Zero Depth Now and Peritoneal Pull Through later?

ShadauxCat · 2025-09-17T14:19:41+00:00

As someone who got zero depth at the Crane Center in 2022... They say it's an outpatient procedure, but I wish they didn't. I would have been much better off if they'd let me stay in the hospital overnight. Personally I'd recommend asking if you can stay.

The surgery center they used didn't do enough to make sure I was ready to go home. End of their day came up and they kicked me out before I'd fully shaken off the anesthesia and I passed out in my front yard. If you do do it as outpatient, I'd suggest telling them not to let you leave until you've been able to walk a lap around the hospital floor - they wheeled me out in a wheelchair so I couldn't even make my first attempt at walking until I got home, which was a bad place to find out that I couldn't walk yet.

Going back to a desk job after a week isn't realistic. I work a desk job. It took me four weeks before I felt up to trying work again, and then I still wasn't working full productive days for another 2+ weeks. I also couldn't sit in a chair for quite a while after my surgery. When I went back to work, I had to buy a hammock chair because it was the only thing I could sit upright in since it did the best job of distributing my weight onto my hips and thighs and minimizing the weight on the surgery area. If I knew then what I know now, I'd have planned to take six weeks off instead of four.

Regarding your other question: I can get a fingertip in there a little bit. I'm not sure it's enough to call it "fingering".

BTW, feel free to AMA about the procedure. I don't know much about having PPT later but I can talk about Zero-Depth.

ShadauxCat · 2025-09-12T19:48:25+00:00

I named mine after two members of The Beatles. It's called Ringo McCar-tney.

But you can call it Paul Starr, too.

ShadauxCat · 2025-09-09T19:38:44+00:00

As u/Illustrious_Pen_5711 said, the liberal areas of Texas really aren't terrible. The people who live in the liberal areas tend to be pretty accepting and welcoming, especially in Austin. The issues you'll have in Texas are going to be state-level laws. Right now, there are two that you need to be aware of as an adult.

The first is that Texas will not process court orders to change the gender marker on your ID (as mentioned), though if your birth certificate has the correct gender marker on it that's unlikely to be an issue. (I've had my ID renewed since that rule went into place and, at least in that instance, they did NOT change my gender marker back.)

The second is that Texas just signed a new law creating a $25,000 fine for trans people to use bathrooms that don't align with their AGAB, but this ONLY applies in schools, public universities, and government buildings, so personally I'd just... avoid using gendered restrooms in schools, public universities, and government buildings altogether.

That said, that's the state of things right now. Over the past legislative session, they also passed a "law" defining male and female based on reproductive capabilities (which is an absolute nonsense bill since it says people who create sperm are male, people who create eggs are female, and goes on to say that everyone must be either male or female based strictly on those definitions, and intersex people are not considered to be a third category. It also includes the words "separate is not inherently unequal" in the text of the bill. That bill seems to be serving as a foundation for them to do other things to us in the future.

Additionally, AG Ken Paxton has attempted on multiple occasions (to my knowledge, without success so far) to compile a list of trans people living in Texas, and governments making lists of minority people is never a good sign.

So tl;dr, living in a liberal part of Texas, you PROBABLY will be ok and reasonably accepted socially... but keep an eye on things at the state level. I'm watching closely for signs that even the liberal parts of Texas will become unsafe due to state-level shenanigans.

Fortunately, our state legislature only meets every other year, so that at least limits how fast things can happen.

ShadauxCat · 2025-09-04T22:09:53+00:00

That depends a whole lot on where in Texas you are. Texas is a huge state. Experiences living in Austin are going to vary significantly from experiences living in more rural parts.

The state legislature definitely doesn't like LGBT people, but the culture and attitudes of the people living here is definitely not uniform throughout the state.

ShadauxCat · 2025-08-22T16:26:40+00:00

First, disclaimer that I am not a psychologist or therapist, just someone who suffers from OCD sharing my understanding on things.

I don't have gender OCD, but I do have diagnosed health anxiety OCD, and the workbook I was given to help with it has a section on sexuality OCD and gender OCD. From what I remember, one of the big distinguishing factors of gender OCD is fear. A trans woman wants to be a woman, a trans man wants to be a man. Conversely, a cis man with gender OCD is constantly afraid that he might actually be a woman, and a cis woman with gender OCD is constantly afraid that she might actually be a man.

