Foldès before taking up my activities again. I don’t want to return to the pool and catch something awful which requires me to undergo treatment for yet more weeks.
Smoking: 6/10
I cracked.
Several times.
It’s useless, I know, I know.
I think that before the operation, I was so frightened the smoking could harm my reconstruction (it could hinder the healing) that I watched my step.
Now that I’ve had the operation and I’m not dead on the table, I no longer have the Sword of Damocles hanging over my head.
So on special occasions I’ve smoked one or two cigarettes, stupidly, in the joy of the moment.
Then, I bought a packet all of which I smoked.
It’s not good at all, I know, I know.
I am very contrite. I assure you I would beat myself except that I have this little problem of pain intolerance. I am ashamed. And even more so since the disappointed look thrown to me by my man when he caught me in the act.
I’ve been on patches again for several days, I don’t want to fall into this addiction again.
Especially as I wonder if it doesn’t explain the fact that I am still not completely healed after the expected six weeks.
[Original in French]
Next post
On Wednesday it was six weeks since I had the operation. The time has come for a little assessment.
Pain: 1/10
My period of post-operative suffering is over. In the end it lasted about a fortnight. Then for two or three weeks there were gnawing pains and serious discomfort when I stood up for too long, admittedly a diffuse pain but definitely present if I really overdid it. But still, it happened only once or twice (I quickly learn how to take it easy when the alternative implies suffering). Lastly there was the awful time while my hair was growing back. I so much wanted to scratch myself for about a week.
But now, the war of the physical pain is over. Strangely I have almost forgotten what it was like.
Hallelujah.
Healing: 8/10
My clitoris is still quite pink.
On the other hand, all the area around has returned to a normal colour. The swelling has gone down in all that area and is no longer sensitive.
Talking of sensitivity, contrary to what I thought, I still don’t feel my “interior” clitoris. It no longer hurts, I can feel it “outside” when I cross my legs, but that’s all for now. I’m being patient, being patient.
I’m continuing with the personal hygiene using dilute iodine. The most often was 4 times a day but more and more often I’ve been forgetting the afternoon session so reducing myself to 3 washes.
Normally this treatment would be modified next week. I have an appointment with Dr Foldès and he said to me that he would prescribe a cream to perfect the healing. I hope there won’t be any more of these intimate ablutions to do because I’ve had enough of them.
The stiches haven’t yet dissolved. They are going to become embedded in my flesh if this continues, I’m sure of it.
The other great annoyance that I’m experiencing, is that I still can’t distinguish my labia minora. It may be it’s because I’m hopeless at female anatomy (but I have done my research) or perhaps there is a problem and they are still too swollen. As a result the skin is stretched, they merge with the labia majora and so I can’t see them. Anyway, that’s the theory I worked out this morning. Verdict next week.
Gait: 9/10
I’ve regained my gait. I’ll even go so far as to say it’s more feminine, seeing that wearing skirts makes me wiggle my bottom. In reality I like it more and more, walking around in a skirt or dress. I am becoming more and more used to the sight of my legs (their prettiness depends on your point of view. From my direction they are just OK, my legs after all). I’ll almost go so far as to say I like my silhouette in a skirt…
Still, if I’ve regained my cruising speed, I still can’t really run. I daren’t go all out and I content myself with trotting carefully. Even in the pouring rain. That’s to say that it’s at that point I’m afraid of hurting myself. One day I’m going to have to launch myself, but for the moment I’m scared stiff.
Morale: 7/10
I have highs and lows. Neither euphoria nor deep depression but my problems with my parents have left their mark. I haven’t spoken to them for 3 weeks and I don’t at all feel I want to. It’s as though I’m indifferent. I need to put some distance between us. But I don’t know for how long or what will happen in the end. From the point of view of my therapy too, I’ve put my parents to one side. I need time to assimilate what happened on the last occasions. At the moment I’m working on the myths which I have built to maintain my self-esteem. I’m at a stage where I no longer need these props and I need to get rid of them. It’s ridiculously hard I’m finding. Because I’m afraid of what will happen when I have to move on without these crutches. It’s like when you remove the little wheels from the back of a child’s cycle…
In retrospect, I realise the invaluable help given by the opportunity to put my feelings into words. With my therapist of course. And also here on this blog. I really believe I would have poisoned myself by not expressing things I have undergone in the past and still now…
Sex: 3/10
I worry more and more about taking up, very soon I hope, my sexual life again. We miss it, my man and I.
But I’m really afraid that the jumbling of bodies will hurt me. Already rubbing against my clitoris makes me freeze in terror. Seeing the effect my poor jeans had on me , I dare not imagine what the skin and movements of my love could cause by way of pain. In fact, for now, I associate all contact with my clitoris with the idea of intense pain.
At the worst, I’m less afraid of penetration because there are positions which allow there not to be any rubbing against my clitoris. But I fear even that a lot.
I believe, besides, I need a green light from Dr Foldès before starting off. I want to be sure that I run no medical risk. I don’t want any complications or I don’t know what else unpleasant which I would be able to avoid by not romping about wildly.
Physical shape: 6/10
I don’t know if it’s linked but I’m exhausted. Frankly worn out. It’s simple, I’m dragging myself about. It’s as if, after a sustained tension, I have relaxed and I’m visibly affected. I’m sleepy all the time and I fall asleep as soon as I lie down. Can’t wait for the holidays ….
Sport 0/10
I am the first to be astonished but I miss my sessions (sporadic I admit) at the swimming pool, or out jogging.
Nevertheless I’m waiting to see Dr Foldès before taking up my activities again. I don’t want to return to the pool and catch something awful which requires me to undergo treatment for yet more weeks.
Smoking: 6/10
I cracked.
Several times.
It’s useless, I know, I know.
I think that before the operation, I was so frightened the smoking could harm my reconstruction (it could hinder the healing) that I watched my step.
Now that I’ve had the operation and I’m not dead on the table, I no longer have the Sword of Damocles hanging over my head.
So on special occasions I’ve smoked one or two cigarettes, stupidly, in the joy of the moment.
Then, I bought a packet all of which I smoked.
It’s not good at all, I know, I know.
I am very contrite. I assure you I would beat myself except that I have this little problem of pain intolerance. I am ashamed. And even more so since the disappointed look thrown to me by my man when he caught me in the act.
I’ve been on patches again for several days, I don’t want to fall into this addiction again.
Especially as I wonder if it doesn’t explain the fact that I am still not completely healed after the expected six weeks.
[Original in French]
Next post
Sunday, 18 June 2006
Roving at last!
Monday 18 June 2007
My best friend often has very good ideas.
Recently he had one which has set me free from my bathroom.
As I told you, I have to attend to my personal hygiene 3 to 4 times a day. And rinse thoroughly each time.
In time I ended up getting used to it. From being “bloody annoying” the ritual has become “a bit of a nuisance”.
Even since I went back to work, I haven’t strayed from Dr Foldès’ instructions and I am continuing to take four semi-showers a day.
In fact I could content myself with three sessions a day (one in the morning, one when returning home from work and one in the evening when going to bed). After all, he told me “3 to 4 times a day” at my last consultation. But quite obviously the “good pupil” side of my nature, forces me to have 4. In "3 to 4 times a day", I hear only 4 times but still, if it’s only three, that’s nevertheless fine.
As a result, when I went back to work, I was returning home every mid-day to take care of myself.
Which was getting me into a bit of a jam. It was impossible to do what I had to during a lunch hour and the return journey was taking me an hour and a half (including lunch).
The other day, I had lunch with my best friend and it appeared to him that the constraint came in reality from the fact that I have to rinse thoroughly. You can’t rinse your intimate areas thoroughly in the toilets (unless they are equipped with these new luxury thrones from Japan with optional heated seats and a fountain for rinsing, as I have seen in the past, but those aren’t the sort of toilets at my workplace).
So my best friend suggested that I should carry a wash bottle (you know, those laboratory bottles with a sort of bent spout which chemists use?).
With that I would have the ability to rinse thoroughly and with complete discretion in any toilets.
That evening in the supermarket, the idea became more refined: as it was a question of needing a sort of portable fountain, I could also use a bottle of water with a “sports special” cap (the ones you take off with your teeth while running, and which allow you to squirt the water out in a jet by pressing the sides).
I tried several. Some bottles were too hard (as a result when you press them you don’t get a fountain, you had to tilt the bottle to get a substitute jet, well short of my expectations). Others were too supple, I could press harder and produce a magnificent jet while holding the bottle upright (head up) but their capacity was too small for my taste (25 cl).
As far as I am concerned, the ideal would be to have a litre of water available.
While waiting to try out my friend’s wash bottle, I chose a bottle containing 50 cl and I diluted the iodine well, which means there is less to rinse.
As a result, I walk around now with my little pink bag containing a bottle of iodine, a beaker (for mixing the iodine and water,) some sterile swabs, my bottle with the “sports” cap, some soft paper handkerchiefs and one or two soft sanitary towels.
I am finally free to do what I want during my lunch hours.
The treatments, which I have to continue until 4 July at least, are far less of a constraint now that I can do them anywhere.
That is bliss!
[Original in French]
Next post
My best friend often has very good ideas.
Recently he had one which has set me free from my bathroom.
As I told you, I have to attend to my personal hygiene 3 to 4 times a day. And rinse thoroughly each time.
In time I ended up getting used to it. From being “bloody annoying” the ritual has become “a bit of a nuisance”.
Even since I went back to work, I haven’t strayed from Dr Foldès’ instructions and I am continuing to take four semi-showers a day.
In fact I could content myself with three sessions a day (one in the morning, one when returning home from work and one in the evening when going to bed). After all, he told me “3 to 4 times a day” at my last consultation. But quite obviously the “good pupil” side of my nature, forces me to have 4. In "3 to 4 times a day", I hear only 4 times but still, if it’s only three, that’s nevertheless fine.
As a result, when I went back to work, I was returning home every mid-day to take care of myself.
Which was getting me into a bit of a jam. It was impossible to do what I had to during a lunch hour and the return journey was taking me an hour and a half (including lunch).
The other day, I had lunch with my best friend and it appeared to him that the constraint came in reality from the fact that I have to rinse thoroughly. You can’t rinse your intimate areas thoroughly in the toilets (unless they are equipped with these new luxury thrones from Japan with optional heated seats and a fountain for rinsing, as I have seen in the past, but those aren’t the sort of toilets at my workplace).
So my best friend suggested that I should carry a wash bottle (you know, those laboratory bottles with a sort of bent spout which chemists use?).
With that I would have the ability to rinse thoroughly and with complete discretion in any toilets.
That evening in the supermarket, the idea became more refined: as it was a question of needing a sort of portable fountain, I could also use a bottle of water with a “sports special” cap (the ones you take off with your teeth while running, and which allow you to squirt the water out in a jet by pressing the sides).
I tried several. Some bottles were too hard (as a result when you press them you don’t get a fountain, you had to tilt the bottle to get a substitute jet, well short of my expectations). Others were too supple, I could press harder and produce a magnificent jet while holding the bottle upright (head up) but their capacity was too small for my taste (25 cl).
As far as I am concerned, the ideal would be to have a litre of water available.
While waiting to try out my friend’s wash bottle, I chose a bottle containing 50 cl and I diluted the iodine well, which means there is less to rinse.
As a result, I walk around now with my little pink bag containing a bottle of iodine, a beaker (for mixing the iodine and water,) some sterile swabs, my bottle with the “sports” cap, some soft paper handkerchiefs and one or two soft sanitary towels.
I am finally free to do what I want during my lunch hours.
The treatments, which I have to continue until 4 July at least, are far less of a constraint now that I can do them anywhere.
That is bliss!
[Original in French]
Next post
Tuesday, 6 June 2006
Check up
Wednesday 6 June 2007
After his lightning visit the day after the operation, Dr Foldès indicated that I had to return to see him 2 to 3 weeks later. All I had to do was to call the secretary to find out when he would be there and to turn up without an appointment.
So on Monday morning I called the Louis XIV clinic. His secretary told me that this week Dr Foldès was consulting Monday afternoon and Tuesday afternoon from 14:00.
I didn’t want to go at all. So much so that instead of choosing Monday afternoon I decided not to go until Tuesday. I arrived just on time on Tuesday afternoon and not at least half an hour early as I had been in the habit of doing.
