Initially, there was the “fate” phase of healing: the unavoidable, predestined, and decidedly monstrous facial swelling the doctors had warned me about. It happens in the wake of this type of surgery, where you first look like a helium-inflated cartoon of yourself. This set in for me just before I came home from the hospital, but it’s one of those things where you tend to look like someone has taken your face off its scaffolding, rolled it out like a piecrust, reattached it at your hairline, and then blown it up like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. I studied myself constantly during those first days, keeping watch for any infinitesimal sign of improvement. Overall, my mug was vaguely triangle shaped. Between the cranial stiches, cuts, and bruises, I was full of random holes and irregular patterns.
Then, as if by slow magic, my face started to shift like a Scooby-Doo villain mask deflating. It’s the kind of thing where you just don’t believe your body can actually make those kinds of wild, implausible Picasso-esque shapes. Originally, I had only thought that a mother’s baby belly could grow to such a size. My mug was literally the elephant in the room. I felt so strikingly at odds with nature and so in contradiction with the rest of my skinny wimp of a frame. Yet somehow, my face, in growing against itself in order to heal, still managed to come up with all kinds of wacky geometry that was, in essence, more me than me at the time. And so, as with birth, you just hope you have the requisite amount of chemicals, muscle memory, collagen and whatever-else hormones are needed to make everything you are seeing (and feeling) go back to the way it was before. (Please face, please?)
You might think the worst part of breaking your face is the surrealist swelling or the grotesquerie of stink that comes from not being able to brush the insides of your teeth and tongue for a whole straight week at a time, or the fact that after a steady, monthlong diet of too-sweet smoothies and Jell-O cups, you hunger like a dying vampire for the taste, the texture, of salty medium-rare meat. I got so desperate one night, I thought, “Bitches gotta eat,” so I ordered a bacon double cheeseburger from Jackson Hole on the Upper West Side, ground it to bits with a hand blender, and tried to suck it through a straw like some kind of mad beast with no real mouth to speak of. It was food torture porn of the worst kind.
No, the worst, pettiest, most annoying bit was when the pressure bandages came off. It wasn’t just that I was totally beaten up and still bearing stitches and cranial staples; it was that I had actually developed a massive zit underneath the bandages. And I hadn’t even felt it coming. Without being able to feel my chin, I had no more zitvoyance. This had previously been one of my special powers: the uncanny clairvoyant ability to anticipate and fend off bouts of adult acne. Talk about adding insult to injury. Not cool, body. I mean, I was already pretty torn up as it was. Give a girl a break, why don’t you? Anyway, I immediately attacked that sucker with Neosporin cream; this is my only middle-aged acne wisdom that I bequeath to you all and I’m sure it’s been proffered elsewhere on the Internet. (1) Don’t ever break the skin. Don’t squeeze things as, (a) that’s gross, and (b) it just introduces infection. (2) Slather that cystic-zit-nightmare-about-to-happen in Neo cream—not the greasy clear stuff, the white cream. The next day, I usually find things have improved or gone away altogether.
Next came the “fury” phase of healing where you look like a longshoreman who has come home from a drunken pub brawl. The deep swirling bruises on my face and neck were like a lava lamp with an ever-shifting liquid interior that ranged from licorice black to angry purple, to a slow fade to sickly puce. Now matter how much I tried to smile or look neutrally indifferent, I still looked wild, sneering, and childishly sinister—like something only Maurice Sendak could dream up. I had resting beast face. My jaw and one tooth still jutted out to the left. The bones in my head and face still felt cracked in pieces, like a broken terra-cotta vase that had been gingerly Scotch-taped back together—with pins and plates. I worried things would all fall apart, so I wore this tight, little gray stocking cap because it felt comforting—as though it would hold all the still-loose bones in place until they grew back together.