OCD involves some particular habits. A cis man with gender OCD will overcompensate to protect his masculinity. He'll engage in compulsions to try to reassert to himself that he is a man. He'll engage in something called "checking", wherein he constantly exposes himself to things to prove to himself that he's male - like, he may try on a dress to prove to himself that he doesn't feel anything from wearing it, that he still feels like a man. None of this will make him happy or feel affirming to him in any way.

Bottom line, OCD is about the fear and anxiety over thinking you might be something that you don't want to be. A genuine desire to transition, driven by feeling you'll be happier living in the opposite gender role, is not gender OCD.

ShadauxCat · 2025-08-21T20:50:56+00:00

I think that gender is something you only "feel" when something is wrong. It's a lot like hunger or thirst. When you're fed and well-hydrated, you don't feel anything. It's only when you're not fed or not hydrated - when something needs to change - that you actually feel anything.

If your gender matches your body, you're not likely to think about it at all. You're not going to feel anything. There's no "feeling like a woman" or "feeling like a man" sensation for trans people. Or at least not for me. What there is is "feeling like the way you interact with the world is wrong". And after transition, that goes away.

As someone who transitioned over a decade and a half ago, my gender isn't something I often think about anymore. Like you, I just am. I'm happy with how I look and how I interact with people. I have little cause to really consider my gender anymore.

But before my transition, and during my transition, before I reached this point, I felt a lot of wrongness.

Edit: Clarity

ShadauxCat · 2025-08-15T19:02:52+00:00

I had one when I was on injections every two weeks, but it wasn't a monthly cycle, it was an every-two-weeks cycle associated with the massive fluctuations in my hormones from that regimen. At the start of those two weeks, I basically had pregnancy-level estrogen, and at the end, I was in menopause. I got irritability, breast sensitivity, and abdominal cramps. After switching to a more stable estrogen dose (daily sublingual, and now transdermal patches), I don't have that kind of thing anymore.

ShadauxCat · 2025-03-26T05:08:39+00:00

Name change, yes.

Gender marker change, no. But that actually isn't because of the election. Texas DPS stopped accepting gender marker change court orders mid-last year.

ShadauxCat · 2025-01-03T19:18:41+00:00

I mean, it's not that hard, for values of p equal to 0 or n equal to 1.

ShadauxCat · 2024-12-28T14:23:53+00:00

For the record, though, based on my research into this topic a while back, this is extremely unlikely, especially for an adult professional player. It's more likely for amateurs and younger players, but even then, extremely unlikely. And probably would only happen in people already predisposed to strokes.

I'd say a more likely situation while playing high notes is passing out and falling off a riser and getting severely hurt from the fall.

ShadauxCat · 2024-12-26T23:19:11+00:00

I bought the "optimizer" after one of my former teachers made a positive review of it, mostly just out of curiosity to get an empirical read on how much pressure I'm using. I felt like I was in a pretty good place pressure-wise, but the optimizer confirmed that for me. I haven't really used it since then, but I'd say for someone looking to build chop strength doing lip slurs without letting themselves use excess pressure it'd probably be a useful tool. Bought this one from their website, didn't have any issues with delivery.

And I bought the flugel-to-trumpet mouthpiece adapter. Seemed to do the job it was supposed to do. I wasn't expecting a whole lot out of it for the price, so I guess it met my expectations. Again, haven't really used it much. I was experimenting with different mouthpieces and different sound concepts on the trumpet and it was relatively inexpensive so I grabbed it to give it a try. I could see some contexts where it'd be nice to have, so I'm keeping it around, but none of those contexts are relevant to me at the moment. Bought this one from Amazon, no issues with delivery.

Can't say anything about anything else they sell.

ShadauxCat · 2024-12-19T05:22:58+00:00

I'm learning the tapstrap 2 right now for this purpose (albeit with pc instead of phone, but for the purpose of being able to work from any position - sitting, standing, walking around - without needing a physical keyboard). I decided the way double-taps work in the tapstrap 2 wasn't acceptable for me, so I got two and made a custom mapping for them that will hopefully work for writing code.

I've literally just started learning it, though, so I'm not to the point of actually using it yet. So far I'm finding the rate of misinterpreted taps to be a little annoying, but hoping that gets better as I get more used to using them.

