First update: with by far the most professional, prompt, and comprehensive response to my initial enquiries, coming from left field to build an early lead is... Dr Chet!

That's right, the longtime pretender to the Suporn crown, looking to prove he should be nobody's number two choice, Dr Chet is aching to give Tattie a vadge! Can he stay the front-runner at this pace?

(I have no idea why I'm narrating this in horse race fashion.)

@Tattie

The best advice I can give you is to start with asking yourself if you're wanting full depth or zero/minimal depth (it's the same thing, I've just heard both terms for it. It's got just enough depth where the canal would be for your vulva to lay properly, so like a fingertip's depth).

If you think you might ever want full depth, start with full depth.

After that, ask yourself how you prioritize these things: Aesthetics, sensation, and -- if applicable -- depth.

That will help winnow your surgeons down, and also help focus your research.

As an example: I realized right away that zero depth wasn't going to work for me.

So I was left with full depth, and I struggled to prioritize them and eventually decided that sensation edged out aesthetics, but I also wanted good depth -- but most of all, I wanted consistency of results and minimal complication rates.

So I started by looking at full depth and quickly decided against the classic PI approach, and so looked hard at two other types of full depth -- sigmoid colon and PPT. The first takes out a chunk of colon and uses it for the canal. PPT uses your peritoneal tissue (it's the stuff that makes up the lovely sack that holds all your organs in place) for the canal.

I leaned more towards PPT, because I really didn't want to deal with a colon resection. Once I narrowed it down to PPT or something like it, the number of surgeons I was wading through dropped dramatically.

So then I could review aesthetics, sensation, complication rates, etc -- which helped me pick a surgeon. (Bluebond, who does a hybrid PPT method I quite like, and whose work is solid and consistent. And she has the wait lists to prove it).