I ended the 2010 Journal with a Christmas Letter explaining my planned reassignment surgery. The letter got a heartwarming response, and if you haven’t read it, please click on the link and do so now; otherwise, the rest of this won’t make sense. (I promise you, dammit, you MUST click on that link before you read another word, or you won’t be able to understand the rest of this post.)
There is good news. Since i banged myself up so badly during the above Great Adventure, i checked around and discovered that i could go ahead and have the reassignment surgery early. I did so, and it was completely successful. The incision is healing and i’m becoming acclimatized to my new body. My doctors had warned me that while i would have conscious control of my body immediately, i would need to learn to deal with automatic and instinctive responses that are ingrained by a hundred thousand of years of evolution.
The first time this surgery was performed, there was an unfortunate incident in the Recovery Room when a meaty intern heard a Code called on the intercom and went rushing to respond. Without thinking, the patient leaped off the gurney and caught him before he made it to the door. Even in our finest hospitals, there’s not much that can be done when all the cervical vertebrae have been crushed.
Since then, the hospital staff have worked with patients on these instincts from the moment they regain consciousness, and by now i’m pretty much acclimatized and barely twitch at all over creatures running away from me, mostly just my ears lie back flat. Frankly, a more difficult adjustment is to no longer having an opposable thumb. Well, and to human speech. It’s pretty clear that i’ll always have a feline accent, but i’m understandable. After all, we Californians got accustomed to listening to our Governator, didn’t we?
So how am i looking? Well, they had to shave my entire head for the incision, and i’m kinda vain about my hair, so for now we’ll have to make do with this facial shot:
Photo by Victor Zhang
I’m working on a more bashful look, as Vic was acting kinda nervous during the shoot, but that may have been because i’d eaten a Jack Russell Terrier for breakfast, and you know how those things give you dog breath.
My friend David just wrote that he and Chris were planning a trip to California in April and would love to stay with me if they’d be safe. I assured him that they could take advantage of innate behavioral traits and be confident in their compete safety, as it is simply impossible for me to think of any creature as food after it has scratched behind my ears.
Both ears.
And if i growl when you stop, that means don’t stop.