While going to the clinic, I tried to analyse my concern. There was the fact that Dr Foldès had impressed me a lot. And yet there was also another component which I couldn’t manage to express. All I could grasp of it was that I had no wish to meet other of Dr Foldès’ patients.
When I entered the clinic, I exchanged glances with a woman sitting where I had waited when they came to find me on the day of my admission, the night before the operation.
She was black. And I couldn’t stop myself from thinking she was surely there to be operated on by Dr Foldès.
Dismissing that thought, I went up the few steps which led to the surgeons’ secretaries.
And there, bingo, I met Dr Iceberg. As usual, as expressive as a prison door, he didn’t recognise me. At about that moment a lump appeared in my throat and my morale began to waver seriously.
Dr Foldès’ secretary put my name in the margin of her book. As a result I had no idea what time I would have to wait.
I thought that I would be given priority but, once settled in the jam-packed and stifling waiting room, I noticed the surgeon talking to his secretary. I felt my body tensing and I was ridiculously relieved to hear him call an older man. In the end I preferred to wait until after everyone else who had an appointment.
Dr Foldès is basically a urologist. That occurred to me when, two or three times, he came to look for a man in the waiting room.
During this time the waiting room didn’t become any emptier, to the contrary. There wasn’t a single free chair and new arrivals crowded standing up along the cubicles of the surgeons’ secretaries.
Seeing black women appearing, I once again immediately though that they were Dr Foldès’ patients. That was confirmed by their going to his secretary.
A young woman of about 25, with her head in a turban, arrived first, followed closely by a woman of about fifty. Then a very young girl (she hardly seemed to have come of age) came into the waiting room briskly. A few minutes later another woman in her twenties arrived, accompanied by a woman who could have been her sister of her friend.
These women had no doubt been circumcised too. And they no doubt had also come to have their mutilated sex repaired.
I studied them to work out at which stage in their long journey to reconstruction they were. The last arrivals were wearing slim fitting jeans and crossed their legs. The two first were wearing loose clothes but had a lively gait. So I deduced that it was either their first consultation or it was more than six weeks since their operations and they had come for a check up.
The lump in my throat was growing, my morale was sinking. I felt vulnerable and sad. For myself, for them. Each black woman present was very likely a circumcised woman. I found that distressing.
We weren’t patients like the others in the waiting room. Unlike the others who had come to battle with an stroke of fate, we were there to repair an abomination which had been inflicted by the hand or wish of our own people, of a member of our own family.
And we took all these actions, these round trips to St Germain en Laye, these pains, this fear, anxieties, to restore our dignity plundered without our consent.
In a real mess, that outraged me so much that the lump in my throat doubled in size and my morale dropped to the abyss of depression. I wanted to cry.
At that moment I thought that I really would like my parents to say they were sorry one day.
Lost in these black thoughts, I hardly heard Dr Foldès calling me, and I didn’t have time to be afraid.
In his office Dr Foldès smiled at me, which heartened me a little. He asked when I had had the operation. He didn’t remember me and that was curiously a relief. I really wanted to be ordinary and anonymous come to be examined, not a victim of circumcision. I was no longer a circumcised woman. It was over.
On his desk he had an information leaflet about a young Malian woman born in 1988 and circumcised at the age of 5. That weighed down my already not very brave morale.
He asked me to get on to the examining table and to bend my legs. Then he did an rapid examination. “Superb! It’s perfect!” he said. That pleased me, I felt very proud. “It’s healing well, the labia minora as much as the clitoris. It’s very good”.
He added that it’s normal to have a hole at the front (but what hole exactly? I feel I’m going to have to explore again with my little mirror, I didn’t know what he was talking about at all) and that there will still be a little discharge.
He recommended continuing cleaning the whole genital area with well diluted iodine three or four times a day.
Then he explained that this visit was a check up just to establish that everything was going well. And everything was going well.
Then he said he would see me again in 3 to 5 weeks. That consultation would be very important, even essential, because he would prescribe a further treatment.
He smiled at me again and my morale got a second wind. I was even fairly happy and reassured. In the end all the pain was worth it …
I made an appointment for 4 July before leaving.
Leaving for the RER station, I was split between the joy of knowing my healing was going well and a burst of anger over the mutilation.
Damn, I WISH my parents would say they are sorry.
I need someone to say they are sorry for the pain they have given me ….
[original in French]
Next post
After his lightning visit the day after the operation, Dr Foldès indicated that I had to return to see him 2 to 3 weeks later. All I had to do was to call the secretary to find out when he would be there and to turn up without an appointment.
So on Monday morning I called the Louis XIV clinic. His secretary told me that this week Dr Foldès was consulting Monday afternoon and Tuesday afternoon from 14:00.
I didn’t want to go at all. So much so that instead of choosing Monday afternoon I decided not to go until Tuesday. I arrived just on time on Tuesday afternoon and not at least half an hour early as I had been in the habit of doing.
While going to the clinic, I tried to analyse my concern. There was the fact that Dr Foldès had impressed me a lot. And yet there was also another component which I couldn’t manage to express. All I could grasp of it was that I had no wish to meet other of Dr Foldès’ patients.
When I entered the clinic, I exchanged glances with a woman sitting where I had waited when they came to find me on the day of my admission, the night before the operation.
She was black. And I couldn’t stop myself from thinking she was surely there to be operated on by Dr Foldès.
Dismissing that thought, I went up the few steps which led to the surgeons’ secretaries.
And there, bingo, I met Dr Iceberg. As usual, as expressive as a prison door, he didn’t recognise me. At about that moment a lump appeared in my throat and my morale began to waver seriously.
Dr Foldès’ secretary put my name in the margin of her book. As a result I had no idea what time I would have to wait.
I thought that I would be given priority but, once settled in the jam-packed and stifling waiting room, I noticed the surgeon talking to his secretary. I felt my body tensing and I was ridiculously relieved to hear him call an older man. In the end I preferred to wait until after everyone else who had an appointment.
Dr Foldès is basically a urologist. That occurred to me when, two or three times, he came to look for a man in the waiting room.
During this time the waiting room didn’t become any emptier, to the contrary. There wasn’t a single free chair and new arrivals crowded standing up along the cubicles of the surgeons’ secretaries.
Seeing black women appearing, I once again immediately though that they were Dr Foldès’ patients. That was confirmed by their going to his secretary.
A young woman of about 25, with her head in a turban, arrived first, followed closely by a woman of about fifty. Then a very young girl (she hardly seemed to have come of age) came into the waiting room briskly. A few minutes later another woman in her twenties arrived, accompanied by a woman who could have been her sister of her friend.
These women had no doubt been circumcised too. And they no doubt had also come to have their mutilated sex repaired.
I studied them to work out at which stage in their long journey to reconstruction they were. The last arrivals were wearing slim fitting jeans and crossed their legs. The two first were wearing loose clothes but had a lively gait. So I deduced that it was either their first consultation or it was more than six weeks since their operations and they had come for a check up.
The lump in my throat was growing, my morale was sinking. I felt vulnerable and sad. For myself, for them. Each black woman present was very likely a circumcised woman. I found that distressing.
We weren’t patients like the others in the waiting room. Unlike the others who had come to battle with an stroke of fate, we were there to repair an abomination which had been inflicted by the hand or wish of our own people, of a member of our own family.
And we took all these actions, these round trips to St Germain en Laye, these pains, this fear, anxieties, to restore our dignity plundered without our consent.
In a real mess, that outraged me so much that the lump in my throat doubled in size and my morale dropped to the abyss of depression. I wanted to cry.
At that moment I thought that I really would like my parents to say they were sorry one day.
Lost in these black thoughts, I hardly heard Dr Foldès calling me, and I didn’t have time to be afraid.
In his office Dr Foldès smiled at me, which heartened me a little. He asked when I had had the operation. He didn’t remember me and that was curiously a relief. I really wanted to be ordinary and anonymous come to be examined, not a victim of circumcision. I was no longer a circumcised woman. It was over.
On his desk he had an information leaflet about a young Malian woman born in 1988 and circumcised at the age of 5. That weighed down my already not very brave morale.
He asked me to get on to the examining table and to bend my legs. Then he did an rapid examination. “Superb! It’s perfect!” he said. That pleased me, I felt very proud. “It’s healing well, the labia minora as much as the clitoris. It’s very good”.
He added that it’s normal to have a hole at the front (but what hole exactly? I feel I’m going to have to explore again with my little mirror, I didn’t know what he was talking about at all) and that there will still be a little discharge.
He recommended continuing cleaning the whole genital area with well diluted iodine three or four times a day.
Then he explained that this visit was a check up just to establish that everything was going well. And everything was going well.
Then he said he would see me again in 3 to 5 weeks. That consultation would be very important, even essential, because he would prescribe a further treatment.
He smiled at me again and my morale got a second wind. I was even fairly happy and reassured. In the end all the pain was worth it …
I made an appointment for 4 July before leaving.
Leaving for the RER station, I was split between the joy of knowing my healing was going well and a burst of anger over the mutilation.
Damn, I WISH my parents would say they are sorry.
I need someone to say they are sorry for the pain they have given me ….
[original in French]
Next post
Sunday, 4 June 2006
Suitability
Monday 4 June 2007
It’s strange, I hadn’t really thought, before the operation, about the fact that my sex would have a new appearance. At a certain moment I had even lost the point that my clitoris would resume its place between my labia. I had never thought about it.
And today, presented with my new-found clitoris, I admit I am troubled.
Since the operation I have been cleaning it delicately with compresses soaked in dilute iodine, I have been observing it discretely during this intimate toilet, and I have been noticing its reactions when I spray it with water, I’ve been watching the progress of its appearance, I’ve been watching out for signs when I am walking, sitting or lying down. But it intimidates me.
The operation for reconstruction of the clitoris isn’t a transplant, I know that, but in my mind it seems very like it.
When I brought up my operation in therapy, I often said “I am going to have a clitoris”. And my therapist corrected me: “No, not A clitoris, My clitoris”. In the same way, when I said “I don’t have a clitoris” she said to me that the sentence would be true if I had been born without a clitoris. So, I have one. It has been cut, but I have one.
But see, that’s 27 years I was brought up during which time I can’t remember having a clitoris at all. It really is like someone having given me a transplant of a new organ.
At the moment, quite honestly, I can’t really feel it. By that I mean to say that I only very rarely and fleetingly feel that the layout of my genital area has changed.
I find it very noticeable on the other hand, when I walk and I feel my clitoris, I have a sort of reflex which makes me spread my legs a little and so walk very slightly like a duck, which is the ultimate chic.
The other day, for the first time, I dared to explore the contours of my clitoris directly, with my fingers without a compress. I touched it timidly and lightly, being very careful not to trouble it too much (I was afraid of feeling a painful pang or I don’t know what else unpleasant, the area between my labia majora still being quite sensitive).
What this exploration has taught me is that at the moment my clitoris is held “out of the water” by stitches on two sides (in front and behind the labia majora, not just in front as I thought before). That reassured me because I found it somewhat large.
The question which I intend to ask Dr Foldès this week is: “and what about my labia minora?”. Because it’s a bit of a mess and with all these stitches, I can’t distinguish my labia minora (nevertheless I’m dedicating a long time to investigate these places).
I’ve refound my clitoris, but I still need to make its acquaintance , something which isn’t obvious in view of how it impresses me. Well, all the same, I notice a new intimacy between us, in its own way. And I think that’s great.
[Original in French]
Next post
It’s strange, I hadn’t really thought, before the operation, about the fact that my sex would have a new appearance. At a certain moment I had even lost the point that my clitoris would resume its place between my labia. I had never thought about it.
And today, presented with my new-found clitoris, I admit I am troubled.
Since the operation I have been cleaning it delicately with compresses soaked in dilute iodine, I have been observing it discretely during this intimate toilet, and I have been noticing its reactions when I spray it with water, I’ve been watching the progress of its appearance, I’ve been watching out for signs when I am walking, sitting or lying down. But it intimidates me.
The operation for reconstruction of the clitoris isn’t a transplant, I know that, but in my mind it seems very like it.
When I brought up my operation in therapy, I often said “I am going to have a clitoris”. And my therapist corrected me: “No, not A clitoris, My clitoris”. In the same way, when I said “I don’t have a clitoris” she said to me that the sentence would be true if I had been born without a clitoris. So, I have one. It has been cut, but I have one.