After this came the “phantom” phase, where you are just haunted with pain and odd facial sensations for what seems like an eternity, a glacial age. The doctors had said neuropathy or nerve damage might be a factor in my recovery. Think numbness, constant tingling, stabbing sensations, tightness, muscle weakness, and a lack of movement. That said, this was more than anyone bargains for as, one by one, your tiny electric nerves literally do light up and start working again in the most unexpected ways. It’s just the body healing, growing against itself, and the inflammation that happens in the wake of trauma, surgery, and regeneration. Still, it was like having a poltergeist living just under the surface of my skin, zipping around, making mischief, and occasionally wreaking havoc only to go all quiet. One day might find me waking to searing heat throughout my cheeks; another day my lips would be ice cold. Still, others might have me feeling like someone was actively stabbing knives into my whole face. My talking was still limited to a few hours, but if I overdid things, my face, jaw, and mouth would suddenly go on strike and clamp shut altogether, even after all the wires and bands came off.
Aside from the occasional conference call with work, not much got done. I ordered groceries online, communicated mostly on text and messenger with coworkers, and sent out the laundry. Friends brought things by and helped with errands, but I lived in a quiet mode I’d never really experienced before. It was a decidedly small and contained day-to-day existence.
Despite the neuropathy, the really bad, bad news that had been repeatedly explained to me in the hospital was that the nerves on the right side of my face, which fan out like daisy petals from the ear to the center of the face, had been very compromised and all but severed. This meant that everything from the middle of my forehead swooping past my cheekbones and on down to my chin was paralyzed with little to no sensation. This would most likely be permanent. On the plus side, I would have no wrinkles or frown lines resulting from normal facial muscle movement as I could neither frown nor smile. I had “perma-brood.” My right eye drooped—similar to how a stroke patient’s might. I was most sad about this because having no expression made me feel completely geriatric and as if no one would ever really understand me again. My face was so much a part of my emotional life and well-being. I could still blink—but only slowly and not very frequently. To save itself from self-ruin, my right eye would involuntarily rebel against properly looking straight ahead and roll back into my head. Admittedly, I looked a bit demonic when it would do that, but it was super quick. Like a demon flash! A shazam! of electricity zapped my eye over and over again. At one point, Walter took a picture to catch it and there was (briefly) a question of whether they would need to sew my lid shut to prevent permanent corneal damage. Walter would nag. Was I irrigating it enough? Was I wearing my pirate patch every night? The answer was an unqualified “yes.” I had practically bedazzled my patch as I needed to be able to go back to work pronto.
That said, this time of “getting better” seemed to stretch out interminably like clouds on a windless day, imperceptibly creeping across the sky. It simply didn’t occur to me that I wouldn’t get better within a few weeks. I couldn’t comprehend any other story than getting better. I had always bounced back from my previous seizures, and I was doing all the right things: loads of facial pushups where I’d work at actively raising the entire right side of my face in total hyperbolic alarm over and over again, including my dead eyebrow up toward my right ear and forehead. I practiced making fish-kiss faces and whistling constantly. To get feeling back in my lips, I would walk around the apartment making farty noises with my lips like French men do when they’re making excuses for not doing things like the dishes or taking out the garbage. I was also blowing big raspberries in every direction.
In this way, I found that when something like this happens, you start to want to become the monster you resemble. And why shouldn’t I? Maybe it
’s that ferocity that would help me lick this. I was gross, but I just needed to go with it. I would roar around the living room against my jaw wiring and, well, I liked it. “Let the wild rumpus start!” I would tell myself. This is how I would get better.
Though I was cognitively fine to return to writing pithy doodads and dealing with media partnerships, apparently I was still too horrific to be seen by our clients. After a few weeks I didn’t have a black eye or bruising anymore. However, I did still have a pretty Jay Leno-esque chin—which looks fine on Jay Leno but was not so much what people were used to on me. I also didn’t feel right. It was as though I was still trapped under the ice and muzzled with a kind of invisible duct tape.
