[Part II]
Mid-September, a week before the procedure, I send in the balance of the fees via PayPal. I made reservations at the Grand Hotel Tijuana via Expedia, which ended up being cheaper than the referral discount rate. Plus points. I asked about the shuttle from San Diego, and Diana said that it was $140. Coupled with driving costs from Los Angeles, parking my car at a border lot--it was going to be close to another $100. In context of what I was spending for the procedure (and subsequent treatments) it\'s small beans, but I\'m a cheapskate. Found a Greyhound bus from LA to Tijuana for $35 round-trip.
Treatment day came around, and I boarded the bus at the Greyhound terminal at around 6AM. From there it was a few hours until the border, where we entered border control. Flashed my Global Entry card, and got a visitor visa document. Boarded another bus that took us from border control to the terminal at Tijuana. The plan was to hail an Uber to take me to the clinic.
A note about ride-share and taxis in Tijuana--there\'s no love lost among the Taxi drivers for the Uber drivers, and there\'s been altercations involving drivers and even their fares in the past. I\'ve had bad experiences with Tijuana taxi drivers in the past, so I figured Uber was going to be better regardless. When you\'re in Mexico, there\'s usually a Uber-English option that pops up, but for some reason it didn\'t show up on my phone. I had to walk a block from the terminal to get an Uber driver to agree, and two tries to get one who understood English. I have high school Spanish, which didn\'t help me with trying to understand stuff over the phone.
After a pleasant drive to the medical center, I went up to the clinic, which was very clean and elegantly appointed. It wouldn\'t look out of place in Santa Monica or West LA at all. I was greeted by the receptionist, and was told that Ian was still with another patient and to come back in about an hour for registration and pre-op. What\'s neat about Hotel Grand Tijuana is that it\'s the same complex as the medical tower, connected by an internal walkway. I went to the hotel lobby and asked if I could check in early--it was only noon, and check-in was not until 3PM. My room was ready, so I went up to drop off my bag and change into loose clothing. The standard hotel rooms seemed clean, but kind of dated--a cross between a nice motel and a hotel from the 90\'s. They swapped the lights with CFLs, so the room seemed kind of dim. I also didn\'t realize this was a thing, but there\'s a slot for you to put your keycard in to trigger the lights and electrical power to the room. There\'s free wifi, but they require you to sign in via Facebook for some reason.
I went back to the clinic and met with Ian. He directed me to a consultation room where I filled out my registration forms. A few minutes later, Dr. Cassavantes stopped by and asked me about what my expectations were for the procedure. I told him that my goal was that I wanted as natural-looking augmentation as possible, and was fine if that meant using lower concentrations of
PMMA. I asked what the real benefit was for platelet-rich plasma (PRP), and he said that aside from helping with the healing process it helped to pre-expand the tissue and help the
PMMA to diffuse more thoroughly. Talking to him made me feel less anxious--he was very up front about the possible complications, including the cases of some of the adverse reports on
PhalloBoards.
I was walked back to the procedure room and changed into a gown--which was basically a standard hospital gown put on backwards: covered in the back and open in the front. It was really awkward and I had to suppress the urge to clasp the front closed like a robe. I had pre-pictures taken, and then sat on the bed. The procedure bed really isn\'t a bed--it\'s kind of a chair that can fully recline. I had blood drawn (PRP is prepared by centrifuging your blood to remove the red blood cells), and then was fully reclined in the supine position. After disinfecting, they began the process of anesthetizing my penis, which consisted of a series of circumferential lidocaine injections from the pubic mound to the edge of the
Circumcision scar. This was probably the worst part of the whole procedure, since there were many injections and some were a bit painful. I stared up into the halogen ceiling lamps to distract myself. There were three people handling my junk at the same time, first time that\'s ever happened, and altogether a bit disconcerting.
Dr.
Morales began the injections of the PRP. Even with the local anesthetic, you could still feel the pressure sensation of the cannula, and occasionally slight pain where not quite enough lidocaine diffused to the nerves. After the penis was engorged with the fluid, Dr. Cassavantes drew a sort of fishbone pattern along the dorsal part my penis to split it into several regions. He was then handed his famous microcannula loaded up with Linnea and began injecting. After a while, they said they were done and brought me back in a seated position. I looked down and I was HUGE!
I know that most of that swelling was temporary, mostly fluid carriers for the
PMMA and the plasma that would eventually be absorbed, but it was a kick to see my penis that large. Length wasn\'t part of the equation, so it was kind of comical in proportion, but I couldn\'t even wrap my hand around it. They bandaged me up and told me to come back in a couple of hours.
Bandaged as it was, it was a very strange sensation to walk around with something significantly heavier in the pants. To be honest I kind of got a taste of what the augmentation addicts were feeling. The lobby of the medical tower has two convenience stores, and I went to one of them to stock up on some bottled water. I went back to my room to wait out the few hours by watching some Netflix.
Back at Avanti, Ian took me into the procedure room to remove the bandages and instructed me on how to massage the swelling so that the
PMMA would be evenly distributed. Again, kind of weird to have someone in a clinical setting kneading at my junk, swollen at that. The nature of the swelling meant that temporarily, the glans was a bit enveloped. I was instructed to massage the penis to force the collected fluids away once an hour and to come back the next day. I also had antibiotics, ibuprofen, and Flomax to take.
That night, I ordered up some room service for lunch and then dinner (decent club sandwich, mediocre nachos, and very disappointing pizza), and proceeded to massage myself. I noticed that there tended to be more swelling on my right distal end, so I had to take particular precautions to make sure that part was massaged away. The shaft looked pretty bruised, and with massaging, there were occasional droplets of blood from the injection sites. I had some chlorhexidine wipes with me and made sure I disinfected myself before and after. Last thing I wanted to have to explain was how I got a cutaneous infection to my primary care doctor back home while the penis was still very swollen.
I\'m a little heavier than I\'d like to have been (I\'m now down 25 pounds since the procedure), but I noticed that the pubic fat pad had a tendency to force the fluids towards to glans, the distal third--and the effect varied depending on my body position. It was more pronounced when I was seated. This would be a bit consequential in the long run.
The next morning, I reported back to Avanti, and checked in with Ian, who repeated the manipulations and asked me if I had any issues during the night. There was none, and I was told to come back a few times during the day for follow-up inspections. The fact that my hotel room was only a hundred yards away made things very easy. I grabbed food across the street at Carl\'s Jr., since my room service experience left me pretty disappointed, and shuttled between my room and Avanti over the course of the day. Altogether I decided to stay two nights, so the morning after checking out, I went back to the clinic for the last time and was given the stretching instrument.
I caught my Uber and hopped on the bus to the US border. Having my Global Entry card, I got to skip the line (which was kind of meaningless since I still needed to wait for the San Diego bus with the rest of the group). I had to declare anything brought in, so I showed the border patrol agent the bottles of meds I was prescribed by Dr. C. Antibiotics and ibuprofen was easy enough to explain--trying to explain what Flomax was took a bit, but I was eventually waved through. The bus ride back home was uneventful.