But see, that’s 27 years I was brought up during which time I can’t remember having a clitoris at all. It really is like someone having given me a transplant of a new organ.
At the moment, quite honestly, I can’t really feel it. By that I mean to say that I only very rarely and fleetingly feel that the layout of my genital area has changed.
I find it very noticeable on the other hand, when I walk and I feel my clitoris, I have a sort of reflex which makes me spread my legs a little and so walk very slightly like a duck, which is the ultimate chic.
The other day, for the first time, I dared to explore the contours of my clitoris directly, with my fingers without a compress. I touched it timidly and lightly, being very careful not to trouble it too much (I was afraid of feeling a painful pang or I don’t know what else unpleasant, the area between my labia majora still being quite sensitive).
What this exploration has taught me is that at the moment my clitoris is held “out of the water” by stitches on two sides (in front and behind the labia majora, not just in front as I thought before). That reassured me because I found it somewhat large.
The question which I intend to ask Dr Foldès this week is: “and what about my labia minora?”. Because it’s a bit of a mess and with all these stitches, I can’t distinguish my labia minora (nevertheless I’m dedicating a long time to investigate these places).
I’ve refound my clitoris, but I still need to make its acquaintance , something which isn’t obvious in view of how it impresses me. Well, all the same, I notice a new intimacy between us, in its own way. And I think that’s great.
[Original in French]
Next post
Monday, 22 May 2006
Analysis of the pain
22 May 2007
Today I am walking almost normally. Almost. Because I am holding myself oddly when upright. I’m exaggerating the arch of my spine and as a result, obviously, I have backache after several minutes standing.
The daily reduction of the pain has been a lovely surprise on awakening since Thursday. I can’t really even say pain, at the time of writing these words. It’s more of a dragging feeling. As a result I have started to ignore my best friends, the painkillers.
Nevertheless, contrary to what you might think, it’s not better to be dragged than to be in pain. Far from it even.
The dragging is worrying enough that I have the impression that something is going to give way, causing a haemorrhage or destroying all the work of the surgeon. So I take note of my feelings, I change position when I feel tension increasing in the region of the operation. When I am sitting or lying down I need one or two minutes to find a comfortable position. And so, standing up, I hold myself in a way that minimises the tightening while letting me find my balance, to the detriment of my back.
The pain and the stinging have a use all the same: that’s what makes me diligent in the care I need to give myself. In effect, I have to carry out intimate cleaning 4 times a day with the sterile swabs soaked in dilute red iodine. And I have to rinse thoroughly. Which means using the shower head. And so I take a mini-shower each time. Four times a day. When waking (well that’s not too much of a problem it’s true, as I take a full shower in any case), at about 2:00pm then about 7:00 pm and finally before going to bed. It’s frankly annoying. So it’s fortunate that there is this pain, that there is this pulling. If I didn’t feel anything at all it would be very difficult not to skip some of the care.
The clitoris is a very long organ (approximately 11 cm/4 inches) of which only a little is found outside the body. Circumcision consists of cutting this end which protrudes, while damaging the labia minora at the same time.
In order to do the repair, the surgeon therefore had to remove the scar tissue from my circumcision, then he cut and disengaged my clitoris. He reconstituted a clitoral gland at the end which he then repositioned so that it would protrude. So that the clitoris would not retract to its anterior position (so that it doesn’t “go back” again) he “wedged” it and sutured it with reabsorbable thread in front of the labia majora so that they keep it in place.*.
In my case he also injected a product into my labia minora so thet they would take on the normal shape again.
The pulling and pain are from where? All my genital area is swollen, tight and sensitive. I also have a slight pink discharge (nothing compared with the haemorrhage I imagined when I saw the giant sanitary towels in the clinic on Tuesday evening, nor with periods either) but the flow is not much at all.
At the time of my daily cleaning, I use a little mirror to see how things are going. The day before yesterday, for the first time, I noticed a little pink button between my labia majora. My clitoris. The little piece of flesh, that was my clitoris!
Damn! My mouth drops open.
I have been so obsessed by the pain since leaving the clinic that I completely put to one side part of the reality: I HAVE FOUND MY CLITORIS AGAIN! For good!
Damn, damn, damn, it’s coooolll!!
So, true, I don’t feel it at all at the moment. I can only wait for the pain, the stinging, the pulling to pack up for good. That should be before next Wednesday at the latest. At that time I believe I will notice its presence (and that will surely be reeeaaally strange to feel I have an extra organ). For it’s own sensitivity, to “feel it internally”, that should happen after six weeks of healing.
I still don’t know too much of what awaits me on the healing of my labia minora …
I am not in any rush to know what I am going to feel. For now, my need, what I am looking forward to, is the moment when I will no longer have any disagreeable feelings.
I understand perfectly now what that lady meant when she said she “still felt circumcised in her head, in spite of the operation”. For the moment, I feel no matter what has changed in my body, there are unpleasant things which prevent me from feeling it and so realising it. And nothing notable has happened in my head. It has certainly noticed the theory of what happened last week, it knows my body has been reconstructed, but it remains an abstraction.
I am waiting, I am waiting, I know that it will come ….
*sources
- Victoire sur l’Excision, Pierre Foldès, le chirurgien qui redonne l’espoir aux femmes mutilées, l’excellent livre d’Hubert Prolongeau (Editions Albin Michel)
- Urofrance, le site de l’urologie française
- Excision - On peut soigner les femmes victimes d’excision - Doctissimo
[Original in French]
Next post
Today I am walking almost normally. Almost. Because I am holding myself oddly when upright. I’m exaggerating the arch of my spine and as a result, obviously, I have backache after several minutes standing.
The daily reduction of the pain has been a lovely surprise on awakening since Thursday. I can’t really even say pain, at the time of writing these words. It’s more of a dragging feeling. As a result I have started to ignore my best friends, the painkillers.
Nevertheless, contrary to what you might think, it’s not better to be dragged than to be in pain. Far from it even.
The dragging is worrying enough that I have the impression that something is going to give way, causing a haemorrhage or destroying all the work of the surgeon. So I take note of my feelings, I change position when I feel tension increasing in the region of the operation. When I am sitting or lying down I need one or two minutes to find a comfortable position. And so, standing up, I hold myself in a way that minimises the tightening while letting me find my balance, to the detriment of my back.
The pain and the stinging have a use all the same: that’s what makes me diligent in the care I need to give myself. In effect, I have to carry out intimate cleaning 4 times a day with the sterile swabs soaked in dilute red iodine. And I have to rinse thoroughly. Which means using the shower head. And so I take a mini-shower each time. Four times a day. When waking (well that’s not too much of a problem it’s true, as I take a full shower in any case), at about 2:00pm then about 7:00 pm and finally before going to bed. It’s frankly annoying. So it’s fortunate that there is this pain, that there is this pulling. If I didn’t feel anything at all it would be very difficult not to skip some of the care.
The clitoris is a very long organ (approximately 11 cm/4 inches) of which only a little is found outside the body. Circumcision consists of cutting this end which protrudes, while damaging the labia minora at the same time.
In order to do the repair, the surgeon therefore had to remove the scar tissue from my circumcision, then he cut and disengaged my clitoris. He reconstituted a clitoral gland at the end which he then repositioned so that it would protrude. So that the clitoris would not retract to its anterior position (so that it doesn’t “go back” again) he “wedged” it and sutured it with reabsorbable thread in front of the labia majora so that they keep it in place.*.
In my case he also injected a product into my labia minora so thet they would take on the normal shape again.
The pulling and pain are from where? All my genital area is swollen, tight and sensitive. I also have a slight pink discharge (nothing compared with the haemorrhage I imagined when I saw the giant sanitary towels in the clinic on Tuesday evening, nor with periods either) but the flow is not much at all.
At the time of my daily cleaning, I use a little mirror to see how things are going. The day before yesterday, for the first time, I noticed a little pink button between my labia majora. My clitoris. The little piece of flesh, that was my clitoris!
Damn! My mouth drops open.
I have been so obsessed by the pain since leaving the clinic that I completely put to one side part of the reality: I HAVE FOUND MY CLITORIS AGAIN! For good!
Damn, damn, damn, it’s coooolll!!
So, true, I don’t feel it at all at the moment. I can only wait for the pain, the stinging, the pulling to pack up for good. That should be before next Wednesday at the latest. At that time I believe I will notice its presence (and that will surely be reeeaaally strange to feel I have an extra organ). For it’s own sensitivity, to “feel it internally”, that should happen after six weeks of healing.
I still don’t know too much of what awaits me on the healing of my labia minora …
I am not in any rush to know what I am going to feel. For now, my need, what I am looking forward to, is the moment when I will no longer have any disagreeable feelings.
I understand perfectly now what that lady meant when she said she “still felt circumcised in her head, in spite of the operation”. For the moment, I feel no matter what has changed in my body, there are unpleasant things which prevent me from feeling it and so realising it. And nothing notable has happened in my head. It has certainly noticed the theory of what happened last week, it knows my body has been reconstructed, but it remains an abstraction.
I am waiting, I am waiting, I know that it will come ….
*sources
- Victoire sur l’Excision, Pierre Foldès, le chirurgien qui redonne l’espoir aux femmes mutilées, l’excellent livre d’Hubert Prolongeau (Editions Albin Michel)
- Urofrance, le site de l’urologie française
- Excision - On peut soigner les femmes victimes d’excision - Doctissimo
[Original in French]
Next post
Sunday, 21 May 2006
From the other side of the miracle
Monday 21 May 2007
When I opened my eyes I was in a bed in another room. And I was in terrible pain. I cried, saying “It hurts” again and again and the nurse, who, two minutes before had confirmed that “no, I wouldn’t be in pain” (when I think back I'm totally on edge again), put me on a drip to relieve the pain.
I believe the operation took around twenty minutes and the anaesthetic approximately an hour.
I don’t remember the trip back to my room very well, it was as though I was in cotton wool. My room mate wasn’t there. I don’t remember her returning. I was dozing, I felt very tired, I was in pain …
I remember however my room mate demanding something to eat and the explanations from the nurses (we had to wait several hours before eating, the time taken for the anaesthetic to wear off completely, for fear of suffocating from swallowing the wrong way). And I remember also the nurse taking my blood pressure 3 or 4 times during the day.
The first of my circle to show themselves was my man. He came to see me around 4 pm, just when we were brought our tea (stewed apple, two butter biscuits and a madeleine). I was so happy to see him that I cried when he left.
Then I received my phone calls. My best friend first. Then my cousin. Then my mother. I had given her the clinic’s number but I didn’t think she’d phone me.
I still don’t know exactly what I felt when I heard her, but there was some relief in any case, and also pleasure. She asked me lots of questions, how it went, how I felt, was I in pain, when would I be leaving etc. … She told me to make sure I explained the whole sequence to her as soon as I returned home. That really pleased me that my mother was interested in me like that, it touched me. It’s rather new for me.
My mother then passed me over to my father who had just come home. He still had his distant tone, embarrassed. He didn’t speak to me much, just asked how I was, I think. There too, I don’t remember the words we exchanged well. I didn’t want to speak to him, I held it against him, his tone of voice, this distance that I felt, this rigidity.
To say that I was afraid he would give me a hard time, I found his near-indifference worse in the end. I am disappointed when I think of my father. Disappointed and angry.
The night was difficult, I took a long time to go to sleep, unlike my room mate. I was in pain, in spite of the painkillers which a nurse brought to me. I wanted to pee but I dare not, I was afraid of even more pain. And then there was this giant sanitary towel which irritated me too.
Next morning I was impatient again. I wanted to go home. Quickly. A nurse came to tell us that Dr Foldès was coming to see us and we had to wait to see him before we could leave the clinic.
While waiting, I chatted a bit with my room mate. She was 36 and had 4 children by an unhappy first marriage. The operation, in her case, was because she felt sexually frustrated. And also because she was afraid of her second husband leaving her if she weren’t more “playful” in bed. She told me that each time she gave birth or each time she saw a gynaecologist, she asked in vain, if it were possible to do something for her and her total absence of pleasure. She had heard about Dr Foldès on television and called him next day to make an appointment.
