Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

Some of the staff don't have a lot of English (which is fine!). The recovery room staff were impressed at my very small amount of German. Honestly I've mostly just said "genau" (to show that I understand something I'm being told) and "danke (schön)"! The night nurse, Janine, struggled with English but I found it helped if I aimed for a kind of "denglisch," saying English words that'd be most likely to make sense to her, and constructing sentences in a German way (as best I understand that, which probably isn't very well!).

It's nice being in Germany, where when the reception staff ask for my first name, she then immediately knew to ask "with a c or a k?"It's also nice being in Germany because when people ask where I'm from and I say Minnesota, they usually seem to have heard of it.

When I woke up in recovery I was next to a screen that showed my BP and it was 124/80 [basically perfect] and I was thinking oh yeah does my BMI make me so unhealthy?? yeah?! Take that, UK surgeons, you fatphobic fuckwits!!! Honestly, if they weren't such bigots I could've had this surgery fifteen miles from home instead of having to pay ten grand and go to Germany for two weeks...

The recovery nurse told me they get a lot of people from the UK "because of BMI." I muttered curses against BMI and she agreed. Shame it's so regular as to be familiar to them here, though!

(She did look up how much weight I lost in the surgery, which we feel should be deducted from the BMI if they must use it! She told me what it was but I wasn't awake enough to hear it properly/remember. I'm very touched that she's this on-side, though!)

When D told his Mum that we were going to Düsseldorf, she said "Düsseldorf isn't very touristy is it?" To be fair he hadn't told her yet why we were going to Düsseldorf. But still, it made me laugh, it made it sound like there was a version of a "destination weeding" for this. Destination top surgery. But my hospital room did have some swag that made it really seem like that: a sleep mask that said "TOP SURGERY" and then "Düsseldorf" underneath, with the clinic's logo next to it. All my take-home dressings and meds and things were in what looked exactly like a gift bag or a shopping bag from an upscale store where you buy small expensive things like jewelry or whatever: it also said "Top Surgery - Düsseldorf" and it even had a rainbow version of the clinic's logo.

The surgeon was carrying around one of these bags before my surgery, when he came to draw on me to mark everything up that he needed before the operation. He had like a dry erase marker and a normal metal ruler, but in one of these fancy little shopping bags.

D took a photo of the finished drawing; I was fascinated to see it but since I had to stand up straight and stay still for the measurements and markings, I couldn't see anything. The photo, of green lines all over my torso, my hairnet at a jaunty angle, and hte surgeon in his blue scrubs a blur behind me as he helps me hold up the gown behind my waist, is so funny. I wanted the photo not just so I could see it but so that V could; I wanted to tell them that I felt like a sewing pattern. They concurred that that's basically what it was.

When one of the friends I was updating about the surgery yesterday expressed the hope that my trip home wouldn't be too bad, I told him that as soon as I told V I had a surgery date, they said they already had researched mastectomy cushions and was ready to buy me this one. My friend replied, "You've got a de-boobing doula!" I told Vee this because I knew they'd love it; they did.