I was not entirely “out” to Jeremy, my boss in New York. Things were still too new and I worried he would feel betrayed by having hired an epileptic. It was an all-male, conservative crew. A squad of Don Drapers and I was Peggy—at least before this particular seizure I was. But now, I really did scare the poor grocery delivery guy judging by the terrified look on his face. And it’s true, my neighbor Pablo did not recognize me in the hallway and asked me if I was new to the building, but I needed to work, to feel like some normalcy was still possible.
By the time I did go back, I still had the phantom chin. It felt enormous, as if I’d been shot full of Novocain, and I still had these razor-sharp rubber bands holding my upper and lower teeth together, so I kept the chitchat to a minimum.
My boss wasn’t having it. I was told I should consider disability, but the thing is, I didn’t feel disabled. Everything worked in my head. In fact, on this new epilepsy drug that Delia had prescribed, which I still can’t pronounce at all, I felt better than ever. I wasn’t having auras. There was no “seizury” tinge to my days, no vertigo. The floor no longer throbbed like an immense alien heart. Gone was the supercharged electric buzzing in my brain. Best of all, I felt awake. There was no gauzy-gray veil to life these days. The cracks in the sidewalks and the wrinkles on people’s faces were crisper than ever. I was crisp and clear. Indeed I felt crisp on the inside. On the outside, however, I made people uneasy with my bionic face still swollen and full of titanium. But to lose my job finally was rough. They called me at home to cancel my contract. Budget cuts was the official reason, but I knew. I was so angry I could spit—except I couldn’t. Crying just made my whole face ache even more. Dumb mucous membranes. How was I going to do this? It would be another year before many of the pins and plates could be removed, but it was clear that if I was going to be allowed back into the work world, I would need to create the illusion of greater symmetry and work like freaking Eliza Doolittle on my diction—STAT as the surgeons say.
SO, THERE I WAS NOW with the plastic surgeon’s nurse taking pictures, awkwardly exaggerating my deformed self—so that I might qualify for a procedure that would move me an inch back over the line of social and corporate acceptability. To do this, I needed the right side of my face to behave a little more like the left side. Both sides needed to droop in unison. If I couldn’t smile symmetrically and evenly with my current muscles and nerve endings being in disarray, I could still look mildly bored and disgusted in order to fit back in with every other bored and disgusted colleague I might work with. I’d reasoned that would pass in New York City. I thought perhaps if I went from a resting freak face to resting bitch face, humanity might have me back.
At the same time, my jaw needed to relax to the right just a millimeter to keep from looking misaligned and shifty. There was nothing they could do about the swelling. My Jay Leno look would just take time to die down. In the meantime, I could hide it (partially) with the right haircut, tapered just enough to soften the jawline. Lastly, my eyes needed to appear mostly the same size and work in parallel with each other instead of the right one drifting up and looking dead. I would take a break from contacts and only wear my dark-frame nerd glasses from decades earlier. The glasses would distract. The rest would have to be improvised with Botox and fillers.
Now, you judge a plastic surgeon’s office not by the binder of “before and after” photos but by their staff. Does the receptionist look a bit too surprised to see you? Does the treatment coordinator appear a little too tightly pulled and windblown from her last complimentary tuck? How are the necks? And what of the other supplicants in the waiting room? Were they just there for injectables? Did any of them have any serious structural and symmetry issues akin to yours? Were there any drooping eyes? Was there a jaw out of whack anywhere? I tried to peek at the other patients behind their magazines. Most of the women and one man seemed to be there for cosmetic maintenance. The smartness of their dress made me think they were probably a little fussier about everything than I was. Oh, how I missed the luxury of being fussy about little things. I would have given anything right about then for a simple marionette line (the parentheses-style wrinkles around your mouth) that could be quickly and easily filled with some Juvéderm. To even be able to both feel and wrinkle my forehead would be like savoring a big piece of cake with the best frosting ever.
Coco Chanel once said, “Nature gives you the face you have at twenty. Life shapes the face you have at thirty. But at fifty, you get the face you deserve.”