The doctor came by in a gust of wind. He gave us, my room mate and me, a prescription and a leaflet entitled “Immediate after effects of surgery to repair the clitoris”. Then he signed me off work until 25 May. He then explained to us very rapidly the care we should take, and then left again. I didn’t have time to write down what he said, I didn’t have time to tell him that I was in more pain on the left side of my sex than on the right, I didn’t have time to ask him if it was normal.
Before leaving he told us to call in three weeks to find out which days he was consulting and to turn up without an appointment on a day he would be there.
A few minutes later, after a call from the clinic’s reception, I went down (at the speed of a tortoise and that still gave me plenty of pain) paid the excess charge of 300 euros for the surgeon and the 9 euros that the telephone and television cost me.
My man arrived just when the young woman at the reception gave me a slip for the patient to sign, a hospitalisation slip, each with three copies (one for me, one for social security and one for the insurance company).
I was in an excellent mood, I chirruped with my love on the stairs on the stairs while going back up to collect my bag. I couldn’t stop myself smiling I was so happy. I wanted to hug everyone. The atmosphere was strange though. The clinic was very quiet on this holiday Thursday [Ascension Day], I had the impression that nobody was there apart from the young woman in reception and Dr Foldès’ patients who were walking around the corridors (I recognised them by their way of walking, so like mine).
I came across one on the stairs as I went down again. I smiled at her but she had a glum air which I didn’t understand. Life was so beautiful, how was it possible to be so sad?
My man took me to the pharmacy when we arrived back in Paris. I bought:
- Brexin [anti-inflammatory] (1 tablet to be taken each morning for 10 days)
- DiAntalvic (2 to 4 tablets a day in case of pain)
- A bottle of iodine and a packet of 100 sterile swabs (I have to do my intimate toilet 4 times a day with dilute iodine and the swabs and rinse thoroughly afterwards)
- A packet of soft cotton sanitary towels
Then he took me to devour an enormous entrecote steak. With loads of chips [fries]. To make me forget the depressing, and rather light as far as portion size was concerned, food in the clinic.
When I switched my mobile phone back on, I had a message from my mother who wanted to know if I had returned home and who repeated that she was 100% behind me. I called her back, I was really happy to chat with her. I told her about my room mate, about the delicious steak I had just eaten, my treatments … Before ringing off, she thanked my man for looking after me so well. It gave me great pleasure to feel her so nearby. It was lovely. I felt soothed when I rang off.
I also called my cousin. I had all the same had time to ask Dr Foldès how women living abroad could proceed in order to benefit from the operation. In reality it’s quite simple: all that’s necessary is to have insurance which covers overseas and which will pay for the operation. She need therefore to come to be examined by Dr Foldès who will give an estimate to be sent to the insurance company. As soon as they agree, she can make an appointment for the operation.
My cousin was delighted. So was I.
So that’s how these important days went by. I am happy to have set down the details here. For me, for other circumcised women, for my children later on, for the whole world in fact. Yes, I am happy. Even if I found the exercise curiously difficult …
[Original in French]
Next post
When I opened my eyes I was in a bed in another room. And I was in terrible pain. I cried, saying “It hurts” again and again and the nurse, who, two minutes before had confirmed that “no, I wouldn’t be in pain” (when I think back I'm totally on edge again), put me on a drip to relieve the pain.
I believe the operation took around twenty minutes and the anaesthetic approximately an hour.
I don’t remember the trip back to my room very well, it was as though I was in cotton wool. My room mate wasn’t there. I don’t remember her returning. I was dozing, I felt very tired, I was in pain …
I remember however my room mate demanding something to eat and the explanations from the nurses (we had to wait several hours before eating, the time taken for the anaesthetic to wear off completely, for fear of suffocating from swallowing the wrong way). And I remember also the nurse taking my blood pressure 3 or 4 times during the day.
The first of my circle to show themselves was my man. He came to see me around 4 pm, just when we were brought our tea (stewed apple, two butter biscuits and a madeleine). I was so happy to see him that I cried when he left.
Then I received my phone calls. My best friend first. Then my cousin. Then my mother. I had given her the clinic’s number but I didn’t think she’d phone me.
I still don’t know exactly what I felt when I heard her, but there was some relief in any case, and also pleasure. She asked me lots of questions, how it went, how I felt, was I in pain, when would I be leaving etc. … She told me to make sure I explained the whole sequence to her as soon as I returned home. That really pleased me that my mother was interested in me like that, it touched me. It’s rather new for me.
My mother then passed me over to my father who had just come home. He still had his distant tone, embarrassed. He didn’t speak to me much, just asked how I was, I think. There too, I don’t remember the words we exchanged well. I didn’t want to speak to him, I held it against him, his tone of voice, this distance that I felt, this rigidity.
To say that I was afraid he would give me a hard time, I found his near-indifference worse in the end. I am disappointed when I think of my father. Disappointed and angry.
The night was difficult, I took a long time to go to sleep, unlike my room mate. I was in pain, in spite of the painkillers which a nurse brought to me. I wanted to pee but I dare not, I was afraid of even more pain. And then there was this giant sanitary towel which irritated me too.
Next morning I was impatient again. I wanted to go home. Quickly. A nurse came to tell us that Dr Foldès was coming to see us and we had to wait to see him before we could leave the clinic.
While waiting, I chatted a bit with my room mate. She was 36 and had 4 children by an unhappy first marriage. The operation, in her case, was because she felt sexually frustrated. And also because she was afraid of her second husband leaving her if she weren’t more “playful” in bed. She told me that each time she gave birth or each time she saw a gynaecologist, she asked in vain, if it were possible to do something for her and her total absence of pleasure. She had heard about Dr Foldès on television and called him next day to make an appointment.
The doctor came by in a gust of wind. He gave us, my room mate and me, a prescription and a leaflet entitled “Immediate after effects of surgery to repair the clitoris”. Then he signed me off work until 25 May. He then explained to us very rapidly the care we should take, and then left again. I didn’t have time to write down what he said, I didn’t have time to tell him that I was in more pain on the left side of my sex than on the right, I didn’t have time to ask him if it was normal.
Before leaving he told us to call in three weeks to find out which days he was consulting and to turn up without an appointment on a day he would be there.
A few minutes later, after a call from the clinic’s reception, I went down (at the speed of a tortoise and that still gave me plenty of pain) paid the excess charge of 300 euros for the surgeon and the 9 euros that the telephone and television cost me.
My man arrived just when the young woman at the reception gave me a slip for the patient to sign, a hospitalisation slip, each with three copies (one for me, one for social security and one for the insurance company).
I was in an excellent mood, I chirruped with my love on the stairs on the stairs while going back up to collect my bag. I couldn’t stop myself smiling I was so happy. I wanted to hug everyone. The atmosphere was strange though. The clinic was very quiet on this holiday Thursday [Ascension Day], I had the impression that nobody was there apart from the young woman in reception and Dr Foldès’ patients who were walking around the corridors (I recognised them by their way of walking, so like mine).
I came across one on the stairs as I went down again. I smiled at her but she had a glum air which I didn’t understand. Life was so beautiful, how was it possible to be so sad?
My man took me to the pharmacy when we arrived back in Paris. I bought:
- Brexin [anti-inflammatory] (1 tablet to be taken each morning for 10 days)
- DiAntalvic (2 to 4 tablets a day in case of pain)
- A bottle of iodine and a packet of 100 sterile swabs (I have to do my intimate toilet 4 times a day with dilute iodine and the swabs and rinse thoroughly afterwards)
- A packet of soft cotton sanitary towels
Then he took me to devour an enormous entrecote steak. With loads of chips [fries]. To make me forget the depressing, and rather light as far as portion size was concerned, food in the clinic.
When I switched my mobile phone back on, I had a message from my mother who wanted to know if I had returned home and who repeated that she was 100% behind me. I called her back, I was really happy to chat with her. I told her about my room mate, about the delicious steak I had just eaten, my treatments … Before ringing off, she thanked my man for looking after me so well. It gave me great pleasure to feel her so nearby. It was lovely. I felt soothed when I rang off.
I also called my cousin. I had all the same had time to ask Dr Foldès how women living abroad could proceed in order to benefit from the operation. In reality it’s quite simple: all that’s necessary is to have insurance which covers overseas and which will pay for the operation. She need therefore to come to be examined by Dr Foldès who will give an estimate to be sent to the insurance company. As soon as they agree, she can make an appointment for the operation.
My cousin was delighted. So was I.
So that’s how these important days went by. I am happy to have set down the details here. For me, for other circumcised women, for my children later on, for the whole world in fact. Yes, I am happy. Even if I found the exercise curiously difficult …
[Original in French]
Next post
Saturday, 20 May 2006
The most important day
Sunday 20 May 2007
In spite of the sedative I swallowed, I opened my eyes very early on Wednesday morning. I don’t know the exact time but it was still dark outside.
My eyes open in the dark, I tried to work out the time I would go into the operating theatre. A nurse I had asked told me that they wouldn’t know till the next morning, that Dr Foldès started operating at 9:30 and that he had lots of patients.
I told myself that, having arrived the night before, I would no doubt be amongst the first, or at least before the ones arriving in the morning.
I was delighted when around 8 o’clock, a nurse came to tell me to go and take my shower. She brought me a little tumbler on which my name was written in ink., followed by “8:30”. In the tumbler there was a tablet like the one I had taken the night before and also a large effervescent tablet. She told me I had to take them, with a very small amount of water, when I returned from the shower, “even if I didn’t need a sedative” according to her.
It was with a big smile and very happy that I left the room, at the same time as my neighbour arrived. I was no doubt going to be operated on soon. If not the effect of the sedative would no doubt end up wearing off.
Returning from the shower, I dressed again in the dark blue garment which had been given to me the night before. (a sort of shirt to put on “backwards”, with your buttocks in the breeze) then I took the medications then I lay down on my bed and didn’t get up again, following the nurses instructions. She had explained that I would feel light-headed a little after taking the pills and I mustn’t take the risk of falling.
The minutes passed and my impatience grew. Impatience is really the word which characterised the morning of 16 May.
My room mate, in a blue shirt too, a tumbler on which was written “9:30” in front of her, smiled at me hesitantly. Then she asked me if I too were going to be operated on “down there”. When I agreed, she started to explain to me that she had never had any pleasure. Not an ounce. I didn’t know what to reply. I believe in fact that I didn’t want to reply. I was impatient for someone to come and fetch me. She asked where I came from, I asked her her first name, we smiled, then we were exhausted.
Around 10 o’clock a young man in blue pyjamas and a shower cap on his head came to fetch me. I left my bed to get on the stretcher he had brought. He covered me in a blue sheet then took me away. He was funny, he made jokes in the metal left which we took to the unit, two floors down.
I waited some minutes in a sort of antechamber, under a sort of survival blanket, with a shower cap on my head. It was cold. And my joy gently descended. I was almost there. I felt I was floating a bit.
Arriving in Unit 2, I was put on a funny table like the ones for gynaecological examinations, with stirrups at the end. Here the stirrups were made for your feet but also to support your calves. Correctly placed, I had my back on the table, my buttocks in the open, my legs slightly bent and my arms crossed, laid on some sort of armrests.
A nurse arrived to fix a machine to take my blood pressure on my right arm. Covering me, (it was really cold) she looked at me and then asked if I were worried. With a tiny little voice I said “Yes” before correcting “actually I’m upset I think”. “Everything will be all right” she replied rapidly before leaving the room.
I wasn’t sad but I wanted to cry. Minutes passed on the big white clock which I could see in the corridor. I asked myself vaguely whether, in the end, Dr Foldès hadn’t had an accident while coming in that morning.
Then, at about 10:15, Dr Iceberg arrived to give me the anaesthetic. “We’ve met before,” he said. “Yes I remember you,” I replied. He put a drip in my left arm, a sophisticated thing with two entry points, surrounded by an enormous sticking plaster. He then left to confer with other people in the corridor.
During this time, tears were welling in my eyes, overflowed, and started to run down my cheeks.
The arrival of Dr Foldès in the unit around 10:30 made my heart leap. He was there, alive, smiling, he was going to operate on me. THE moment which I had been waiting for for so long had arrived. It was like a miracle. I could no longer hold back my tears.
“Ah Miss XXX! So we are going to repair your clitoris and also…” He didn’t finish his sentence as if to verify what we had agreed. “We are repairing the labia minora too,” I hurried to say. “Yes, I’m going to find the product” he declared, leaving the room.
