Over in
@SassyCassie's thread she's writing about a trip we took to southeast Florida. As part of the trip we spent time with her relatives, and she took me to my first time on the beach, which I'd written about earlier.
The initial catalyst for the entire trip, though, was an appointment I'd made for a consultation with an FFS clinic in Jupiter, FL.
After breakfast we blasted south in Cassie's Marauder. As usual, we got a late start, so I remain the late Stephanie Bensinger. We arrived about 1/2 hour late, but happily I had the last appointment of the day, so they had plenty of time to see me.
Since my memory is what I forget with, I asked Cassie to sit in to make a mental recording and pose questions I might forget to ask. We started out with a short meeting with the administrative assistant, and after covering the preliminaries, moved to an examination room where we met with the doctor.
The most important thing I am pursuing is hair grafts. As you may have seen from my pictures, I still have a reasonable amount of hair, but the front hairline has receded in the corners, and the top and crown are thin. I'm constantly self-conscious about it, and you'll usually see me with a hat or one of my IFV's* to hide the hairline. Secondarily, I wanted to know about rhinoplasty, lip lift, and a face and chin lift. I had a feeling from my own research and from what others have told me, that I shouldn't need any bone work such as brow bossing or jaw recontouring. But I went in with the idea that what I'm interested in was a suggestion, and I was open to the doctor's recommendations.
As it turned out, I was pretty close to what the doctor recommended. He agreed that my brow and jaw were fine, and he even thought the rhinoplasty was optional (I don't agree about the optional part). He did suggest a hairline advancement and slight lip augmentation which he'd do as part of the lip lift. The doc was very personable and sounded professional and competent. After a few more questions, even straying into some things that Cassie was interested in, we moved back to the conference room to meet with the admin assistant again to discuss the costs.
This is where things kind of fell apart. I figured since no really invasive work would be needed, I'd be looking at somewhere around $12,000 for the hair grafts, and $15 to $18k for the rest, for about $30k for it all.
Their bottom line: just over $42,000. This is with minimal prep work and no aftercare. Considering that we were in Jupiter, it's no wonder that all the oxygen left the room. It took my breath away. All I could do at that point was thank them for their time, let them know that it was my intention to get a second opinion, which they agreed was a good idea, and shuffle back to the Marauder.
It was time to do some more research. I have since learned that a friend had gone to FacialTeam in Spain, had much more intensive work done than I'm looking at, spent two weeks at a beautiful seaside recovery facility, toured Europe, and flown there and back - for about the same price I was quoted. Needless to say, I'm now in the the process of setting up a consultation with FacialTeam.
I'll write more about our trip in separate posts, but that's where I stand on FFS right now.
Stephanie
* Instant Feminization Visor.
