Quote from: Denjin on July 08, 2016, 05:11:22 AM
Congrats, Cali.  Now the waiting begins!   I hate anesthesia... I could feel it deep in my lungs for hours.

The aloe drinks are amazing - I always had some in the fridge for my entire trip.

Dear Denjin

Thank you for your feedback. I could feel the anesthesia in my lungs as well, so I enjoed my walk double to breath "fresh" air. Like I wrote before... I'll buy some Aloe Drinks today. Two so positive ratings from you and anjaq as well... I can not go wrong... 

And yes... Waiting and being silent is uncommon in this way... But let's see how successfull I'll be.

Take care...
Danielle

Take care

Here's hoping it's a beautiful butterfly that emerges from the chrysalis 
VFS has to be one of the more interesting and difficult things to go through, the waiting!!! The waiting!!!

Quote from: Rafaela on July 10, 2016, 05:40:24 PM
Here's hoping it's a beautiful butterfly that emerges from the chrysalis 
VFS has to be one of the more interesting and difficult things to go through, the waiting!!! The waiting!!!

Dear Rafaela

Thank you very much for you suportive words... 

Yes, you're right... The waiting. The silent waiting...   

Well... I'll try to do a diary for the first days. I guess this could be interesting for all which are considering a glottoplasty as well.

Ok here we go...

Day 1 after Surgery:

When I woke up, the throat feeled less inflammed than right after the surgery and I had a good night without any problems. I still feel the surgery site like there is something small in my throat, but no pain. The tip of my tounge is still numb... It's a funny feeling...  Like when a clothes peg would be at your tongue...

Today I had my first of seven day on additional medication I got from Dr. Kim. Until now there is no problem with the medicine and I don't feel any side effects as well. Not tired or dizzy or something. So no problmes. There is a Siroup against coughing. The taste of this siroup is bitter and chemical sweet and sour... And a very intense orange color. But this siroup is veeeery excellent for calming down the antitussive. I'm looking forward to get the next portion of that siroup...  It's one of the post op highlights for my throat...

Today the weather was good and we was going to the palace where the king resided. We took the subway from our appartment to the Station Gyeongbok gung, which is at the orange line. Very impressive to see the whole area. The price for the entrance a´was fair. I think it was 3000 WON, which is something like € 3.- per person. A huge area with all the houses, where you can walk the whole day long...

We reside in the Gangnam area of Seoul, which is very impressive and you could spend endless money for shopping. I guess I never saw so many brand shops in a row like here in Gangnam: Gucci, Omega, Cartier, Rolls Royce, Christian Dior, and so on, and so on... The list would get veeeery long. One house owned by a brand after each other...

Take care...
Danielle

Glad it is going well so far.   Odd that I never had a numb tongue, as so many others report it.  Just got lucky, I guess.  The cough syrup stuff was pretty good, I think.  Kept three packets just in case I need them at some point.

Korea is so cheap, isn't it?  I still can't believe how little I spent when I was there! Is it very warm this summer?

Quote from: Denjin on July 11, 2016, 02:58:53 AM
Glad it is going well so far.   Odd that I never had a numb tongue, as so many others report it.  Just got lucky, I guess.  The cough syrup stuff was pretty good, I think.  Kept three packets just in case I need them at some point.

Korea is so cheap, isn't it?  I still can't believe how little I spent when I was there! Is it very warm this summer?

Hi Denjin

Thank you for your Feedback. Well the thumbness with the toungue is not a real problem. It is only a "funny" feeling... 

Well some places in Seoul are "cheap". But in Gangman, where we reside it's veeery expensive. You can also see that with the cars... The common cars here are Mercedes, BMW, Bentley, Porsche as well as some Maserati, Ferrari and Rolls Royce... I think I never saw so many luxury cars in my whole life together... Well I guess that's Gangnam Style... 

But there are cheap districts as well... You are right.

Immay try to buy some extra of that Siroupmas well to have it as a backup, necause it is really terrible good against coughing.

Here I'll,go with my diary...