As soon as he left, Dr Icefield started to inject the colourless contents of a syringe into my drip. He also injected the milky contents of two other syringes, then put a mask on my face, asking me to breathe in it. “You’re going to sleep,” he told me.
I remember having a strange feeling in my head. Like tickling. Then I was suddenly asleep.
(to be continued. The story being quite long, I’ve divided it into several parts. The next tomorrow. Promise)
[Original in French]
Next post
In spite of the sedative I swallowed, I opened my eyes very early on Wednesday morning. I don’t know the exact time but it was still dark outside.
My eyes open in the dark, I tried to work out the time I would go into the operating theatre. A nurse I had asked told me that they wouldn’t know till the next morning, that Dr Foldès started operating at 9:30 and that he had lots of patients.
I told myself that, having arrived the night before, I would no doubt be amongst the first, or at least before the ones arriving in the morning.
I was delighted when around 8 o’clock, a nurse came to tell me to go and take my shower. She brought me a little tumbler on which my name was written in ink., followed by “8:30”. In the tumbler there was a tablet like the one I had taken the night before and also a large effervescent tablet. She told me I had to take them, with a very small amount of water, when I returned from the shower, “even if I didn’t need a sedative” according to her.
It was with a big smile and very happy that I left the room, at the same time as my neighbour arrived. I was no doubt going to be operated on soon. If not the effect of the sedative would no doubt end up wearing off.
Returning from the shower, I dressed again in the dark blue garment which had been given to me the night before. (a sort of shirt to put on “backwards”, with your buttocks in the breeze) then I took the medications then I lay down on my bed and didn’t get up again, following the nurses instructions. She had explained that I would feel light-headed a little after taking the pills and I mustn’t take the risk of falling.
The minutes passed and my impatience grew. Impatience is really the word which characterised the morning of 16 May.
My room mate, in a blue shirt too, a tumbler on which was written “9:30” in front of her, smiled at me hesitantly. Then she asked me if I too were going to be operated on “down there”. When I agreed, she started to explain to me that she had never had any pleasure. Not an ounce. I didn’t know what to reply. I believe in fact that I didn’t want to reply. I was impatient for someone to come and fetch me. She asked where I came from, I asked her her first name, we smiled, then we were exhausted.
Around 10 o’clock a young man in blue pyjamas and a shower cap on his head came to fetch me. I left my bed to get on the stretcher he had brought. He covered me in a blue sheet then took me away. He was funny, he made jokes in the metal left which we took to the unit, two floors down.
I waited some minutes in a sort of antechamber, under a sort of survival blanket, with a shower cap on my head. It was cold. And my joy gently descended. I was almost there. I felt I was floating a bit.
Arriving in Unit 2, I was put on a funny table like the ones for gynaecological examinations, with stirrups at the end. Here the stirrups were made for your feet but also to support your calves. Correctly placed, I had my back on the table, my buttocks in the open, my legs slightly bent and my arms crossed, laid on some sort of armrests.
A nurse arrived to fix a machine to take my blood pressure on my right arm. Covering me, (it was really cold) she looked at me and then asked if I were worried. With a tiny little voice I said “Yes” before correcting “actually I’m upset I think”. “Everything will be all right” she replied rapidly before leaving the room.
I wasn’t sad but I wanted to cry. Minutes passed on the big white clock which I could see in the corridor. I asked myself vaguely whether, in the end, Dr Foldès hadn’t had an accident while coming in that morning.
Then, at about 10:15, Dr Iceberg arrived to give me the anaesthetic. “We’ve met before,” he said. “Yes I remember you,” I replied. He put a drip in my left arm, a sophisticated thing with two entry points, surrounded by an enormous sticking plaster. He then left to confer with other people in the corridor.
During this time, tears were welling in my eyes, overflowed, and started to run down my cheeks.
The arrival of Dr Foldès in the unit around 10:30 made my heart leap. He was there, alive, smiling, he was going to operate on me. THE moment which I had been waiting for for so long had arrived. It was like a miracle. I could no longer hold back my tears.
“Ah Miss XXX! So we are going to repair your clitoris and also…” He didn’t finish his sentence as if to verify what we had agreed. “We are repairing the labia minora too,” I hurried to say. “Yes, I’m going to find the product” he declared, leaving the room.
As soon as he left, Dr Icefield started to inject the colourless contents of a syringe into my drip. He also injected the milky contents of two other syringes, then put a mask on my face, asking me to breathe in it. “You’re going to sleep,” he told me.
I remember having a strange feeling in my head. Like tickling. Then I was suddenly asleep.
(to be continued. The story being quite long, I’ve divided it into several parts. The next tomorrow. Promise)
[Original in French]
Next post
Thursday, 18 May 2006
Pre-operative ebullition
Friday 18 May 2007
It was in the rain that I set off for the Louis XIV Clinic, on Tuesday afternoon. In the rain and fairly serene. I was smiling, I was happy and calm. It was finally happening, the wait was over. I was no longer thinking about my mother’s call, I was thinking only of this miracle which was really happening and my heart was sparkling. I felt as though I were on holiday.
On the RER which was taking me to Saint Germain en Laye, I had two surprising telephone conversations: first my father called me. Strangely, I can’t remember much of what he said to me. As a conversation, it was very desultory. And his tone was neutral, detached, which surprised and unsettled me. At one point it even came to mind that he was talking to me as if I were just going to have my wisdom teeth removed, without any particular emotion.
He first of all asked me how I was . Then he said that my mother had called him to talk to him about my operation and the letter. He told me he still hadn’t read it but he was counting on doing so as soon as he arrived home on Wednesday evening. He told me of my mother’s deception, of not being able to be at my side, told me that it was a pity that I had let them know so late, that she would have come to look after me if she had known sooner. He said he thought I was in good hands and wished me luck.
The whole conversation I held my breath, I was very uneasy and I gave him my habitual “standard issue responses” reassuring and automatic. I wasn’t at all frightened. Nevertheless, I had one feeling of urgency: to hang up. And it was with relief that I thanked him for calling when he said he’d better let me go.
Then my cousin called. I had spoken to her about my call from my mother the evening before. I told her I wasn’t sure whether to believe her. Her response surprised me: she said that it was very possible that my mother hadn’t participated in the organisation of our circumcision, since she had no say. “The poor thing, what would you expect her to do apart from submit to your grandmother’s wishes” she said.
It’s true that in Senegalese culture, a woman has a certain authority over her daughter in law, who owes her respect and obedience, and also over her grandchildren. So had my mother told me the truth? Had my paternal grandmother been the sole instigator of the butchery?
My cousin confirmed that my father himself had truly slavered (but I still don’t know what that means exactly). [in French you can faire baver de rage, jalousie etc but it sounds really odd in English and I can’t think of an equivalent - A.] While walking to the clinic, I asked myself if my father himself had a grudge against my mother because he really believed she was in league with my grandmother, or if it was because she had done nothing to prevent my grandmother from mutilating us, because she hadn’t protected us …
And then I arrived at the clinic and there I could think of nothing other than my relief at being there. I didn’t die on the way, the clinic hadn’t burnt down, it had really happened, I was going to have the operation….
I was put into a double room. I had asked for a telephone, not being allowed to use my mobile, and television, but I hadn’t particularly wanted to be in a single room. The very young male nurse who took me to my room told me the other bed would be occupied by another of Dr Foldès’ patients who would arrive next morning.
He had me fill in a form about my possessions (had I a mobile phone with me? A credit card? A cheque book? What was the number of the last cheque used? Did I have a digital camera? My papers? etc…) before asking me if I wanted to put anything in the safe, which I didn’t.
His questions gave me the feeling of having landed in some sort of no-go area, and that must have shown on my face because he assured me that there had been practically no incidents at the clinic, the questionnaire was simply a precaution, just in case. That reassured me only a little.
After the form, he verified that I was wearing no nail varnish, or jewellery (I had to leave my silver bracelets at home and without them I felt really quite strange). Then he mumbled, blushed deeply, and asked me very quickly if I had had all my body hair removed.
He showed me the showers, situated outside my room and told me I had to take a shower that evening before going to bed, and again next morning when a nurse came to wake me up. He showed me the iodine with which I had to wash myself meticulously, from head to toe twice, especially my hair, nostrils, nails (feet and hands), navel and the urogenital and anal regions.
When I returned to my room I had a visit from another nurse, who came to give me what looked like giant sanitary towels “for after the operation”. That worried me. Was I going to bleed a lot?
Then the duty anaesthetist that night came to my room. It was a woman with a Nordic accent. She told me that I would be given a sedative tablet that evening and another next morning. She asked me if I had any questions, to which I answered, no.
I felt lonely in that room. I phoned my man, then the meal arrived: vegetable soup, a portion of quiche and green salad mixed with quarters of tomato, bread, spreading cheese, and, for dessert, a yoghurt. That made me even more depressed, that dinner.
I read and watched television, then at about 20:30 I went to take my evening shower.
And that’s when I discovered the big difference between a room in a clinic and a room in a hotel: towels are not provided. Worse: they have none at all. I therefore had to dry myself with a sheet kindly lent to me by a night nurse, before putting my nightdress back on, and going to bed, my pill swallowed.
I felt a bit sad all the same, on Tuesday evening.
Sad and very impatient for Wednesday. To be finished at last.
(to be continued)
[Original in French]
Next post
It was in the rain that I set off for the Louis XIV Clinic, on Tuesday afternoon. In the rain and fairly serene. I was smiling, I was happy and calm. It was finally happening, the wait was over. I was no longer thinking about my mother’s call, I was thinking only of this miracle which was really happening and my heart was sparkling. I felt as though I were on holiday.
On the RER which was taking me to Saint Germain en Laye, I had two surprising telephone conversations: first my father called me. Strangely, I can’t remember much of what he said to me. As a conversation, it was very desultory. And his tone was neutral, detached, which surprised and unsettled me. At one point it even came to mind that he was talking to me as if I were just going to have my wisdom teeth removed, without any particular emotion.
He first of all asked me how I was . Then he said that my mother had called him to talk to him about my operation and the letter. He told me he still hadn’t read it but he was counting on doing so as soon as he arrived home on Wednesday evening. He told me of my mother’s deception, of not being able to be at my side, told me that it was a pity that I had let them know so late, that she would have come to look after me if she had known sooner. He said he thought I was in good hands and wished me luck.
The whole conversation I held my breath, I was very uneasy and I gave him my habitual “standard issue responses” reassuring and automatic. I wasn’t at all frightened. Nevertheless, I had one feeling of urgency: to hang up. And it was with relief that I thanked him for calling when he said he’d better let me go.
Then my cousin called. I had spoken to her about my call from my mother the evening before. I told her I wasn’t sure whether to believe her. Her response surprised me: she said that it was very possible that my mother hadn’t participated in the organisation of our circumcision, since she had no say. “The poor thing, what would you expect her to do apart from submit to your grandmother’s wishes” she said.
It’s true that in Senegalese culture, a woman has a certain authority over her daughter in law, who owes her respect and obedience, and also over her grandchildren. So had my mother told me the truth? Had my paternal grandmother been the sole instigator of the butchery?
My cousin confirmed that my father himself had truly slavered (but I still don’t know what that means exactly). [in French you can faire baver de rage, jalousie etc but it sounds really odd in English and I can’t think of an equivalent - A.] While walking to the clinic, I asked myself if my father himself had a grudge against my mother because he really believed she was in league with my grandmother, or if it was because she had done nothing to prevent my grandmother from mutilating us, because she hadn’t protected us …
And then I arrived at the clinic and there I could think of nothing other than my relief at being there. I didn’t die on the way, the clinic hadn’t burnt down, it had really happened, I was going to have the operation….
I was put into a double room. I had asked for a telephone, not being allowed to use my mobile, and television, but I hadn’t particularly wanted to be in a single room. The very young male nurse who took me to my room told me the other bed would be occupied by another of Dr Foldès’ patients who would arrive next morning.
He had me fill in a form about my possessions (had I a mobile phone with me? A credit card? A cheque book? What was the number of the last cheque used? Did I have a digital camera? My papers? etc…) before asking me if I wanted to put anything in the safe, which I didn’t.
