I consulted with two surgeons before selecting Dr. D. The other doctor was fine. Dr. D and his…read morestaff have all been absolutely incredible. He's effortlessly charming but doesn't misuse the charm; he is clear about potential complications, where people have been unhappy, etc. He has the strongly held professional opinion that one should go a bit past the female average when doing facial feminization surgery, so he makes his recommendations accordingly, but ultimately listens to the patients' wishes. He was careful to ask me what I wanted before sharing his own recommendations, and particularly touched on whether I was going for androgyny or femininity. Ultimately, I picked Dr. D for his aesthetic sense. You can see it in every detail in the office architecture, in the experience he and his wonderful staff gives their patients, and in the after photos of the many people he's worked on. I hear it all the time from the dozens of his patients that I personally know. I wanted a doctor I could trust with my face, the thing that everyone sees first when they look at me, and I feel incredibly confident about the surgery I'll be getting a week from day. One area where Dr. D could do a bit better is mock-ups. He acknowledges that his are not the best. I ended up hiring a friend, also trans and an artist, who photoshopped me some mock-ups of what I might look like. I took those mock-ups with me to the pre-op and they were really helpful in showing Dr. D what I wanted for my nose. You meet every member of your surgical team beforehand. This is so important. Some doctors will have students work on you. The only team member I met day-of was the anesthesiologist, who Dr. D works with a lot. I expected to be basically in bed for the first several days. I got home, slept for several hours, and then was ready to go for a walk (they want you to walk two hours a day for recovery). I expected pain but there really wasn't any -- just discomfort and some strange nerve sensations and some numb spots (my chin, the top of my head, part of my nose). Most bandages came off five days later, and the nose cast came off a week after surgery. It was exactly the nose I'd asked for in the pre-op (the femme version of my original nose). Recovery went so smoothly and so quickly with limited exceptions. I remember that Dylan Mulvaney got her surgery just a few weeks before me from a different doctor. She was as swollen at three weeks as I was at one. I credit this to the pre- and post-surgical diet the team required, which was low sodium, low carbohydrate, low blood thinner. Anecdotally, this diet makes a huge difference in swelling for other plastic surgeries as well. I'm two days short of six weeks as I write this, and so happy about the outcome. Dr. Dr promised me I'd look feminine but couldn't promise me I'd be pretty, but now I'm definitely both, with still a lot of healing to go. I expected facial surgery to eliminate a lot of dysphoria, but I didn't expect it to eliminate most of it. Before if I saw myself doing a pull-up in the mirror, the muscle gave me dysphoria. Now, I see a pretty girl doing a pull-up in the mirror, and she's strong! Of course, nothing is perfect. Here are some caveats and downsides you might want to know about. * Firstly, if you are a vocalist, you might have an extremely distressing time with the trachea shave. At six weeks my range is severely limited, I have dysphonia, I can't do falsetto. Everyone assures me that these things will come back in the next two months because Dr. D has a flawless track record with trachea shaves, but it's been by far the hardest part of surgery recovery for me. Even for speaking, I'm stuck in Chad voice right now and it's really hard. I think the clinic could have done a better job of providing guidance -- perhaps arranging a consult with an otolaryngologist with a vocal specialty to make sure everything is healing okay. * The clinic could do a better job of dealing with people who might have GERD / silent reflux. These can complicate laryngitis. If you have this, consider taking a course of prilosec. * They give you a scopolamine patch behind the ear in recovery. For some people, scop makes it difficult or impossible to pass urine, which can cause you to be re-catheterized. * Your face will be asymmetrical in different ways than it was before, and this might bother you. * Don't expect to eat solid foods for a while. I had to order soylent, and then order more soylent, and more, and more, and more again. Even now that I'm eating mostly solid food, I still drink a lot of soylent, because my jaw is healing still. * The hairline scar will be bad for a while. * Talk to your doctor about low-dose oral minoxidil to reduce shock loss. The topical only works for some people. * Find an existing patient and get an invite to the surgery discord. I don't know what I'd have done without that community. What an amazing group.

I was standing, pigeon-toed and awkward, in the corridor outside of Dr. Deschamps-Braly's office,…read moreholding my x-rays. I heard a voice behind me saying, "You wouldn't happen to be going in here, would you?" It's the doctor himself, radiating kindness, competence, and looking just casual enough, with a nice suit and an open shirt collar. He shook my hand, let me in, introduced me to the staff, and disappeared into the back to prep for the appointment. It was nuts, at that time, to be treated and addressed appropriately (and warmly) without so much as a batted eyelash by the entire staff. The whole clinical experience is very luxurious and a little intimidating if you've never thought of yourself as "the type of person who gets plastic surgery," but trust me, they see the person inside, too; they're all wonderful people who went above and beyond before and after the surgical experience. I knew from the beginning that I wanted someone extremely experienced with doing facial feminization surgery, and especially someone who could do the type of extreme brow reconstruction that can turn a "chad" brow into an authentically feminine appearance. Dr. Deschamps-Braly impressed me with his extreme level of technical depth in that area. It's all very mathematical. I just said, "Give me the face I would've had if I'd started hormones when I was a kid," and he devised a plan of how much he wanted to take off, and where, on the spot. I initially wanted to hold onto a little nose character, but he convinced me quickly to get a "ski jump" nose to seal the deal in terms of a feminine apperance. It was also really charming that he accurately pegged me as a goth and delved gleefully into pictures of how the brow reconstruction looks while it's in-progress. You aren't going to find those pictures on the internet; it looks far more grisly than it actually is. The surgical experience went as well as it possibly could've. I woke up after dark. The nurse who monitored my recovery was really fun to hang out with, and, like the rest of the staff, saw the person inside. I enthusiastically followed his post-op instructions, and recovered rapidly. Walking is extremely important for healing and drainage, and at the time (six months prior to CoViD) walking around looking like a potato woman wasn't too dodgy. As for pain - well, it was discomforting. There was a lot of swelling and it felt like I'd hit pavement or been in a fistfight the previous day, but I wouldn't call it "painful." Ibuprofen and acetaminophen, were enough to deal with the pain and inflammation as long as I took them on-time. As for the results: I found it hard to process at first. Similar to what Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints) said in her review of a similar procedure, I woke up and I was like... okay? This is good, I guess? And then, especially as I hit week 6 and beyond, people started staring at me in astonishment and gushing about how beautiful I was. I'm skeptical of the entire concept of beauty, and I tend to see beauty more in terms of how you carry yourself, who you are, and how you nurture your personal growth over time, but apparently whatever pretty privilege is, I have it now. *Gulp*. Life after lockdown is going to be exciting. :)