I paid for the hospital component of my surgery today. What with no health insurance it'll be about $2,500 in total. Depending on anaesthetist and pathology costs. I received the info pack from John James with all the info about surgery and prep work I need to do. I'm just starting to feel a little nervous. It probably won't hit me until the needle is about to go into my arm.

I am a little bit worried about the post-operative pain. I'm a little bit worried about having flesh carved off me. When I first came to grips with the necessity of this surgery it felt like amputation. Having gone through a grieving process it no longer feels like amputation, it feels closer in concept to having an appendix removed. My cunt will look different. It will have a different appearance, a different texture! That is so strange, the contours of my body will forever be different, a smooth one rather than a jagged landscape.

I've conveyed the story in bits and pieces, but I'll have a go at expressing it fully.

When I was about 7 years old I was playing in the bath tub when I discovered bodies were cool and fascinating. It felt extraordinary, the beautifulness and bizarreness of the human body. I think it started with discovering how cool fingers were when you really looked at them, the wrinkles and bends, the different shapes they could make, the fascination with toes and their similarities and differences with fingers (I think this started my habit of doing lots of stretches and things with my toes, something which is quite good for you). So for, I'm not sure how long, a period of time I'd spend ages in the bath marvelling at the human body. Eventually I happened upon my groin, which seemed very simple on a cursory glance, but I discovered to my amazement that it had all sorts of different bits and was quite interesting and strange... in a weird kind of way.

At about the same time as a precocious young child I knew about the basics of evolutionary theory and I also knew that Freud was a sexist dickhead who thought that girls had penis envy (I think my big brother introduced me to Freud as he would have been a precocious 12 year old at the time).

Freud pissed me off, understandably. So while I was thinking in the bath I thought... what if Freud got it wrong, what if girls aren't amputated boys, but penises are stretched girl bits... maybe cave men were created when cave women were wandering around the bush (so to speak) without much on and some women got their bits caught on barb-wire or prickly bushes and got stretched. So boys are just stretched girls, girls aren't amputated boys.

I was very pleased with this theory (which sans barb-wire is closer to biological theory) and being of a somewhat scientific mind decided to test this theory by seeing if there was any residual stretch left in female genitalia. I didn't want to get a big ugly stupid penis, but I wanted to see if there was just a tiny bit of stretch left that might indicate that once upon a time there was much greater stretchiness. So some gentle tentative tugging on different bits (whose names I would not learn for quite some time), and not much in the way of give until...

Until I gently tugged on my right inner labia, which seemed to stretch enormously! going froma small petite thing to nearly double in size. Talk about freak out city. I had damaged my beautiful neat girl bits and now one was much bigger than the other! Possibly that was latently there all the time, who knows, I certainly thought I had hideously damaged myself and ruined my girl bits and would no longer be symmetrical.

I hoped that it would shrink back in time. It didn't. It haunted me, I couldn't tell my parents I'd broken myself and dreaded what a doctor might say, so I kept it to myself (for nearly 20 years it would turn out). That labia is on the larger size of average, to this day it extends beyond my outer labia and is big, but not unhealthily painfully so... if only the story had ended there.

Haunted by my asymmetry this 7 year old (perhaps 8), took matters into her own hands and unable to shrink one labia, she decided to stretch the other labia to match. Unfortunately this labia was already quite smaller and thinner than the other labia and did not have much matter to stretch. But this young child was determined and stretched and pulled and evened things up... only the left labia was not a solid lip, it was more like a fan with the fabric taken away, pulled up pieces of flesh. My hope was that my body would fill in the gaps. It didn't. Indeed the wear and tear of everyday life on the groin plus hormonal growth of bits meant that I had strands of flesh with callused lumps at the end. The user pic being a mild example.

As a teen 14-15 horseriding was hell on occasion... I lost flesh from the pounding of the saddle. Sometimes I'd help bits on the way when the tissue had thinned near the callused lump through pinching through the tether of flesh with my fingernails. I said not a word and was secretly glad the damaged tissue was going away and being tough was an important part of my identity. I hated my oversized labia and wished parts of it would tear off, but it was firmly thick and healthy, miming cutting it off with a pair of scissors.

When I became 100% sexually active (virginity being a slippery term... but when inserting dicks got involved) at 18 I lost a lot more flesh. That was a lot of silent pain as there was a degree of tearing that was quite deep and slow, through a lot more tissue. Some got fingernail treatment as the flesh thinned around the callused end, some lost in the throes of passion (enjoying sex being in no small degree about grim determination and orgasm about finding the other side of pain), one rotated 360 degrees, went black, still wouldn't come off and was exceptionally painful to touch... so I amputated it with a pair of nailclippers in the end - although I nearly went to a doctor at that point. Having now spoken to medical professionals I realise how incredibly lucky I was, given how much bleeding can occur from cuts to this region. A chunk of flesh about the size of a fingernail tore off after much pain, it was a deep tear and I'd guided its progression so that the tear would curve an arc (rather than just tear deeper) and would in the process remove the worst of the tassels. I remember showing the chunk of flesh to my lover when he came home. It freaked him out a little I think, possibly recommended a doctor, but I down played it. No one else knew about the damage until this year. (edit, except I realise a small portion of people who read my LJ a long time ago - and it was a only a small segment of the tale, hideous tearing only told in a joking manner in the comments)

With that chunk the worst of the damaged material was gone. I could get on with things. As time passed I even grew happy with my big labia, it was part of me and I was one happy, whole, incorporated being. I loved my yoni and it was sacred and beautiful as it was. It's ironic that it was at a place of self acceptance and love of all my bits that the next part of the story happens.

I remember when I got together with wibble and was thus having sex on a regular basis I did check some of the remaining damage, had a think about how it was going and decided if I was careful it probably wouldn't cause me trouble for a while. I didn't mention my labia saga... you know, never quite got round to it, I was so used to just dealing with it. And then it flared up again badly this year. Some great foreplay one night and then... owww... to my credit I had reached a degree of trust and self assertiveness that when I felt a sharp pain like a knife cutting into my groin I only tried to ignore it for a little while before fessing up to the pain. So I lightly say it's probably ghost pain and tell wibble the story. Wibble seemed more than a little surprised that I'd never told him and that he'd never noticed. You see I have stealth labia, they fold down and look like normal labia especially these days when the most protuberant stuff has been torn off.

It wasn't ghost pain though, they were on the move and once awoken the pain became worse. I went to my doctor and told the story, tears surprising me. My doctor said she'd never seen anything like it and was astounded that no doctor had spotted it before - I refrained from telling her that she had done several gynaecological exams on me previously. Stealth Labia. Once I started talking about it I couldn't stop, colleagues at work, the quiz on LJ. It was strange the grief, some grief at the amputation, but more grief for that stubborn young woman, grief for the pain I'd silently endured, the surgery I'd performed on myself I could now view with horror. I had completely forgotten all those details... It's the healthy thing to do, but now that the pain had returned the memory was returning and it was time to grieve.

It's interesting how the healthy attitude towards my body as a young child (this is my body and my genitals and I say who goes near them) backfired on me a little. But then again, it only backfired in the short term, in the long term the same healthy attitude is what has helped me navigate the world of doctors and stand up to fuckwits.