The Face Chronicles: Before and After

What an adventure! I’m writing this now so I’ll remember how PAINFUL the operation was, and how quickly the healing process is taking place. I’m taking pictures every day, and I’ve learned a lot.
First, you find out who your real friends are, and how much you can lay on their doorstep. I had to leave for the hospital for the operation at 5:30 AM on Monday, June 15, and neither of the people who volunteered to drive me wanted to get up that early. Yes, it hurt my feelings, as I would have done it for either of them in an instant. I had to spend a bit of time remembering that it’s not always about me, it doesn’t mean I’m being deserted, etc. Also, if it was for a cancer treatment or some “real” medical treatment, I think it would have gone differently. We all learned a bit about ourselves courtesy of this event. I did have one volunteer who was willing to make the sacrifice, even though he was working through the weekend into late Sunday night: Thank you, Jim—you are the world’s nicest guy. Another friend came up with the cleverest solution to the problem: I could drive myself in, and she would drive in later that day with her son and pick up my car. That’s what we went with. Darn creative, Jan!
I got to the hospital, met the incredibly perky anesthesiologist, Annie, who lives in Marin and showed me pictures of her view from Sausalito on her cell phone. She postponed the dose that would send me to my “happy place” until Dr. Chung (my adorable senior resident surgeon) marked me up with a pen, and the supervising surgeon Dr. D’Amore (he had to make that name up—so cute, just like him!),  came in and discussed her preliminary marks and drew on me again. Amazingly, a woman I had met just the week before at a party spotted me (marks, hairnet and all) came over to say hello—she’s a nurse at that hospital.
Once the happy juice hit at 8AM Monday, I didn’t come to until 1AM Tuesday morning. Then began my endless quest for oblivion, which would last about two hours until I woke up again. Let’s be frank. In a face-lift/upper and lower eyelid combination, your ears are basically removed and replaced on your head while “excess” skin is removed and the muscles underneath are stitched up. Skin and muscle are cut and moved from your lower eyelid and upper eyelid, fat is placed in a “better” position, and the brow muscle is stitched up through your brow. It’s like a car accident where you’ve gone through the windshield. You can’t see the muscle work, but you can feel it—it’s tight, like a heavy workout/pulled muscle. In addition to the incisions (which you can both see AND feel) across your upper eyelid and inside your lower eyelids, and around your ears from the hairline in front around and through the inside of the ear across the bottom up the back and into the hairline, there are these marvelous things called drains. They are long tubes attached to your head by needles, and you are laying on them and occasionally pulling on the tubes accidentally, ripping the needle a bit. No need to ask, “Why morphine”, but rather, “When morphine?” People actually do this voluntarily, more than once. More later….