I'm A Nurse Who Cares For Gender Surgery Patients. Here's Why I Love It So Much.
I’m an intensive care unit nurse in Austin. I work with the number one gender confirmation surgical team in the world, in a tiny hospital, in the middle of Texas. I get to tell my dad and strangers at parties, “I help make dicks and vaginas,” and that’s really fun, because my dad gets embarrassed easily. But what I should say is, “I help make people whole,” because that’s actually what my job is.
When my groggy patients open their eyes for the first time after surgery, I say, “Congratulations! Want to see?” I gently pull back the covers to reveal their new and appropriate parts and they well up with tears and then I well up with tears and we celebrate with morphine, because gender confirmation surgery hurts. As they nod back off I pat their hand and walk away, thinking, Goodnight, little bunny.
When people ask me why I became a nurse, I have to tell them, “I don’t really know.” My college was paid for by an academic scholarship, and I thought I might use it to become an artist, or a writer, or an archeologist. My parents, who desperately wanted me to have a stable job with an actual income, put me on the phone with my aunt, who was a nurse. She told me all about job security, only working three days a week, and getting to wear pajamas to work. I loved science and biology and pajamas and thought, why not?
After I graduated I was very lucky and got hired into a cardiovascular ICU, where we took care of patients after their open-heart surgery. This was a trial by fire, and I went home after my shifts for the first two years to cry and drink a lot. People were code-bluing left and right, I had to yell “CLEAR” almost every shift (yes, we do that in real life), and I gave countless units of blood. It was hard, but it was also exciting and challenging, and I dug it. I liked it so much, in fact, that I got a tattoo of an anatomical heart on my arm.
Fifteen years into my career as a CVICU nurse, I moved to Austin and took a job at this...
