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Karen's thoughts

A blog by KarenPayne in General

  • Entries

    261

  • Comments

    690

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    132,315

About this blog

This blog is dedicated to telling those who read the entries about my journey in hopes that something can be learned. 

Entries in this blog

Breast implants

For the past week or so have been doing research on surgeons in my area for performing breast implants and finally found one but they are booked until May for consultations. Went to there office, made the appointment and took home several pages for them like anytime one sees a new doctor. I thought it was interesting but not surprised that surgeons and doctors have a list of people who had surgery recently as after giving the receptionist my name she pulled up my address and phone number.

Last entry on identification

I started the process for my name and gender change the last week of last November which took five weeks. The gender part in short (I did write about this before) is allowed before surgery by a therapist on a special DMV list. In the month of January I did my social security card, all my credit cards, bank checks (did not arrive till after I returned from California) and PayPal account. Today the final card arrived, my insurance card. Wish I had this card before surgery simply because the

Work asked me to...

I am still on sick leave but went into work yesterday to try out my new username for signing into the local network. Talked to my boss, told him that I most likely would not be back next week as Marci's office has not given me a letter to return to work yet. He was fine with that. He then said, could you please write something up for your business partners whom do not know about your transition. I told him that I already did this. He then asked if I would write something up for our IT divisio

UPDATE Dilation break through

I have been working on a good method to work on dilation with the largest dilator which I was having not so great luck with. As mention before I need to dilate three times a day for 15 minutes. Small and medium dilator were fine but the larger one I only could manage a few times with then tried 15 minutes with the medium then gave up after five minutes with the larger size dilator. Last night I believe I have found a simple method to start with five minutes with the medium dilator then 15 min

I can relate

One of my friends on Facebook posted this quote “The question isn’t who’s going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” - Ayn Rand I think many feel that they must wait for permission or wish it will happen but the down right truth is you make it happen. Heck I will admit to falling into this mindset in regards to transitioning but for years was the one "who is going to stop me" when it came to teaching specialty classes in self-defense. So it is possible to be of both mindsets and I

Great day

One of my old co-workers who retired several years ago wanted to hook up so I said how about lunch. We met at a great Mexican restaurant, ate and spent an hour talking. Then we went across the street to the local mall, hit Starbucks then walked around the mall for about five lapse talking about everything under the sun. Finally say down and chatted some more. She confided with me that she wanted to get together before this but felt like I might take it as her hooking up with me. Of course

Setting my new goal, breast augmentation

I have been research who to select for doing my breast augmentation in the latter part of this year. I would really like to do this here in Oregon but not sure who to trust as I have heard some not so pleasant stories. For instance one of the woman who cuts my hair told me her left breast was royally messed up and been battling with the surgeon for months now. I am not taking this lightly by any means. Very shortly hope to have my new countdown and be done with this before the end of this year.

Dilation helper

One of the worst things about dilation is setting up. Currently I place two pillows in front of a chair, in front of this a pad design to ease the pain of sitting down then two pillows in front of that which I fold in half and place under my calves to position properly. Get out the KY and butter knife plus the dilator. Lastly turn on the timer on my cell phone. Do the dilation, clean up. Takes about 5-10 minutes to setup, 15 minutes to dilate then another five minutes to clean up. All this

Grocery store then Adult book store...

I get half way to the grocery store and realized nothing is needed but ended up going anyways to pickup vegetables for dinner tomorrow night. On the ways there is an adult book store which has many toys and decided what the heck and went in. So I make a bee-line for the female toys, and there are of course more for females then there are for males and took my time gazing. The salesman came over a few times, first time he said if you want me to open any package let me know and thanked him whil

Facebook again

I have been waiting to see if any of my friends would un-friend me after announcing my gender change, instead I actually gained two friends, lost zero. One I understand as we are both heavily into martial arts and have many common friends in martial arts while the other one not sure about but she is a mutual friend from a person I attended high school with on the East Coast. So to date all is well.

