Hi everyone,
I was a very active member of this site a few years ago, but I've had to make a new account, so please excuse the newb profile!
I have been on T for around six years now, and had top surgery four years ago. I've moved to a new state and am living stealth, and that's put me in an unexpectedly difficult place when it comes to finding the resources I need for bottom surgery.
I am hoping to have meta done in the next year or two, but currently live in Australia, and there are literally no surgeons here who can do lower surgeries. That leaves me with no choice but to travel to get the surgery done, which also means that the expensive health insurance I was hoping to lean on heavily is now absolutely useless. At this point in time it's looking like Thailand will be my best option, but travel and accommodation expenses for a month on top of an already expensive surgery have got me feeling really down.
When I used to attend a local trans group there were two guys there who organised and had their top surgeries overseas together, which meant they could share costs and support each other. There are a million reasons why I don't want any friends or family coming with me for the surgery, but at the same time it's such an intense and expensive thing to do alone, so having a 'travel surgery buddy' just seems really awesome to me. Problem is I have no idea how to go about even beginning to look for such a person. :/
If I go alone I'm worried about the overall cost, and all of the little things, like being able to move between the hospital and hotel, and my ability to go out and buy food, but I also don't want anyone in my life to know that I'm travelling to Thailand for SRS. My mother would likely go with me if I asked her to, but I'm not comfortable with that, and I don't want my genitals to be the talk of the family (which they absolutely would be).
If any of you have had surgery overseas, how did you handle the costs, time away from work, and company? I'm just going around in circles on this...