Day 2

At the second day the inflammation feeling was more or less gone. Also swallowing gets back to normal again. And so we decided to go and do some shopping. The weather was fine again and the temerature was about 33 degrees celsius during day and 20 degrees Celsius in the night. The humidity is higher than in Switzerland, but I guess this helps also to make breathing easier. The only problem is the pollution... Dependig on the wind and the weather you can see the smoke in the air. Some residents said, that is because of the industry in china, from where this smoke is comming from... 

We got to the shops in the Gangnam Subway Station. There you can find a lot of very cheep clothes, shoes, make up, bags and ... Jummy... Food

At the end of the day Imhad a little bit the smell of blood in my mouth...  Maybe because I was doing to much, even if i tried to not force anything and walked slower than normal. We finished that day with delicious fried chicken with salad... So that was day two.

Take care to all...
Danielle

Hi Danielle, glad to see you're recovering well- this may sound like a strange question, but what's it like eating? Is it difficult right now, or can you eat whatever you want so soon after surgery? If you're in Seoul you could try the Korean barbeque plates: it would be hard to resist all the restaurant adventures  I love chillies and spicy food!!!

No hot food for a month post surgery, unfortunately.  For good reason, I think.  I had spicy food 'go down the wrong way' recently and it caused a coughing fit.  Even now, almost 4 months post surgery, a coughing fit hurts afterwards...I imagine it would be very bad during the 1st month.

I had Korean fried chicken the 1st night after surgery, but I think you should eat soft food immediately.  But, it never hurt or anything.  Everyone is a bit different.

Wow - I thought Korea was so expensive - especially the food. But then again I am sadly having a really bad exchange rate due to being in Europe, making everything more expensive - We tried to live cheap. And we never went to Gangnam to buy anything there.  Western Style Food was the most crazy expensive luxury item ever - The Pizza was 4-5 times more expensive than at home.

Speaking of food - Spicy food is sadly out, but we did eat a lot of the alternatives. Bimibap once and gimbap several times and also fried chicken.

I think the waiting for one month was bad - being so excited over how it will turn out - but at least for me that was just the start, the waiting eventually took so much longer and it took effort to make it work. So after over a year the whole voice thing developed well enough - I was told by Dr Kim that it takes a year, but I saw so many videos of others having faster results that I did not believe him

Maybe it was just cheap in GBP at the time.  This country is insanely expensive, though...

Yeah the waiting is quite bad even after you can speak.  I'd say, for me, the 1st two months of being able to speak again were a bit stressful as it all worked differently, etc.  Still, was great to not be a mute!

Quote from: Rafaela on July 11, 2016, 04:26:57 AM
Hi Danielle, glad to see you're recovering well- this may sound like a strange question, but what's it like eating? Is it difficult right now, or can you eat whatever you want so soon after surgery? If you're in Seoul you could try the Korean barbeque plates: it would be hard to resist all the restaurant adventures  I love chillies and spicy food!!!

Dear Rafaela

Thank you very much for your feedback. Yes... I love hot and spicy food as well. And I hat a hot fried chicken at the day one post op... 

I especialy asked because of hot and spicey food. And as far as ai understood the problem is the danger of food going down the wrong way and caughing after that like Denjin allready said...

But there is so many excellent food around which is also not too spicy, so eating is no problem.

Take care... 
Danielle

Quote from: Denjin on July 11, 2016, 04:42:08 AM
No hot food for a month post surgery, unfortunately.  For good reason, I think.  I had spicy food 'go down the wrong way' recently and it caused a coughing fit.  Even now, almost 4 months post surgery, a coughing fit hurts afterwards...I imagine it would be very bad during the 1st month.

I had Korean fried chicken the 1st night after surgery, but I think you should eat soft food immediately.  But, it never hurt or anything.  Everyone is a bit different.

Dear Denjin

Yes... We also love to eat chicken very often. It's so delicious...  Fortunately I had no coughing until now and Inpray that it would stay like this... 

Thank you very much and take care... 
Danielle

Quote from: anjaq on July 11, 2016, 06:02:44 AM
Wow - I thought Korea was so expensive - especially the food. But then again I am sadly having a really bad exchange rate due to being in Europe, making everything more expensive - We tried to live cheap. And we never went to Gangnam to buy anything there.  Western Style Food was the most crazy expensive luxury item ever - The Pizza was 4-5 times more expensive than at home.