His questions gave me the feeling of having landed in some sort of no-go area, and that must have shown on my face because he assured me that there had been practically no incidents at the clinic, the questionnaire was simply a precaution, just in case. That reassured me only a little.
After the form, he verified that I was wearing no nail varnish, or jewellery (I had to leave my silver bracelets at home and without them I felt really quite strange). Then he mumbled, blushed deeply, and asked me very quickly if I had had all my body hair removed.
He showed me the showers, situated outside my room and told me I had to take a shower that evening before going to bed, and again next morning when a nurse came to wake me up. He showed me the iodine with which I had to wash myself meticulously, from head to toe twice, especially my hair, nostrils, nails (feet and hands), navel and the urogenital and anal regions.
When I returned to my room I had a visit from another nurse, who came to give me what looked like giant sanitary towels “for after the operation”. That worried me. Was I going to bleed a lot?
Then the duty anaesthetist that night came to my room. It was a woman with a Nordic accent. She told me that I would be given a sedative tablet that evening and another next morning. She asked me if I had any questions, to which I answered, no.
I felt lonely in that room. I phoned my man, then the meal arrived: vegetable soup, a portion of quiche and green salad mixed with quarters of tomato, bread, spreading cheese, and, for dessert, a yoghurt. That made me even more depressed, that dinner.
I read and watched television, then at about 20:30 I went to take my evening shower.
And that’s when I discovered the big difference between a room in a clinic and a room in a hotel: towels are not provided. Worse: they have none at all. I therefore had to dry myself with a sheet kindly lent to me by a night nurse, before putting my nightdress back on, and going to bed, my pill swallowed.
I felt a bit sad all the same, on Tuesday evening.
Sad and very impatient for Wednesday. To be finished at last.
(to be continued)
[Original in French]
Next post
After the rain
18 May 2007
There it is, I can finally sit down sufficiently long without suffering to write a post.
I’VE HAD MY OPERATION! THAT’S IT! I’VE HAD MY OPERATION! YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
My God but I’m happy! If I could, I would dance from relief and joy.
But I can’t, it hurts when I move. Less than yesterday but all the same, it’s killing me. I’ve often read that after the operation, you don’t feel any pain, hardly any bother. Today I am in a position to state that it’s not necessarily true for everyone. For example, in my case, painkillers have recently become my best friends.
I can’t yet celebrate the event with champagne, my best friends instruct me to wait a bit, so I will tell you what has happened since Tuesday morning and my last post since before the Big Bang…
[Original in French]
Next post
There it is, I can finally sit down sufficiently long without suffering to write a post.
I’VE HAD MY OPERATION! THAT’S IT! I’VE HAD MY OPERATION! YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
My God but I’m happy! If I could, I would dance from relief and joy.
But I can’t, it hurts when I move. Less than yesterday but all the same, it’s killing me. I’ve often read that after the operation, you don’t feel any pain, hardly any bother. Today I am in a position to state that it’s not necessarily true for everyone. For example, in my case, painkillers have recently become my best friends.
I can’t yet celebrate the event with champagne, my best friends instruct me to wait a bit, so I will tell you what has happened since Tuesday morning and my last post since before the Big Bang…
[Original in French]
Next post
Monday, 15 May 2006
The incredible call
Tuesday 15 May
Yesterday evening, on the dot of 9 pm, my mother called me.
When I picked up the phone and recognised her voice, I felt enormously surprised and also, I think, relief. But not fear, anger, or sorrow. On the contrary, I was happy she called.
She said she had received my letter.
She told me she recognised the writing on the envelope, that she was afraid that I was writing to tell her of a catastrophe and that as a result she read it all at once.
In one way it pleased me that she said she was happy that I had written to her, that she understood the step I was taking, that it was my body and that it was important for me to speak to them about this operation. It touched me that she was disappointed I hadn’t spoken to her about it earlier and that she was sorry not to be able to be there with me tomorrow. Her questions on the progress of the operation and about the consultations with the surgeon and anaesthetist did me good. I liked it when she asked me for the clinic’s telephone number and said she would phone me there tomorrow evening. It warmed my heart when she said she would be thinking of me.
But there was this other part of the conversation. This part where she gave me another version of what had happened. The minutes when she said that she had nothing to do with the circumcisions of my sister or myself, that it was my paternal grandmother who had planned it all in secret, in the absence of my father who had left for Dakar (and not to look for my cousin as she herself had told me).
She told me that, on that morning, when she came to look for us in my grandmother’s hut where we were sleeping, my sister and myself, she hadn’t found us, that she asked my grandmother where we were and that she had said we had been sent to the circumciser.
She told me that it wasn’t something that was done in her own village, that her own mother had never done anything as abominable to her.
My mother told me that my father had never believed her, that he had always believed she had participated in this ignominy, and that during that year and well after she had suffered badly.
At the time I didn’t believe her.
I didn’t say anything, but I thought she was lying to me, that she wasn’t innocent. I don’t know, when she was talking to me she wasn’t crying, there wasn’t really any emotion in her voice. And in particular, she didn’t talk about me. She didn’t say that it made her feel as though we had been sent to the abattoir. She didn’t speak about when she saw me again afterwards. She didn’t tell me about her pain that I had been circumcised. I found that bizarre. I listened well, I felt nothing. In fact it was as if my excision was divorced from her, she was just wrongly accused of having participated in it. It was very strange. I had the impression that the drama for her was having been wrongly accused and not the fact that we had been circumcised, my sister and myself.
This morning, in the cold light of day … well I don’t know what to believe any more, if what she said to me is the truth. She told me, yesterday evening, that I was like her, that I had this reserve which prevents me from expressing my emotions (it’s confusing, my father told me basically the same thing, several years ago, but finding a similarity with himself). If that’s so, yesterday evening was it that her emotions didn’t show in her speech because she’s so much in the habit of not showing them? And in fairness, why would she lie to me?
Honestly, I don’t know what to think about it, I am focused on my going to the clinic soon so I think I’ll put it to one side for the moment.
Yesterday evening she told me that she had called my father who is away until Wednesday evening, to let him know that he too had received a letter, no doubt the same.
I don’t know if she made him aware of the contents but he said he would phone on his return, after he had read it.
I’d very much like to hear his version of the story, I hope he will speak to me about it…
[Original in French]
Next post
Yesterday evening, on the dot of 9 pm, my mother called me.
When I picked up the phone and recognised her voice, I felt enormously surprised and also, I think, relief. But not fear, anger, or sorrow. On the contrary, I was happy she called.
She said she had received my letter.
She told me she recognised the writing on the envelope, that she was afraid that I was writing to tell her of a catastrophe and that as a result she read it all at once.
In one way it pleased me that she said she was happy that I had written to her, that she understood the step I was taking, that it was my body and that it was important for me to speak to them about this operation. It touched me that she was disappointed I hadn’t spoken to her about it earlier and that she was sorry not to be able to be there with me tomorrow. Her questions on the progress of the operation and about the consultations with the surgeon and anaesthetist did me good. I liked it when she asked me for the clinic’s telephone number and said she would phone me there tomorrow evening. It warmed my heart when she said she would be thinking of me.
But there was this other part of the conversation. This part where she gave me another version of what had happened. The minutes when she said that she had nothing to do with the circumcisions of my sister or myself, that it was my paternal grandmother who had planned it all in secret, in the absence of my father who had left for Dakar (and not to look for my cousin as she herself had told me).
She told me that, on that morning, when she came to look for us in my grandmother’s hut where we were sleeping, my sister and myself, she hadn’t found us, that she asked my grandmother where we were and that she had said we had been sent to the circumciser.
She told me that it wasn’t something that was done in her own village, that her own mother had never done anything as abominable to her.
My mother told me that my father had never believed her, that he had always believed she had participated in this ignominy, and that during that year and well after she had suffered badly.
At the time I didn’t believe her.
I didn’t say anything, but I thought she was lying to me, that she wasn’t innocent. I don’t know, when she was talking to me she wasn’t crying, there wasn’t really any emotion in her voice. And in particular, she didn’t talk about me. She didn’t say that it made her feel as though we had been sent to the abattoir. She didn’t speak about when she saw me again afterwards. She didn’t tell me about her pain that I had been circumcised. I found that bizarre. I listened well, I felt nothing. In fact it was as if my excision was divorced from her, she was just wrongly accused of having participated in it. It was very strange. I had the impression that the drama for her was having been wrongly accused and not the fact that we had been circumcised, my sister and myself.
This morning, in the cold light of day … well I don’t know what to believe any more, if what she said to me is the truth. She told me, yesterday evening, that I was like her, that I had this reserve which prevents me from expressing my emotions (it’s confusing, my father told me basically the same thing, several years ago, but finding a similarity with himself). If that’s so, yesterday evening was it that her emotions didn’t show in her speech because she’s so much in the habit of not showing them? And in fairness, why would she lie to me?
Honestly, I don’t know what to think about it, I am focused on my going to the clinic soon so I think I’ll put it to one side for the moment.
Yesterday evening she told me that she had called my father who is away until Wednesday evening, to let him know that he too had received a letter, no doubt the same.
I don’t know if she made him aware of the contents but he said he would phone on his return, after he had read it.
I’d very much like to hear his version of the story, I hope he will speak to me about it…
[Original in French]
Next post
Sunday, 14 May 2006
At last
Monday 14 May 2007
I have had cold feet since yesterday. And then pins and needles in my legs. In other words I have been constantly afraid since Wednesday appeared on the horizon.
It’s afternoon. I will have my operation the day after tomorrow. I can hardly believe it. The day after tomorrow. Already.
I no have the feeling that time is flying. I’m afraid, but it’s not painful like anxiety. In truth I’m holding my breath as if not to break the spell, as if in front of something fragile. I especially must not whatever comes to upset the progress of the remaining days. So, I can’t sleep the whole night any more, my eyes are firmly fixed on 16 May which is no longer a mirage but remains a fragile miracle which I haven’t yet reached.
In secret (because you mustn’t tempt fate) I am nevertheless starting to rejoice. My God! It’s here! I’m going to have my operation. It’s here, it’s a reality! I’m going to take the plunge and the day after tomorrow, I’ll no longer be the person I am today. I will be enriched. I am going to rediscover my clitoris. Really. I am totally excited, totally happy. I have a big smile which I can’t manage to suppress….
I also want to cry. Emotion no doubt. Because I’m not sad. What’s making tears come to my eyes is that I’m allowed to hope something magnificent. And that it’s going to happen. It’s the first time I believe …
I am almost ready. In my head I’ve listed all I need to take with me:
- my nightgown
- my toiletries
- two books and a magazine
- a skirt and a pretty top for leaving the clinic on Thursday
- two pairs of pants and a bra
- an notebook and a pen
- the lucky charm which one of the therapists from the Saturday group sessions gave me.
I have removed my nail varnish and I have shaved myself. Those two things are necessary and required by the clinic. Besides, several young women who have already had the operation kindly told me about them.
All the same, I had a bit of a block at the idea of having to remove all the hairs from my sex. I didn’t know how I would manage it. A young woman who had the operation, of whom I asked the question, told me the nurses could do it at the clinic, but I didn’t want to entrust them with this intimate task. I neither wanted to shave myself (and what if I cut myself?) nor use a depilatory cream (what if I burnt my mucous membranes?). Finally I got myself completely depilated by a beautician. I didn’t feel overcome by modesty in front of her (contrary to what I expected) and it wasn’t too painful. My only regret will be not to have been able to “prepare” my body myself.
I now have the sex of a little girl, all smooth, all delicate, without the barrier of hair to protect it, and that disturbs me. I can’t stop thinking that the circle is complete and that I am going to present myself at the clinic as I was on that black day when I was four. It’s a strange sensation. Not really sadness, but a little all the same…
Time becomes solemn, serious, symbolic. And nevertheless, I want to dance …
It’s the day after tomorrow. At last ….
[original in French]
Next post
I have had cold feet since yesterday. And then pins and needles in my legs. In other words I have been constantly afraid since Wednesday appeared on the horizon.
It’s afternoon. I will have my operation the day after tomorrow. I can hardly believe it. The day after tomorrow. Already.
I no have the feeling that time is flying. I’m afraid, but it’s not painful like anxiety. In truth I’m holding my breath as if not to break the spell, as if in front of something fragile. I especially must not whatever comes to upset the progress of the remaining days. So, I can’t sleep the whole night any more, my eyes are firmly fixed on 16 May which is no longer a mirage but remains a fragile miracle which I haven’t yet reached.
