Complications.

Gender Confirming Surgery is major surgery and is subject to all the complications any other surgery can have.

Jazz Jennings's Doctors Revealed Her Gender Confirmation Complications Were 'Severe'
"I think in hindsight we would have never sent you home from the hospital."
Women’s Health
By Jennifer Nied
January 22, 2020

• In a clip from the new season of I Am Jazz, Jazz Jennings's doctors are sharing new details about her gender confirmation surgery complications and ongoing transition.

• The teen reality star and LGBTQ+ activist underwent her first gender confirmation surgery in 2018 and had to have a follow-up procedure due to complications.

• Marci Bowers, MD, says, "it turned out tougher than any of us imagined. I think in hindsight we would have never sent you home from the hospital."

Jazz Jennings has had a tougher transition than her doctors expected. In the last two years, the teen reality star and LGBTQ+ activist has undergone multiple gender confirmation surgeries, and her doctors are now revealing more details about what went wrong in the new season of TLC's I Am Jazz, People reported.

In the episode clip, Jazz's doctors, Marci Bowers, MD, and Jess Ting, MD, speak to Jazz and her family about the previous surgeries. Bowers admits Jazz “has had a very difficult surgical course,” in the show. “She had a very incredible first surgery—it went seemingly very well, but there were problems. And that prompted a second surgery, which I was not a part of, unfortunately.”

“Taking Jazz on as a patient for surgery, we knew it was going to be a one-of-a-kind surgery,” Ting explained in the clip. “We don’t have the experience of having said we’ve done 50 of these. I was just not expecting her to have a complication as severe as what she did have.”
[…]
Jazz went through her initial gender confirmation surgery in June 2018. Doctors had to use a new technique because she started using hormones at such a young age. Since she hadn’t developed enough tissue to construct a vagina, Jazz's doctors used tissue from her stomach lining.

I know of three people who had complications from GCS, all of them had secondary infections, a friend ended up in the hospital for a couple of months while she fought an infection.

Personally I feel that the insurance companies are partly to blame because now that we have insurance the companies are dictating the length of stay in the hospital and sending us home to a germ infected home. And it is not GCS that we have to worry about it is any surgery, it is any surgery, secondary infections are increasing.

How to Tell If You Have an Infection Following Surgery

Infection after surgery
A surgical site infection (SSI) occurs when pathogens multiply at the site of a surgical incision, resulting in an infection. Urinary tract infections and respiratory infections can happen after any surgery, but SSIs are only possible after surgery that requires an incision.

SSIs are fairly common, occurring in 2 to 5 percent of surgeries involving incisions. Rates of infection differ according to the type of surgery. As many as 500,000 SSIs happen in the United States annually. Most SSIs are staph infections.

There are three types of SSIs. They’re classified according to how serious the infection is. Infections are caused by germs that enter your body during or after surgery. In severe cases, SSIs can cause complications, including sepsis, an infection in your blood that can result in organ failure.

Symptoms of infection after surgery
An SSI is classified as an infection that begins at the site of a surgical wound fewer than 30 days after the incision is made. Symptoms of an SSI after surgery include:

• redness and swelling at the incision site
• drainage of yellow or cloudy pus from the incision site
• fever

Muscle and tissue wound infection after surgery
[…]
Organ and bone infection after surgery
An organ and space infection after a surgery involves any organ that’s been touched or manipulated as a result of a surgical procedure.

These kinds of infections can develop after an untreated superficial infection or as the result of bacteria being introduced deep in your body during a surgical procedure. These infections require antibiotics, drainage, and sometimes a second surgery to repair an organ or address the infection.

GCS is major surgery, it is very invasive and I think many of us don’t realize that, like any major surgeries there is a lot that can go wrong. It is very important to follow the surgeon's instructions and their stay in the hospital should be long enough to make sure of proper healing.

All three people that I know had infections and they were serous life threatening infections, one had IV antibiotics for two months in the hospital before the infection was under control.

Another problem is that when they developed the infections many other doctors didn’t want to treat them, they told them to go back to the surgeon which in many cases were states away or even in another country. I suggest reading the above article in full if you are planning on surgery, not to scare you but to recognize the symptoms of a secondary infection.

When to see a doctor
If you think you have an SSI, you should contact your doctor right away. Symptoms include:

• soreness, pain, and irritation at the site
• a fever that spikes at about 100.3°F (38°C) or higher for more than 24 hours
• drainage from the site that’s cloudy, yellow, tinged with blood, or foul or sweet smelling

Lastly, I didn't write this to scare people away from having GCS but rather for them to take the proper precautions. My advice to anyone going to GCS, clean your home with a strong disinfectant, put on clean sheets on your bed, and wash your hands often. Follow your surgeon's instructions to the “T.”