I once knew of a woman who was, frankly, the best-prepared patient I’ve ever known when she went to see her plastic surgeon for a labiaplasty. Many women meet with their surgeons, not knowing what questions to ask, not even knowing what makes a good surgeon. Others are a bit more prepared, and come in with a list of handwritten questions. Lori, though, went to see her doctor with a notebook she had prepared, filled with the details of labiaplasty, before-and-after pictures, questions to ask her surgeon, and more. I was not her surgeon, but with my curiosity piqued, I asked her about the notebook.
She told me she used a program that is on a large percentage of Windows-based PCs. It’s called ONENOTE, and it comes built into both Microsoft Office and Microsoft Works.
ONENOTE is simply a program that allows you to easily find blocks of text on a Website, and copy it and paste it right into a notebook that you create. You can then move these blocks of text around to be exactly where you want them, and to be exactly the shape you want them to be, with exactly the fonts you want. It’s just as easy to point-and-click to move photos and art from the Web to your notebook.
Because the program makes it easy to divide your notebook into several titled sections, she had created each of the following sections: WHAT IS LABIAPLASTY, FINDING THE RIGHT SURGEON, LOCAL SURGEONS, BEFORE & AFTER PICS, RECOVERY PROCESS, and QUESTIONS FOR SURGEON.
As I glanced through the notebook, I was impressed that this truly seemed like a thorough resource on labiaplasty. I asked how many hours she had spent on it, and she said, “Just one.”
One hour! She had simply learned to use Google to find the information needed on each of these subjects and then copy-and-pasted everything into place. She printed out the pages and inserted them in a nice binder. So when she did finally make that appointment to visit with a surgeon for the initial consult, she was prepared with all the questions she needed. And she looked like someone who meant business to the doctor.
If you have ONENOTE, you might want to prepare yourself in this way for your upcoming labiaplasty And even if you don’t have the program, you can still use a standard word-processing program to create something similar.
