Cosmetic Surgery

Welcome to Your Face Lift: What to Expect Before, During and After Cosmetic Surgery
by Helen Bransford

At the age of forty-seven and married to a man seven years her junior, Helen Bransford decided it was time to recapture that face she no longer saw when she looked in the mirror. Her surgery involved a "touch of lipo" under the chin, a forehead peel, an upper eyelid tuck, dermabrasion under the eyes, and a standard lift, and she chronicles it all - with lots of sage advice for the uninitiated - from the moment the decision was made to that day, a month after the event, when she was "dead certain" she'd done the right thing. From first to last, she provides invaluable guidance and suggestions that can come only from experience.

A pleasing countenance is no slight advantage.

- Ovid

I always knew there'd be a price to pay for marrying a man seven years younger than I am. I just wasn't sure what it would be. We had made it through almost four years of marriage feeling joined at the hip and soul, when, on a quiet summer night, I heard the first shoe drop and I forgot to remember to breathe. Not a boot, just a soft slipper, but its echo stayed in the room. He was interviewing Julia Roberts for a magazine profile and came home from their first dinner smitten. He shared with me thirty or forty of her virtues, her remarkable physical attributes, and her ability to quote lines from Hemingway stories. Then he said with astonishment, "She's almost as funny as you are." I asked if this intergalactic goddess had any idea he was married. "Oh sure," he said. "I told her all about you. Well, everything but your age. I didn't tell her that."

I desperately wanted to deny what I was hearing, but his words stung the air. He had wanted to protect me of course, from the world's knowing my age relative to his own. Only then did I understand that the age issue was harder for him than for me. I might add here that he frequently quotes himself with, "It's not whether you win or lose in life, it's how you look playing the game."

The next morning I started calling doctors.

With shocking frequency, it is now repeated that until the age of twenty-one, the way you look depends on your parents and God. After twenty-one, it's all up to you - provided you have the cash or can qualify for credit.

A few easily attainable changes include body shape (addition of curves, removal of curves), freshening skin texture, removing wrinkles, deleting tummy fat, deleting any fat, remounting a droopy butt, lifting saggy eyelids, removing bulges beneath the eyes, supplementing thinning hair, and altering details of the facial profile (reshaping the nose, augmenting or reducing the chin for balance, implanting artificial cheekbones, and defatting the chin and throat). But as I am determined to focus here on facial possibilities alone, I will not be discussing the myriad configurations of work that can be done "below the neck." Nor will I cover breast augmentation or nose jobs, which are generally dealt with during one's teens or early twenties these days. In the likely event your life revolves around a budget, doing any of these procedures piecemeal works quite well. A nip here, a tuck there, two years later a peel and some minor lipo. Many doctors, in fact, advise patients to have a sequence of small procedures over the years rather than a sudden and more obvious overhaul.

There is a certain melancholy in seeing oneself rot.

- Katharine Hepburn

who can argue with photos?
(like, for example, twelve or more)

In fairness to my groom at the time of his life-changing comment I hadn't seen a recognizable snapshot of myself in several years. Each one contained the withered, leathery version of a thirty-five-year-old redhead I once knew well, and I fell into the habit of slipping them face-down into the nearest drawer. I was repeatedly puzzled that Sonia Rykiel could wander so frequently into photos of my family and friends. Then I would reach for my glasses and slowly bring into focus the fact that the Sonia character was me. While Ms. Rykiel is electrifyingly chic for seventy, I was crushed.

Along with a younger husband, I also have infant children. Rounding out the cliché Second Marriage - but with conventional genders reversed. I mention this because any day now a well-meaning caretaker will no doubt announce to a room of twentysomething mothers that "we have a special visitor, a grandmother braving the elements to pick up her charge." The mothers will turn with sappy smiles, and it will be me standing there behind them - wishing I had on huge arresting sunglasses with my spike-tip leopard print heels, and once again feeling an idiotic sadness that I can't blend in with the group.

How I got from there to here

If asked under hypnosis, I'd answer to feeling thirty-six or seven. Attitudinally at least, and maybe physically too. Sadly this estimate's off by a mile. Next, there's the visual aspect to consider. How old do I look to myself? I close my eyes and clutch, but no image floats into view. Instead, I remember my father telling me before he died in his late seventies that he had the mind and curiosity of a man in his twenties, but to his enormous aggravation, his body was wearing out (which leads me to suspect that none of us accurately perceives our own state of decrepitude.)

While my mind doesn't seem to be maturing much, my face has compensated by not missing a beat. The reverse could have been nice. This leaves me, I figure, with a nebulous self-image ranging loosely between four and ninety-four. My subconscious eye has utterly refused to log anything past thirty-five. How, then, did I wake up a decade later stumbling around in seared skin and sporting wrinkles like I've never seen on anybody? The answer probably coincides with my sudden inability to read print closer than two feet away. Impaired vision may be proof of God's empathy for the onset of middle age. Unfortunately, however, middle age is past the eleventh hour for anyone planning to enter the race toward serious cosmetic maintenance. So, what with Ms. Rykiel grinning back at me from photos, late-life parenthood, and Julia Roberts flashing through my marriage, I was ready for a radical leap. Lumped together in neon green, these phenomena comprised my Trigger Event, the springboard that nudged me well beyond the line of hesitation, gasping for an aesthetic airlift.

Copyright © 1997 by Helen Bransford.