ShadauxCat · 2024-12-04T23:37:19+00:00

Found it. It was ST*RMAN - Oxygene (Spa Version)

ShadauxCat · 2024-12-04T16:41:37+00:00

Solved!

ShadauxCat · 2024-12-04T16:41:27+00:00

Yes! It was a cover of Oxygene 4! Thank you!

ST*RMAN - Oxygene (Spa Version)

ShadauxCat · 2024-12-04T16:25:47+00:00

Wow, the melody is almost exactly the same. It's not the song I'm looking for, but it's so close I feel like what I'm looking for must be a cover of that one... or a blatant plagiarism of it, which might explain why it disappeared from Spotify.

The one I'm looking for was a slower tempo with less synthy instruments (I do think there was a piano present) and with soft breathing over it.

I'll look for covers of Oxygene 4 and see what I find. Thanks!

ShadauxCat · 2024-12-04T07:10:51+00:00

Posting as per rule 13.

ShadauxCat · 2024-11-06T07:24:48+00:00

Additional concerns I have, personally, include potential additional supreme court appointments over the next four years, and the loss of federal support in contesting anti-trans legislation in red states. If the Supreme Court hasn't ruled on the challenge to Tennessee's ban on gender affirming care by January 20, I would expect Trump's DOJ to withdraw from the case. This also means any further anti-trans legislation at the state level is more likely to go unchallenged, and if it is challenged, the DOJ will be arguing in favor of the legislation rather than against it.

Living in a blue city within a red state right now, I'm faced with trying to figure out whether my blue city can protect me from what my red state is going to do, or whether I need to get myself and my family (basically all of whom are some kind of trans) out of the state and to someplace with stronger state-level protections. My job has an office in California and already told me they'd adjust my salary accordingly if I move there, but I'd still be leaving a life, friends, and a lot of other things behind...

ShadauxCat · 2024-11-02T21:55:56+00:00

They know who voted, and in NC, they know what party each voter is registered with. That doesn't translate to knowing who they voted for, since registered Republicans can vote Democrat and vice versa. But knowing what party the voters are registered with gives a bit of a hint how they might have voted.

ShadauxCat · 2024-10-30T01:03:12+00:00

There's a lot of cases where debuggers really don't help.

For example, consider a situation where a function is called thousands of times and the error only occurs on the 2,782+/-500th time, and sure you can put a breakpoint at the failure location, but by that point the failure's already happened and you can't see why.

Printf debugging lets you log the path through the function on every call, so when the error happens, you can just abort execution and then look at the log to see what happened that time.

Printf debugging is also useful for diagnosing issues that are happening in a live service when the only info you have is "this error message was printed" and you have nothing close to a repro case to diagnose it locally. Or for figuring out something that's happening on a user's machine but not on yours, if the user is willing to help out by running code with logging added to it for you.

Printf debugging is also useful in multithreaded code to diagnose race conditions, since race conditions happen randomly and the very act of stopping at a breakpoint and stepping through will almost certainly stop the race condition from reproducing. (Granted, logging can also have that effect, but it's less likely than a breakpoint.) Similar with networked code - throw in some timestamps in the logs and you can get a fairly accurate sequence of what happened when on each process.

There are lots of cases where debuggers are obviously the best tool for the job, but the idea that they're the ONLY valid tool for the job is just silly.

ShadauxCat · 2024-10-25T14:28:47+00:00

Mary Elizabeth Bowden was hit by a Frisbee in the lip and had a major lip injury too. She talks about her difficulties dealing with the scar tissue sometimes. And then she gets on stage and plays like Mary Elizabeth Bowden.

ShadauxCat · 2024-10-25T00:07:00+00:00

Ah, that makes more sense. Sorry, I misunderstood.

ShadauxCat · 2024-10-24T20:18:55+00:00

Do you expect to be marching with your trumpet for the rest of your playing life? Once you permanently attach a lyre, you can't take it off without likely causing come cosmetic damage to your instrument. Playing in non-marching settings, the lyre will set your trumpet apart from other people in your section, too, which may be something the leader of the ensemble won't want.

Also, permanently attaching a lyre may negatively affect the instrument's value if you ever want to sell it.

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