Thursday, May 12, 2011

THE PAIN OF AGING

My poor husband is in pain. His back has gone out. I guess that’s what he gets when at our age he does something as strenuous as cliff diving and street luge, or in this case, lying on the floor with the dog watching Glee.

And as much as I miss him at night while he sleeps in the other room, the one with the firm mattress, I wonder if he has any clue about the amount of pain I have suffered through in the quest to stay looking young for him. (Okay, let me be honest…in the quest to stay looking young for ME.)

First, there was the “Lipo-dissolve,” guaranteed to dissolve the fat globules around the thighs and mid-section, a procedure where you are injected with some type of venomous poison that’s supposed to miraculously dissolve the unwanted fat, making you svelte and smooth. Instead, I returned home in more pain than is conceivably possible, swollen and puffed as a cream-filled donut, and tossed and turned for three nights straight, despite the Vicodin, while my beloved snored beside me. And the only thing it dissolved was the money in my checking account.

There was the Blue Chemical Peel, where blue dye is added to the acid they apply to your skin with the intent to smooth out the tiny lines and wrinkles. The dye is necessary so the doctor can monitor how deep the acid is permeating, lest they let it go too deep and you wind up looking like the Two-Face character in The Dark Knight Batman movie where DA Harvey Dent gets his face burned off. My husband missed that lovely experience where I was as blue-green as a lizard for twelve days until the outer layers of my skin peeled off in shriveled tendrils. And the reason he missed it was because he wasn’t my husband yet, and there is a good chance he never would have been if he’d seen me. That experience was so painful the procedure is done with full anesthesia. I vaguely remember someone in the operating room shouting at me to “keep breathing!”  FYI, the wrinkles are still there but the memory of the pain lingers.

Laser hair removal, billed as “painless,” was anything but. I left there hair free, but with burn marks in the shape of a heart around my…bikini line. I should have known there was going to be some pain involved when the technician handed me a tennis ball to squeeze and a box of tissues. That procedure is one that actually works, but I might have reconsidered if someone ever told me there are certain body parts—that as we age—are better off left hidden.

The plucking, the tweezing, the waxing, the pre-op, the post-op, and everything in-between, there is nothing painless about trying to stay looking young. Now excuse me while I head out for my monthly botox, and Honey, hand me your Percocet.


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