In secret (because you mustn’t tempt fate) I am nevertheless starting to rejoice. My God! It’s here! I’m going to have my operation. It’s here, it’s a reality! I’m going to take the plunge and the day after tomorrow, I’ll no longer be the person I am today. I will be enriched. I am going to rediscover my clitoris. Really. I am totally excited, totally happy. I have a big smile which I can’t manage to suppress….
I also want to cry. Emotion no doubt. Because I’m not sad. What’s making tears come to my eyes is that I’m allowed to hope something magnificent. And that it’s going to happen. It’s the first time I believe …
I am almost ready. In my head I’ve listed all I need to take with me:
- my nightgown
- my toiletries
- two books and a magazine
- a skirt and a pretty top for leaving the clinic on Thursday
- two pairs of pants and a bra
- an notebook and a pen
- the lucky charm which one of the therapists from the Saturday group sessions gave me.
I have removed my nail varnish and I have shaved myself. Those two things are necessary and required by the clinic. Besides, several young women who have already had the operation kindly told me about them.
All the same, I had a bit of a block at the idea of having to remove all the hairs from my sex. I didn’t know how I would manage it. A young woman who had the operation, of whom I asked the question, told me the nurses could do it at the clinic, but I didn’t want to entrust them with this intimate task. I neither wanted to shave myself (and what if I cut myself?) nor use a depilatory cream (what if I burnt my mucous membranes?). Finally I got myself completely depilated by a beautician. I didn’t feel overcome by modesty in front of her (contrary to what I expected) and it wasn’t too painful. My only regret will be not to have been able to “prepare” my body myself.
I now have the sex of a little girl, all smooth, all delicate, without the barrier of hair to protect it, and that disturbs me. I can’t stop thinking that the circle is complete and that I am going to present myself at the clinic as I was on that black day when I was four. It’s a strange sensation. Not really sadness, but a little all the same…
Time becomes solemn, serious, symbolic. And nevertheless, I want to dance …
It’s the day after tomorrow. At last ….
[original in French]
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Friday, 12 May 2006
Alea jacta est
Friday 11 May 2007
Finally I wrote to my parents to tell them I was going to have the operation. I needed them to know, both of them. It’s too big a step in my life. To let the operation pass in silence is like letting everything which has changed for me over the last months pass in silence. I need them to know who I am, that they know about the important event which the operation is for me.
Besides, I have this strange conviction that if I don’t speak to them BEFORE the operation, it will no longer be possible. I feel that afterwards I won’t talk about it. That would seem a bit like a confession and I have nothing to confess. I don’t want my reconstruction to be a secret that I will reveal to them one day after some years.
And also I’d like to break my habit of keeping them at a distance, I'd like to become a little closer to them.
I discussed this with my man and I decided to address the letter to both of them. I thought all day yesterday about what I was going to write. Nevertheless, when I set about it yesterday evening I had great difficulty in starting it, this letter.
I went round in circles for several hours, I started several drafts but I discarded them one after the other: I had the feeling I was justifying myself, looking for their approval, or even worse, minimising the importance of the operation for me.
So I thought about what I really wanted to say to them, in my letter, that is to say I loved them. And there, it came all by itself and I wrote my letter in one go, without any difficulty.
I am frankly happy with what I have written. In fact I have sent, perhaps for the first time, an adult letter to my parents.
I copied it out twice. I certainly wanted to address my words to both my parents at the same time, but I wanted each to receive a copy.
This morning, before going to work, I posted my letters. Normally they should arrive before 16 May.
At the time I felt happy, liberated. I even thought, “This time I have finished my preparations”.
But since then, I have become afraid of my father’s reaction. It’s ridiculous I know, but I can’t stop myself thinking that he is going to be terribly angry with me. As for my mother, I don’t think she will talk about it. But basically, his reaction matters little, here, this evening.
In spite of my fear, I have no regrets. The letters are posted and the die is cast.
[Original in French]
Next post
Finally I wrote to my parents to tell them I was going to have the operation. I needed them to know, both of them. It’s too big a step in my life. To let the operation pass in silence is like letting everything which has changed for me over the last months pass in silence. I need them to know who I am, that they know about the important event which the operation is for me.
Besides, I have this strange conviction that if I don’t speak to them BEFORE the operation, it will no longer be possible. I feel that afterwards I won’t talk about it. That would seem a bit like a confession and I have nothing to confess. I don’t want my reconstruction to be a secret that I will reveal to them one day after some years.
And also I’d like to break my habit of keeping them at a distance, I'd like to become a little closer to them.
I discussed this with my man and I decided to address the letter to both of them. I thought all day yesterday about what I was going to write. Nevertheless, when I set about it yesterday evening I had great difficulty in starting it, this letter.
I went round in circles for several hours, I started several drafts but I discarded them one after the other: I had the feeling I was justifying myself, looking for their approval, or even worse, minimising the importance of the operation for me.
So I thought about what I really wanted to say to them, in my letter, that is to say I loved them. And there, it came all by itself and I wrote my letter in one go, without any difficulty.
I am frankly happy with what I have written. In fact I have sent, perhaps for the first time, an adult letter to my parents.
I copied it out twice. I certainly wanted to address my words to both my parents at the same time, but I wanted each to receive a copy.
This morning, before going to work, I posted my letters. Normally they should arrive before 16 May.
At the time I felt happy, liberated. I even thought, “This time I have finished my preparations”.
But since then, I have become afraid of my father’s reaction. It’s ridiculous I know, but I can’t stop myself thinking that he is going to be terribly angry with me. As for my mother, I don’t think she will talk about it. But basically, his reaction matters little, here, this evening.
In spite of my fear, I have no regrets. The letters are posted and the die is cast.
[Original in French]
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Saturday, 6 May 2006
Seven minutes for an anaesthetic
Sunday 6 May 2007
Friday morning, on waking, I had a pain in my stomach. I felt anxious, nervous. I had a chaotic morning, disorganised, trying in vain to make myself concentrate on my work.
At 12:20 I was in the metro to go to my anaesthetist consultation. My appointment was 14:00 but like my appointment with the surgeon, I didn’t want to be late. And I wasn’t hungry. I was too nervous to stop to eat anywhere.
In the RER which was taking me to St Germain en Laye, I once again studied all the documents that I was asked to bring with me. Nevertheless, I had got them ready Wednesday evening, and checked them Thursday evening and that morning. But I needed to reassure myself and calm my agitation.
I had my last prescriptions, the results of my blood tests and questionnaires filled in and signed which were given to me 2 March (patient’s informed consent for surgery, HIV test, medical questionnaire for anaesthesia and patient’s informed consent for anaesthesia).
I had followed Claude’s advice and prepared a short list of questions:
- how exactly is he going to anaesthetise me?
- What is the sedative for which I will be given before the anaesthetic?
- How long will I be asleep?
- Will I be in pain when I wake up?
I really wanted to cry, there on the RER. There was this fear that interfered with everything and made tears come to my eyes. I felt as though I was going to a job interview. I had the feeling the surgeon and anaesthetist were doing me a favour by operating on me and that they could change their minds, without consulting me. Having the impression of depending on them and their good will totally troubled me. I felt powerless and I wanted to cry. For myself.
Finally I arrived, an hour early. Unable to stay there with nothing to do, I forced myself to have some lunch while waiting.
At 14:00 sharp I went into the waiting room, my legs a little numb. It was there that I had my consultation with Dr. Foldès. The anaesthetists’ medical secretary had given me a leaflet explaining the different types of anaesthetic, the precautions to take, the statistics of anything going wrong. I had only read half when the anaesthetist called me.
I spent exactly 7 minutes with Dr Ice-cube. 7 minutes opposite an iceberg who started by taking my blood pressure in a heavy silence. Then he asked me some questions with an uncommunicative face (what medicines do I take? Do I have any allergies? Have I had previous operations?) He then examined the results of my blood tests, and told me everything was all right. Then he delivered a rambling speech in a rapid voice, explaining to me that I wouldn’t be intubated, but I would have oxygen from a mask, that I would be asleep for approximately an hour and a half.
Completely without a glimmer of sympathy, Dr Cold told me I would have to be fasting from midnight from the evening before the operation. He didn’t tell me but I read in the information leaflet that fasting eliminates the risk of suffocating from untimely vomiting. He also said not to take any aspirin.
He got his breath back and asked me, while filling in the patient consent form for the anaesthetic, if I had any questions.
I asked him what the sedative was for which is given before the anaesthetics. He explained that the sedative helped reduce my nervousness, natural when faced with surgery, and so to help the anaesthesia. I also asked about waking up, I wanted to know if I would feel dopey. He answered no, that I would wake up as if after a night’s sleep. If I take the prescribed medicines, he told me, I will feel no pain. I spoke to him about my patch and he assured me I could keep it when I enter the clinic.
7 minutes went by this way and he took me back to the secretary. I paid 28 euros, 4 euros per minute, for this rather frosty anaesthesia consultation. I was a little irritated. Not because of the price, no, because of Dr Snow’s temperature.
So, all right, kindness, human warmth and sympathy aren’t rights, nobody is obliged to be warm and kind (although for the medical professions it is debatable) but all the same, the coldness of the anaesthetist troubled me, if not annoyed me. And then to have been dispatched in seven minutes, that downright worried me. I reassured myself as well as I can by saying to myself that I must be a commonplace and trivial case, but above all the fact of knowing Dr Foldès will be there and that I am his patient and not that of Dr Iceberg calms my anguish.
Paradoxically, the coolness of the anaesthetist has all the same allowed me to be less dramatic, be practical. In my eyes, that afternoon, my operation lost part of its symbolic extent and became more real.
Leaving the clinic I felt as though I was on holiday, light-hearted. It was fine, hot, and I thought that now, between the operation and myself, there were no more steps to take, no examinations, no questionnaires, nor phone calls to the insurance company.
There are only 12 days left.
[Original in French]
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Friday morning, on waking, I had a pain in my stomach. I felt anxious, nervous. I had a chaotic morning, disorganised, trying in vain to make myself concentrate on my work.
At 12:20 I was in the metro to go to my anaesthetist consultation. My appointment was 14:00 but like my appointment with the surgeon, I didn’t want to be late. And I wasn’t hungry. I was too nervous to stop to eat anywhere.
In the RER which was taking me to St Germain en Laye, I once again studied all the documents that I was asked to bring with me. Nevertheless, I had got them ready Wednesday evening, and checked them Thursday evening and that morning. But I needed to reassure myself and calm my agitation.
I had my last prescriptions, the results of my blood tests and questionnaires filled in and signed which were given to me 2 March (patient’s informed consent for surgery, HIV test, medical questionnaire for anaesthesia and patient’s informed consent for anaesthesia).
I had followed Claude’s advice and prepared a short list of questions:
- how exactly is he going to anaesthetise me?
- What is the sedative for which I will be given before the anaesthetic?
- How long will I be asleep?
- Will I be in pain when I wake up?
I really wanted to cry, there on the RER. There was this fear that interfered with everything and made tears come to my eyes. I felt as though I was going to a job interview. I had the feeling the surgeon and anaesthetist were doing me a favour by operating on me and that they could change their minds, without consulting me. Having the impression of depending on them and their good will totally troubled me. I felt powerless and I wanted to cry. For myself.
Finally I arrived, an hour early. Unable to stay there with nothing to do, I forced myself to have some lunch while waiting.
At 14:00 sharp I went into the waiting room, my legs a little numb. It was there that I had my consultation with Dr. Foldès. The anaesthetists’ medical secretary had given me a leaflet explaining the different types of anaesthetic, the precautions to take, the statistics of anything going wrong. I had only read half when the anaesthetist called me.
I spent exactly 7 minutes with Dr Ice-cube. 7 minutes opposite an iceberg who started by taking my blood pressure in a heavy silence. Then he asked me some questions with an uncommunicative face (what medicines do I take? Do I have any allergies? Have I had previous operations?) He then examined the results of my blood tests, and told me everything was all right. Then he delivered a rambling speech in a rapid voice, explaining to me that I wouldn’t be intubated, but I would have oxygen from a mask, that I would be asleep for approximately an hour and a half.