Teaching today

I was asked by a group of six to teach a empty hand defensive class today. My only limitation was to not go to the ground as I am still healing. Many of my techniques end up with me locking up an attacker in a manner that I can call the police and keep them at bay with just my legs and be on top of them. Generally speaking for these types of classes I have one concept to teach and also allow the students to agree say on one common attack and work that into the concepts I teach. Lastly, I demo

I am truly honored

I was just reading Emmasweet’s latest blog post and realized how fortunate I am to have found this safe haven unlike no other on the web. Not to leave anyone out but Monica, Emma, UsernameOptional and Lori are wonderful people and if you have not looked at other sites this one is the best. Way too many focus on one or two high level topics of interest unlike this one. Well this entry was not meant to win any awards, just wanted to put this out there

Facebook

I was contemplating on what I should do for Facebook, create a new account or change the current male one so I created a new one but then thought that this is going to be tough getting friends over to the new account and stopped after creating the new female account last week. While surfing through my male account yesterday I decided to delete the new female account and change the male account to female via gender option then changed from my male name to my female name. Walked away and upon c

There is hope (dilation)

So recently I moved from the smaller dilator to the medium dilator, first time was painful the whole time but got a little better each time yet was still painful. Tonight I just finished and very happy that there was almost no pain. If things progress as they have been I should be good by say Sunday. Any ways the purpose of this entry is too tell others who will go down this path is that in the beginning it is no picnic but does get better. eek not looking forward to the larger one :(

Mornings

For 99% of the days since surgery I have bad mornings. Most of them I wake up way too early. Many of them I feel nausea to some extent and just down right crappy. Usually take a two hour nap within two hours of waking up. I have noticed the past few days that I am starting to feel better. What really makes me feel normal is right after morning dilation and a nice hot shower. Anyways thought others going down this path might be alerted to you too may experience this too.

Facebook cleansing

Don't know what got me started (Kevin Gallagher account) but I went into my albums and decimated most of my photos of my former self but could not bring myself to remove them all which where the one's I was teaching self-defense with. Think I will wait on those until I have pictures for my other (Karen Payne account) FB account. I did first save the photos off to my backup drive, you never know if for some strange reason I might want them but by all intense and purpose they are now buried in the

Coffee at work

I emailed a co-worker whom I told he could use my parking spot at work that I would be in for HR work. He said let's all go out for coffee, which I said sure thing. When I got to work about 10 or so co-workers came over to see how I was doing. I gave them a brief on how things were going and that I will be out for several more weeks (Robin at Marci's office emailed me today and said I can go back to work around March 2nd). So six of us took a walk over to the nearby Starbucks, got coff

Visited with ex-sister in-law and children last night

I texted her last week and said how about we get together? She said, next Sunday and why not come for dinner. When I arrived there was no mistaking that I had transitioned and this was the first they heard of it but she had figured it out from cryptic post I made on Facebook over the past six months. Her husband took it in stride but later confided in my he was very surprised. Her daughter and grand-son were there too who just heard from my daughter. We spent abound two hours chatting in t

Female emotions

I will start off by saying that in the past 15 years there has been just one time I truly cried for something real. Today I was watching Chicago Fire television show where there was a very emotional scene. I could feel my body reacting to what I was watching and figured my eyes would become watery but not the case today, I completely broke down, cried, body shook and I actually made sounds. This has to be the hormones as I have noticed in recent months more joy in various aspects of my life,

Crappy morning

I went to bed around 10PM and woke up at 2:30AM which is not enough sleep, tinkered around until 5AM and then got another hour sleep. When I woke up still did not feel well but knew I had to do my dilation and was the worst dilation since the first one. I glided the tool in and knew immediately that it was going to be a painful time but kept on going. Usually immediately afterwards I take a shower which tends to make me feel normal again but it has been one hour since the shower and just beg

My mother is a smartie

After surgery my mother called hearing I was in California for surgery and inquired to what the surgery was. I told her it was not life threatening on three different times days after surgery, not to worry mom. Well this morning she called and asked about my surgery again and I said, don't you remember, I told you it was nothing to worry about. She said, I think I know what it was for. I said, what you do think, she said gender change? Well I am surely not going to deny it as my only reaso

Holy cow

Went to the grocery store this morning and while heading down one of the aisles a co-worker was crossing the aisle, look right at me and did not notice me. That was indeed a good sign as you can not fake not recognizing someone I had worked with for 15 years verses the look that someone gives you that they are ignoring you, at least in my book. This happened two other times in the past year so guess I am on the right track.

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