Hi girls,
So I survived [emoji23]! That was an interesting experience. I wasn't sure what I was getting in for so I opened for lidocaine injection. I am going to go straight next time and skip the lidocaine. The injection hurt a good bit on the upper lip. I have a pretty high pain tolerance though. A couple of grunts and some controlled breathing, and just a few involuntary tears for the first one, took care of that. The lady who administered the lidocaine told my electrolysist, "she's really stoic". Too bad I couldn't actually see when she was doing the injection because that would have made it significantly easier to ignore the pain. Apparently, I am a bit odd in that I can pretty much ignore physical pain if I can see it and be prepared for it. I can do the same thing with shivering from cold and being ticklish. My brain can just turn it off. I know it's not a unique ability, but it certainly seems to be very uncommon.
Since I had four hours and lots of numbing I explained that I wanted to focus as much as possible on the upper lip since that is the most sensitive area. She did a pretty good job and looks like she got about 60-70%of them before switching off to the darker chin hairs. It doesn't look like it but I have incredibly dense hair coverage on the lip and chin. After about 3 hours she told my lip was looking really inflamed and we should leave it alone for now. Seeing as I don't want to deal with super amounts of swelling I was okay with that.
The lidocaine did not last the full time, but that's okay. The center line of the upper lip was most worn off when she reached it. She told me she could have them come back and give me a bit more numbing, but I declined. That was a good way to tell how well I would be able to ignore it for future sessions. It's really not that bad. My chin was almost entirely normal by the time she got down there. And other than a few hairs it was almost a non issue. Maybe like a bug bite or something similar.
I was very ill prepared for aftercare, because I am terrible at planning and also very scatter brained. I have a 3.5 hour drive to get down there, i.e. I also have a 3.5 hour drive back. After we were done she rubbed the area with witch hazel and applied aloe. I then had an incredibly annoying drive home where in I forgot to bring an icepack, or the aloe I have at home, or even painkiller, because I am smart like that. I am also to cheap to stop and buy things I already own. So I drove the whole trip and then had to do a few things before ever getting home at 11 pm and dealing with aftercare. Next time I will definitely be more prepared.
The redness was gone by morning. My upper lip is decently swollen and tender, my chin is a little bit as well. I imagine a bit of that is from the injection and the rest is from the work done. Annoyingly, I have lots of white bumps on my lip where hair was removed. I should have expected this, but wasn't thinking. I initially had the same reaction pretty much everywhere the first time I epilated, e.g. chest, arm, thighs, etc. It's a histamine reaction. They go away, but it is annoying to have them front and center.
I am going to discuss this next session. Oral antihistamine prior to epilating didn't help historically, topical antihistamine immediately after has helped a bit. However, given the length of the session I am not sure if it will be applied within a reasonably helpful window of time if we wait to the end. When looking in the mirror at my car I noticed a number of them had already formed. Oh well, even if we cant figure a solution out I can manage regardless.
The conversation was very neat and really made time go quickly. We talked about kids which was fun. When I mentioned that my daughter has ADHD and the change in seeing her medicated caused me to finally go through the work of getting treated myself, she brought up her teenage son whom she is starting to suspect may suffer from it. She asked me a lot of questions about the various symptoms, behaviors and quirks that I have and my daughter showed. A striking number of them were present for he son. I urged her very strongly to get him tested for his own benefit. It's quite treatable and the early you can intervene the better the outcomes. I explained how a lot of the medications work and that the key part is they mitigate symptoms so that an individual can learn and work on life skills that just don't develop, or barely develop, when untreated. Also, that it is significantly harder to develop these skills as you age and that currently that is a huge problem for me being undiagnosed for 36 years. I also explained that even if they find him not to have ADHD the testing will identify weak points that can be addressed and improved upon. She assumed the testing for ADHD was just one test and I had to explain that there is no single test for it. It is a battery of psychological tests each that look at a single factor, such as working memory, focus, sensory processing, executive functioning, etc.
I hope she gets him checked. I explained that untreated one thing that happens quite often is the development of self esteem issues. Chronic underperformance slowly eats you up inside. You get told repeatedly that you are just lazy and if you would only focus, or try harder, etc. Meanwhile, you are incredibly impaired from that due to the way your brain is wired. This is problematic on many levels and is one of my biggest problems. Granted I had a terrible environment that exacerbated all of these problems, so my experience may be more extreme in intensity, but reading other sufferers accounts they are pretty common.
We talked about general transition stuff and my experience with it. She meets lots of transwomen and always finds it interesting to see how each of us discover things and experience things differently. I explained that aside from this forum I have almost zero interaction with the community. There aren't a whole lot of us in the area I live and, while I do see a few transwomen shopping where I work, it would be incredibly rude to call them out on it even if it's just to share. This is one very odd side effect of passing extremely well. I can see them, but almost no one sees me.
She told me that she was incredibly surprised when she first saw me and had to double-check my paperwork as to why I was there. She told me that I just don't look like a transwoman and she initially thought I was a cis-woman. That's incredibly validating. I was blessed genetically I suppose, but since it seems to be so rare it's hard to talk about my experience without seeming arrogant. I was at consistent male-fail at only 3 months on hormones. I don't have to try to blend in, I just do. Even my mannerisms and speech are just natural. I never worked on them and almost never consciously recognize how I am interacting with the world. I am stealth without even trying to be so. I don't deny being trans when it comes up (and the one time someone actually picked up on it and asked). The only time people can tell is when I talk about certain things from my past.
There is a disconnect in my brain about it. I see all of the very subtle signs. Since I am trans I am very aware of the fact that I am trans. Other people are not and just see me as a woman. My mind just has an incredibly hard time accepting that fact. It's getting better but the magnitude of the adjustment just surprised the crap out of me when I stop to think about it. It's kind of lonely tbh. I want to discuss this face to with people but it's so outside of normal experience for cis people that there is almost no way to relate. I just get comments like, "well that's what you wanted, right?" Which yes it is, but I still would like to discuss how weird it is. My experience seems so far removed from what most transwomen experience that it's almost impossible to talk about because of jealousy or it seeming like narcissism and bragging.
Sorry, for the long and vaguely rambling post. Just recounting my experience and putting it out there for the world, I guess. Seriously though, I can't be the only person who has had such an effortless experience, can I? Also, it does not mean my life is easy. It would just be nice to find that I'm not alone in this.
Amber
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