Really Coco? I still have a few more years before I’m fifty, but did I really deserve this? Yes, I was wearing my spazzy electric brain plainly on the outside now, right on my face. That much was clear, but did I really deserve this was the wrong question to ask, I know. The greater question was what was I going to do with this face now?
Your face becomes an emotional map of your life. There is a wrinkle of regret, a side eye scowl of knowing a lie when you hear one, and the vertical lines above your lip from all those cigarettes you smoked with the other mothers on your mums’ nights out. The smile lines from your marriage and what you believed was going to be a thoughtful, quirky life, well lived together. What happens when the map is almost entirely erased? Tabula rasa. Do you try to reconstruct the map as you and others remember it? Or do you draw new lines altogether? For my part, I just needed anything that looked like a map. That was my starting point: a basic human map with discernable human features, and then I figured nature could draw what it willed.
The Park Avenue plastic surgeon strode into the exam room with my chart. Dr. Henry was a bespectacled man in his early forties. Groomed within a molecule of his life, he had not a wrinkle in sight and yet he still looked human. In other words, he was not too unrealistically good looking. This was important to me because I didn’t need to look perfect. I just needed to pass as unbroken enough for work, for my kids, for any sort of ordinary future. On the wall behind him, multiple Ivy League diplomas silently oozed credibility. He surveyed the chaotic landscape of my mug and then contemplated the X-rays, noting the amount of metal still lodged in my head. Of the paralysis on the right side of my face, the best they could do was to try to balance things out by paralyzing portions of the left side with Botox. This would also help my eyes to appear more symmetrical. They couldn’t do anything about the fleeting moments when my eyeball rotated up into my head—that would just take time—but they could even out the droop across both eyes. They would need to do a number of strategic injections in my upper jaw, face and scalp. No problemo, I thought. I wasn’t afraid of shots after everything I’d just been through. I’d had my whole face taken off and put back on. Shots were easy. What I was most afraid of was pity, of not being able to support my family, of being a lost cause and being entirely unlovable in any shape or form for the rest of my days. I was more afraid of that than the seizures themselves.
To get the insurance to cover the symmetry fixes he was recommending, Dr. Henry reiterated that they would need to submit the photos we were taking today to prove the deformity was significant enough to warrant the procedures. Then, he paused a moment to counsel me that I was getting older and presumably wiser now. Given what had happened to me, I should consider myself lucky to be alive. I could have broken my neck or been paralyzed.
Shouldn’t I consider myself above and beyond such trivialities as symmetry? He told me I needed to get comfortable with the idea of inner beauty.
I would have gasped if I’d been able. What the hell was happening here? The guy whose very industry had trained the world to value symmetry and classic external beauty norms was selling me on inner beauty? Was this all some sort of sadistic prank? What was most annoying was I couldn’t even raise my eyebrows in shock at his patronizing tone. I indulged in an invisible eye roll. In a world where one’s face, beauty, and even identity are governed by laws that embrace order, pattern, symmetry, and simplicity, I still felt like utter chaos. I was a creature from Where the Wild Things Are. Yes, the splotches of yellow and purple had faded, but I was still misshapen on the inside and out.
Add to that, New York is a city of reaction, a city of critics, columnists, and great pontificators. Everybody, down to the very last little old lady at your optometrist’s office who tightens the screws on your glasses, has an opinion. They all have a clear and pronounced reaction to everything and anything. Everyone here reacts. The more they like something, the more irritated and loud they get about it. Everyone except me. I had nothing. I couldn’t smile. I couldn’t fully frown. I couldn’t look angry. My teeth still didn’t meet when I would bite down. My words were still limited to a few hours a day before all of my face muscles became tired and I started to sound like a lush. I had no expression, no symmetry, no proportion, and no sensation, which meant I could easily burn myself if I didn’t touch-test all of my warm liquids and foods. I also could never tell if I had food all over my face. When I would hang out with Ed or Holly, I would jokingly smear things across my chin, then gesture to my whole visage and ask, “How am I doin’?” because it was the only way I knew how to manage the awkwardness of all of these little moments.
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