Speaking of food - Spicy food is sadly out, but we did eat a lot of the alternatives. Bimibap once and gimbap several times and also fried chicken.

I think the waiting for one month was bad - being so excited over how it will turn out - but at least for me that was just the start, the waiting eventually took so much longer and it took effort to make it work. So after over a year the whole voice thing developed well enough - I was told by Dr Kim that it takes a year, but I saw so many videos of others having faster results that I did not believe him

Dear Anjaq

Yes... Agree 100%. It's very expensive. I come from Switzerland and even compared to that it is expensive or at least equal. The same experience we had with Pizza as well...    The Pizza was delicious and from a wood oven, but the price was much too high...

Dr. Kim told me the same, that the adaption of the "new" vocal chords would took around one year. And as shown in the adaption curves on the Yeson Homepage it may varies  one or two months depending on different factors like smoking, age, talent, training and so on. So each adaption curve will be unique, but the mean seems to be equal, so that a good goal could be reached after around a year. But that's still theoretical for me and I will post also some one year post op statements, when I'm still here then...

Take care... 
Danielle

We did not even go into that Pizza place we found. It was odd, we arrived in the late afternoon, tired from travelling and did not want to experiment on korean food, so we thought heck lets just have a boring Pizza or Burger, but the prices decided we cannot do this. We did not understand any of the other restaurants menus in that area and the restaurants looked closed with just 3 or 4 people sitting in it. So we found one place that sold soup for a reasonable price so we took that. It was mediocre but we were not hungry anymore. We then bought some toast, cheese and ham for breakfast and again spent a fortune on those, so we prepared for a very expensive week at that popint. Luckily we found out that one can find restaurants that have chicken or possibly pork and some fish with rice and veggies for normal prices - as long as it was deep fried its price was ok - also the street vendors. And we deemed it safe after deep frying. Gimbap was also reasonably priced in the take-away version. But getting into more interesting Korean food - menus or BBQ - that was massively expensive again... so I guess the rule for us mostly was to stick to chicken and fried stuff - no western stuff as it was 4x the price it is here and no fancy korean stuff unless we wanted to celebrate.

Quote from: DanielleBasel on July 11, 2016, 08:09:23 AM
Dr. Kim told me the same, that the adaption of the "new" vocal chords would took around one year. And as shown in the adaption curves on the Yeson Homepage it may varies  one or two months depending on different factors like smoking, age, talent, training and so on.

The thing that is IMO wrong about those curves he shows is that they show pitch. Its not really pitch that changes so much with adaptation, its other things - voice clarity, volume etc. My pitch was up from 134 Hz to 170-180 Hz at week 5 and after a year now its at 180-190 but can be 150 or 200 depending on my mood - so the pitch did not change so much later on, but the way I use the voice, the way it sounds like, the volume and cleanliness is different.

Yeah the pitch curve is totally wrong.  One of my first recordings showed 210Hz at around 4 weeks and now at about 4 months my lazy voice is still 210.

Danielle,

Nice to see you back and so sorry being so off topic too but I wanna say a big THANK YOU for wishing me on my day! Really appreciated

Let's go back to topic now

So how is your 4th day post VFS going? Hope everything is well and can't wait to hear updates from you.

Thanks again sweetie and take good care of yourself!
Brenda

Quote from: anjaq on July 11, 2016, 12:03:29 PM
We did not even go into that Pizza place we found. It was odd, we arrived in the late afternoon, tired from travelling and did not want to experiment on korean food, so we thought heck lets just have a boring Pizza or Burger, but the prices decided we cannot do this. We did not understand any of the other restaurants menus in that area and the restaurants looked closed with just 3 or 4 people sitting in it. So we found one place that sold soup for a reasonable price so we took that. It was mediocre but we were not hungry anymore. We then bought some toast, cheese and ham for breakfast and again spent a fortune on those, so we prepared for a very expensive week at that popint. Luckily we found out that one can find restaurants that have chicken or possibly pork and some fish with rice and veggies for normal prices - as long as it was deep fried its price was ok - also the street vendors. And we deemed it safe after deep frying. Gimbap was also reasonably priced in the take-away version. But getting into more interesting Korean food - menus or BBQ - that was massively expensive again... so I guess the rule for us mostly was to stick to chicken and fried stuff - no western stuff as it was 4x the price it is here and no fancy korean stuff unless we wanted to celebrate.

