I know that the surgery worked - higher pitches are sooooo much easier now and just come naturally in many situations. If I say "good bye" to someone its incredibly high and feminine - or if I laugh - or sing along with women and dont have the male undertones. My voice has a totally different "ring" to it now. All of this is totally great and makes me incredibly happy - I just want to say that, because I tend to talk about the remaining problems more than the successes. Just for those things, the surgery is already worth it totally. My voice does not feel to me like a male voice anymore. The areas I do struggle with are the low pitch in everyday speaking situations and the hoarseness/breathiness mostly:
But what is kind of unexpected for me is that I was said to have a female resonance pattern before the surgery, so I sounded feminine in my voice to most. Post op, this seems not not be the right thing to do anymore. I still do it - but it puts me in a similar pitch range as pre op - it will still sound female as before the surgery, but I dont make the most out of the pitch gain with it. I start to think that the goal of the exercises from Yeson is to find me a new feminine resonance pattern (Yeson say "phonation pattern" and tell me I am still using the wrong one). In my perception that pattern seems to be odd and artificial since it seems to basically be the head voice or singing voice that is trained with the Exercises (starting at C4 in pitch and going up to G4). Of course I can talk softly in that range and sound very feminine, but it is quite a conscious act, when I dont watch out, I just drop in my chest voice and am then in the neutral pitch range. I cannot really use that head voice trained in the exercises for regular speech - it is too high. So I consider seeing another voice therapist in my city and see if she can help me to find a good way - but she was really warning me a lot about voice surgeries, so I am not sure she is willing to work with a post op patient seriously - or if she will basically just do something else and whenever something does not work out blame it on the surgery...
I did not expect to be among those VFS patients who had these issues - I feel there are two groups - some who get the new phonation pattern very fast (like Jennygirl, Sarah, Olivia, Jamie, Amy) and others who struggle with this for a longer time. I was hoping to be better in getting this right, given how much I was working on my voice pre op, but maybe its a mental thing, maybe its just still the healing process - I dont know. The variation in how fast the success of this surgery plays out is so huge - 2 months to 12 months. I guess there are many factors involved.
Again - I am happy with many aspects about the surgery but am just mainly angry about myself for not getting how to use this properly. Its like getting a new musical instrument and occasionally I totally hit the right way to use it and it sounds great and then most of the time I fumble around with a slow learning curve
- I should have done this when I was 25 and my brain was not so rigid already...
Oh and the main reason I said I cannot say if I would do this surgery again is: If I would somehow not learn the new phonation pattern, I guess I would have to consider if this still works out well - if the breathiness and hoarseness would persist, I would maybe say that I could also have done the surgery locally on insurance. The main reason to choose Yeson was that I think they do produce a lot less of these dysphonia issues than local doctors. So that is why I said that technically I have to wait until the first 6-12 months are over to see if that can be confirmed. I am confident that it will be , though - everyone else seems to have experienced that dysphonia stuff and it has cleared up with time 
- while locally the patients often reported the dysphonia to persist in the long run, so I am very confident that this was the best choice despite the hickups I have in some aspects. Always remember: Its not even 4 Months! Thats far from the point where my voice is supposed to be healed, so I feel a bit overwhelmed by such a question.