Completely without a glimmer of sympathy, Dr Cold told me I would have to be fasting from midnight from the evening before the operation. He didn’t tell me but I read in the information leaflet that fasting eliminates the risk of suffocating from untimely vomiting. He also said not to take any aspirin.
He got his breath back and asked me, while filling in the patient consent form for the anaesthetic, if I had any questions.
I asked him what the sedative was for which is given before the anaesthetics. He explained that the sedative helped reduce my nervousness, natural when faced with surgery, and so to help the anaesthesia. I also asked about waking up, I wanted to know if I would feel dopey. He answered no, that I would wake up as if after a night’s sleep. If I take the prescribed medicines, he told me, I will feel no pain. I spoke to him about my patch and he assured me I could keep it when I enter the clinic.
7 minutes went by this way and he took me back to the secretary. I paid 28 euros, 4 euros per minute, for this rather frosty anaesthesia consultation. I was a little irritated. Not because of the price, no, because of Dr Snow’s temperature.
So, all right, kindness, human warmth and sympathy aren’t rights, nobody is obliged to be warm and kind (although for the medical professions it is debatable) but all the same, the coldness of the anaesthetist troubled me, if not annoyed me. And then to have been dispatched in seven minutes, that downright worried me. I reassured myself as well as I can by saying to myself that I must be a commonplace and trivial case, but above all the fact of knowing Dr Foldès will be there and that I am his patient and not that of Dr Iceberg calms my anguish.
Paradoxically, the coolness of the anaesthetist has all the same allowed me to be less dramatic, be practical. In my eyes, that afternoon, my operation lost part of its symbolic extent and became more real.
Leaving the clinic I felt as though I was on holiday, light-hearted. It was fine, hot, and I thought that now, between the operation and myself, there were no more steps to take, no examinations, no questionnaires, nor phone calls to the insurance company.
There are only 12 days left.
[Original in French]
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Monday, 1 May 2006
A stitch in my side
Tuesday 1 May 2007
In 16 days I going to be operated on. And nevertheless I’m a bit sad today.
What’s happening is that I’m fed up waiting. I can no longer check a thousand times that I haven’t forgotten anything. I can no longer bear feeling afraid. I’m not getting enough sleep. I am beginning to feel seriously tired.
I’d like to be able to think about something else. I’d like to be able to make some plans. At he moment I’m not capable of it. Even summer holidays, I can’t manage to organise anything. 16 May takes over everything.
I want to get away from the subject. I’d like not to think about it anymore, that the days would pass and hop, it’s 15 May and I’m going into the clinic.
I have the feeling of having started on an endurance course, a marathon, on 2 March last exactly when I said “Is it possible in the month of May?”. And, although I can see the finishing line over there, I have a stitch in my side …
I believe I have a type of indigestion, I’ve thought about it so much, I’ve pondered over my circumcision and its repercussions on my life, I have immersed myself so much in the question that I feel I’ve had something of a bellyful there …
[Original in French]
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In 16 days I going to be operated on. And nevertheless I’m a bit sad today.
What’s happening is that I’m fed up waiting. I can no longer check a thousand times that I haven’t forgotten anything. I can no longer bear feeling afraid. I’m not getting enough sleep. I am beginning to feel seriously tired.
I’d like to be able to think about something else. I’d like to be able to make some plans. At he moment I’m not capable of it. Even summer holidays, I can’t manage to organise anything. 16 May takes over everything.
I want to get away from the subject. I’d like not to think about it anymore, that the days would pass and hop, it’s 15 May and I’m going into the clinic.
I have the feeling of having started on an endurance course, a marathon, on 2 March last exactly when I said “Is it possible in the month of May?”. And, although I can see the finishing line over there, I have a stitch in my side …
I believe I have a type of indigestion, I’ve thought about it so much, I’ve pondered over my circumcision and its repercussions on my life, I have immersed myself so much in the question that I feel I’ve had something of a bellyful there …
[Original in French]
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Tuesday, 18 April 2006
Remembering and forgetting
Wednesday 18 April 2007
When I learnt at the time of my consultation that I was going to have a general anaesthetic, I wasn’t afraid of the risks that it implied. I didn’t think of it for a second.
In fact it intrigued me, this general anaesthetic. I asked myself how it worked, if you dreamt, if you remembered anything or if it went by like a click of your fingers: you didn’t remember falling asleep and, ping, someone waking you in another room. Having an anaesthetic, to me, is something mysterious, remarkable and interesting. I was eager to have the experience.
Thanks to my reading on the internet and Fafa’s comments, I finally have an idea of what it is to have an anaesthetic. Roughly, it’s going to be like when you turn off a switch. At one moment I will be in my room and the next minute after I will open my eyes in the recovery room. I am not going to notice anything about the operation, as a matter of fact.
Well, this theory makes me think and worries me a bit. The thought of having no recollection of the operation makes me less keen to experience the effects of a general anaesthetic.
I’ve always known that I had been circumcised. As far back as I can remember , I have always known that I had been mutilated. I have even always known that it was my clitoris which was cut, even at the time when I didn’t know what it was for.
Nevertheless, I don’t remember the circumcision itself. I don’t remember the place, the people who were there, the pain, or what happened afterwards. All that remains with me is the conviction of having been mutilated.
When, during therapy, I tried to recall that moment, I failed. The most that came to mind were some fragmentary images which I couldn’t work out if they were real or invented by my mind or even taken from a film which I had seen a very long time ago. I never succeeded in remembering.
For a time, even after I had started my therapy, I had a tendency to think that, since I didn’t remember, it didn’t have that much impact on me. If it had had such huge consequences for me, that would have marked my consciousness, it would have haunted me, it was obvious.
At the same time, not only did I have great trouble in linking my problems to this event, but what’s more, it didn’t seem to me to be “legitimate” to do so, because I couldn’t remember my circumcision. I spent months and years looking elsewhere for the causes of my difficulties.
When I finally understood that the origin of a number my anxieties was my circumcision, my inability to remember that time drove me to despair. I was convinced that to recover, to move on finally, it was essential that I remembered. Except it didn’t happen. And I wanted to so much. I read on the internet the accounts of women remembering that horrible moment when at the time they were only three or four years old, and I didn’t understand. I said to myself that I had a problem, something in my head wasn’t working as it should. Why me, why couldn’t I remember my circumcision?
My therapist explained to me that in these very traumatic situations, when you can’t bear what is happening, you often protect yourself by fainting. Like a fuse which breaks when there is a surge of power. And that this was doubtless what had happened when I was mutilated. I had no doubt protected myself like that: by losing consciousness.
I don’t know why, but when I think about this likely fainting, I have the impression that really I was dead when I was being mutilated then my heart started beating again and my consciousness returned because I didn’t want to die. Whatever was done to me, I wanted to survive. That’s how I explain to myself what happened. And it makes me want to cry each time I think about it …
My therapist said it wasn’t necessary for me to remember, that it wouldn’t hinder psychological rebuilding. I couldn’t see how that was possible. So she reminded me of the extreme panic which came over me when sometimes a figure of authority asked me something unexpected, that I couldn’t control, or I didn’t know how to do (that especially happened at work) or even if I had to do something that seemed to me to be risky or of great consequence. In these cases I examine my feelings, I realise that I am literally afraid of dying. My therapist explained to me that this panic is the recollection of what happened that day, the emotion I felt. Like an echo of the past. She explained that in these moments, I had access to my circumcision, to my emotions of the time, and I will be able to free myself of them by working on these moments of crisis.
That doesn’t stop me from wanting to know precisely what happened. I don’t know why, but I have the feeling that taking that time for myself will give me a little dignity. If I knew the detail of what happened, I would no longer feel I had been a damaged object. It wouldn’t only be my body and my unconscious which would carry the mark of this event. In bringing it to my consciousness, I would have the feeling of having been an entirely separate individual that day.
So, knowing that I won’t be remembering any more of my operation than of my circumcision bothers me. Just like my mutilation, my consciousness won’t be paying attention to my reconstruction. But this time I will be careful to memorise in detail everything that happens before and after the operation itself.
That way, I hope, I will keep in my mind the importance of what happens on 16 May next and I will be able to keep myself going to continue on my path.
[original in French]
Next post
When I learnt at the time of my consultation that I was going to have a general anaesthetic, I wasn’t afraid of the risks that it implied. I didn’t think of it for a second.
In fact it intrigued me, this general anaesthetic. I asked myself how it worked, if you dreamt, if you remembered anything or if it went by like a click of your fingers: you didn’t remember falling asleep and, ping, someone waking you in another room. Having an anaesthetic, to me, is something mysterious, remarkable and interesting. I was eager to have the experience.
Thanks to my reading on the internet and Fafa’s comments, I finally have an idea of what it is to have an anaesthetic. Roughly, it’s going to be like when you turn off a switch. At one moment I will be in my room and the next minute after I will open my eyes in the recovery room. I am not going to notice anything about the operation, as a matter of fact.
Well, this theory makes me think and worries me a bit. The thought of having no recollection of the operation makes me less keen to experience the effects of a general anaesthetic.
I’ve always known that I had been circumcised. As far back as I can remember , I have always known that I had been mutilated. I have even always known that it was my clitoris which was cut, even at the time when I didn’t know what it was for.
Nevertheless, I don’t remember the circumcision itself. I don’t remember the place, the people who were there, the pain, or what happened afterwards. All that remains with me is the conviction of having been mutilated.
When, during therapy, I tried to recall that moment, I failed. The most that came to mind were some fragmentary images which I couldn’t work out if they were real or invented by my mind or even taken from a film which I had seen a very long time ago. I never succeeded in remembering.
For a time, even after I had started my therapy, I had a tendency to think that, since I didn’t remember, it didn’t have that much impact on me. If it had had such huge consequences for me, that would have marked my consciousness, it would have haunted me, it was obvious.
At the same time, not only did I have great trouble in linking my problems to this event, but what’s more, it didn’t seem to me to be “legitimate” to do so, because I couldn’t remember my circumcision. I spent months and years looking elsewhere for the causes of my difficulties.
When I finally understood that the origin of a number my anxieties was my circumcision, my inability to remember that time drove me to despair. I was convinced that to recover, to move on finally, it was essential that I remembered. Except it didn’t happen. And I wanted to so much. I read on the internet the accounts of women remembering that horrible moment when at the time they were only three or four years old, and I didn’t understand. I said to myself that I had a problem, something in my head wasn’t working as it should. Why me, why couldn’t I remember my circumcision?
My therapist explained to me that in these very traumatic situations, when you can’t bear what is happening, you often protect yourself by fainting. Like a fuse which breaks when there is a surge of power. And that this was doubtless what had happened when I was mutilated. I had no doubt protected myself like that: by losing consciousness.
I don’t know why, but when I think about this likely fainting, I have the impression that really I was dead when I was being mutilated then my heart started beating again and my consciousness returned because I didn’t want to die. Whatever was done to me, I wanted to survive. That’s how I explain to myself what happened. And it makes me want to cry each time I think about it …
My therapist said it wasn’t necessary for me to remember, that it wouldn’t hinder psychological rebuilding. I couldn’t see how that was possible. So she reminded me of the extreme panic which came over me when sometimes a figure of authority asked me something unexpected, that I couldn’t control, or I didn’t know how to do (that especially happened at work) or even if I had to do something that seemed to me to be risky or of great consequence. In these cases I examine my feelings, I realise that I am literally afraid of dying. My therapist explained to me that this panic is the recollection of what happened that day, the emotion I felt. Like an echo of the past. She explained that in these moments, I had access to my circumcision, to my emotions of the time, and I will be able to free myself of them by working on these moments of crisis.
That doesn’t stop me from wanting to know precisely what happened. I don’t know why, but I have the feeling that taking that time for myself will give me a little dignity. If I knew the detail of what happened, I would no longer feel I had been a damaged object. It wouldn’t only be my body and my unconscious which would carry the mark of this event. In bringing it to my consciousness, I would have the feeling of having been an entirely separate individual that day.
So, knowing that I won’t be remembering any more of my operation than of my circumcision bothers me. Just like my mutilation, my consciousness won’t be paying attention to my reconstruction. But this time I will be careful to memorise in detail everything that happens before and after the operation itself.
That way, I hope, I will keep in my mind the importance of what happens on 16 May next and I will be able to keep myself going to continue on my path.
[original in French]
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