Dear Anjaq

Well, the korean food is delicious and we love it very much. And we found some clean, cozy places to eat, which are not too expensive as well. I think so too, that the fried food is save. We also drinked once from the filtered "open" water an we had no problems after that as well. But when you ant to stay at the safe side you shoud better use botteled water as well.

I'm scared about the scale at home, when I make my first weight check after that trip, because Inhave done no sports and ear jummy food... 

Take care... 
Danielle

Quote from: Denjin on July 11, 2016, 01:17:11 PM
Yeah the pitch curve is totally wrong.  One of my first recordings showed 210Hz at around 4 weeks and now at about 4 months my lazy voice is still 210.

Dear Denjin, dear anjaq

Well to that curve I can not say anything at the moment... First, because I'm not allowed to speak...  ... And second, because it would need more than a year to make some some serious comparsion.

But well... I was also reading from other patietns on their blogs and vlogs, that it depends on so much factors and also very important... The training.

I'm so courios about my outcome and my progress, because you can read so much different things, that I think it seems that the progress and the adaption seems to be unique for each one. But here I meight be wrong again...

Take care... 
Danielle

Quote from: bmiranda on July 12, 2016, 04:02:33 PM
Danielle,

Nice to see you back and so sorry being so off topic too but I wanna say a big THANK YOU for wishing me on my day! Really appreciated

Let's go back to topic now

So how is your 4th day post VFS going? Hope everything is well and can't wait to hear updates from you.

Thanks again sweetie and take good care of yourself!
Brenda

Dear Brenda

Glad to get some "off topic" fom you...  You're allwas welcome... 

Well here is my diary for

Day 3

The inflammation feeling was gone almost totaly and the numbness in my tounge as well. So the status in ny neck and mouth is back to normal. This is on one side very good, but for me it needs now more attention to not speak per accident, because there is nothing physical, which reminds me to shut up... 

At day three we where going to the Coex Center in Soul. This is a huuuuuge shopping mall with entertainment and restaurants as well. There are also congress rooms as well, but I had only eyes on the hundret of brand shops in there... 

After shopping and eating we where going to the Buddha Temple in the opposit, which is very beautyfull. For us it was very impressive. The "silence" from the green in the middle of this vivid capitol city with around 11'000'000 residents. Amazing... It's worth a visit as well.

Take care... 
Danielle

Well here is also the right now a short update for

Day 4

There was no change in status. No pain, no inflammation, no coughing and thumbness in tongue is gone.

The most difficult is now to not speak or tense the vocal folds... I hope I did everything right until now. Itˋs so difficult to say. I'm sometimes scared, when I look up to the blue sky, because I think this could be too much tension... Well I don't know.

I'm fully concentrated to not speak ba accident.

Today we where going first to the Samsung d'Light exhibition. There in the huge Samsung skyscraper complex. In there is this d'Light exhibition, where they show a lot of new gimmicks how technology will influence our lifes in the next few years. It's interersting, if you like technique and have too much time... Entrance is free.

After that we where going to the famous Myung-dong District. This is hardcore shopping at it's fines. After 4pm you'll find there a lot of fingerfood combined with miles and miles of shops in every difderent shape. Ther you'll find everything... And after 4pm it is also totaly crowdy. It's fun and amazing to be there. Be carefull for you money. Not because of thefts... Because of shopping... 

One word about crime in Seoul. I very seldom felt so secure in a foreign city like in Seoul. I heard also, that the crime rate is very very low here Seoul. I never was scared about my belongings. When I was going once to a public toilette, one local woman put their bag, mobile phone and money pocket onto the sink in front of the toilette and then she was going into the toilette and left their stuff outside... 

Poeple here are very friendly and also very helpfull.

But trans* seems to be something very exotic, but I was accepted and threated with respect.

So... That was day four. And today I'll have my chekup with Dr. Kim. I'm scared, that I have messed up something. Ohh and today I'll get my botox injection. I asked myself in this night many times where they will inject the botox and how much it does hurt.., 

Well I'll see soon. Until then I'll enjoy the Gangnam Style... 

Take care...   
Danielle

Myungdon