It was 3:00 p.m. on the first day of my freshman college orientation week at James Madison University. We were hot and tired from the sun beating down on us all day. Some people were homesick. My hall mates and I sat down on a large, shady patch of grass next to my orientation guide’s favorite building, Harrison Hall. We were told that this particular group session was going to be more intimate than the previous activities we had done.
Note: You can’t force a group of eighteen-year-old strangers to get personal with each other after only two days of college orientation chaos. We were instructed to write down something we consider very personal about ourselves. After we were done writing, we had the opportunity to share. I wrote about the most recent surgery I had on my right leg since it was just a few months before moving into my dorm.
My writing turned into scribbling, soon my page full with everything I had to say about my ongoing gamble with plastic surgery. The girl next to me, who I never got to know, told a story about her best friend dying. The boy directly across from me told us about his family domestic abuse at home. About fifteen minutes into the discussion, I realized my “problem” was probably a joke to most of these people. Thank god I didn’t say anything. I crumpled up my paper and threw it away.
The doctors call it cosmetic surgery. Most people call it plastic surgery. I don’t have a problem calling it what it is, because it changed my life. Roll your eyes. Tell me it’s not a big deal. Tell me I’m vain and ridiculous. I can take it. I’ve lived far too long hating my body, only to accept myself after my plastic surgeries.
***
An overly talkative nurse hooked me up to an IV after sticking my left hand three times. She was sweet. She and Mom gabbed about the similarities their children had once she found out I was a middle child with two sisters. It was my final surgery and I just wanted to get this thing going. The nurse asked me if I wanted Mom to leave the room while she asked me questions. I already knew the checklist she was about to go through. I’d done this twice before.
“I have nothing to hide. Plus, it’s plastic surgery…”
Mom and I made eye contact and she cracked a smile. It was forced – I could tell that she was worried. She always worried about me (and still does, but slightly less). I secretly wanted her by my side until I was on the operating table and dozing off to sleep. Mom was my assigned caretaker, especially at this point. She was the only one who was there for my other two surgeries, so it only made sense that she was at the last one. Mom’s support grew when she finally realized how much the surgeries made an impact on my life. I know she still doesn’t understand, along with everyone else. All that mattered in that point in time was that she made the effort to understand and support me.
Dr. Gour was assigned as my surgeon at Kaiser Permanente for my last surgery, since my previous surgeon quit on me. Dr. Wright lived in Maryland and only came to the Kaiser building in Tysons on Wednesdays. He promised that he would finish all of my surgeries, but as time passed, we heard less and less from him. Eventually, he stopped returning my mother’s endless emails and voicemails. Dr. Gour was kind, gentle, and extremely intelligent. He was much more caring than Dr. Wright, who obviously didn’t give a shit about me or my situation. Dr. Gour drew multiple dashes and dots with a thin purple marker around my right calf. The IV’s clear plastic bag full of fluid drained into my bloodstream until it was almost empty. The lower it got, the closer I was to the last operation. I was overly nervous because so much went wrong with my two previous surgeries. I could only think about what could go wrong with this one.
After the anesthesia kicked in, my deep breathing became easier. My vision went blurry and the heart machine beeped slower as the nurses prepared the yellow-walled operating room. Before I knew it, I was mellowed out and ready to go. Mom gave me a kiss on the forehead and said something sweet. I lifted my arm and tried to wave goodbye, then I drifted off to sleep.
***
I noticed at an early age that I had a large, dark brown oval on my leg. It’s hard to recall the exact size of it because I was in denial that it was there for so long. As I grew, my legs grew, so did my birthmark and insecurities. Summer was always my favorite season. School was out, I had my birthday, I was an avid breaststroker and freestyler on my summer swim team, and I just enjoyed being out in the sun. As the years passed, I started enjoying summer less. Every time I put on my swimsuit or looked back at my reflection I would notice my birthmark. It would creep into photos and stare back at me as I prepared to dive into the pool. It was such a small, stupid insecurity that I acquired at such a young age. Little did I know, this stupid insecurity was here to stay and would become one of my biggest problems.
My dark wash Abercrombie capris were my favorite pair of pants. The sewn-in cuff of the capris covered my problem area just right. It exposed my leg up to the very edge of my birthmark, so nobody had to look at it. Did anyone actually give a shit? Probably not. If I didn’t have to look at it, I didn’t have to think about it. I imagined it wasn’t there, and came up with multiple ways to hide it. Mom took us shopping for every season. Somehow shopping with my sisters became a chore where I’d end up crying on the dressing room floor, unhappy with what I saw in the mirror. Comparing myself with my sisters wasn’t something I ever wished to do, but once I started I couldn’t stop; it spun up an enormous web of self-hatred.
By the middle of the school year in seventh grade, I taught myself how to put on a full face of makeup. Foundation, concealer, mascara, eye-liner, setting powder, and anything else you could find in a twenty-year-old's bag today, I had. While most kids my age spent their money on food courts and junk, I spent my money on high-end makeup and beauty products. I woke up hours before school started just so I could go to school looking and feeling my best. There wasn’t a day I left my house without a full face of foundation on. I couldn’t change the fact that I had a gross brown spot on my leg, but I could completely change my face. Perhaps I was doing everything I could to distract myself from my “worst” asset.
The distractions were nice, but they fell short. Underneath all the makeup, I still wasn’t happy. I spent hours on the computer researching how to get rid of the birthmark on my leg and found things that appeared hopeful. I clicked until I found home remedies, tutorials on how to cover up tattoos or large marks with stage makeup, and a variety of surgeries offered.
Surgery. That was the one permanent fix.
***
I convinced myself that nobody in my family understood what it was like to have something they hated so much about themselves. Besides, my two sisters were spitting images of my mother. We all were, really. But I convinced myself that I was the black sheep of the bunch.
One time I snuck into my mom’s makeup cabinet to steal bleaching cream. She had it for a few sun spots she got on her face from the previous summer. After spreading it all over my birthmark, I had a dream that it magically made it disappear. When I woke the next day it had done nothing except make it burn and itch, which gave me a chemical burn. That morning, I showered, I cried and I went to school, forcing myself to forget about it. The happy-go-lucky attitude I carried hardly strayed during school or during my time with friends. The edges were red and within the next week layers of skin peeled off, but it eventually healed back to its original form.
I begged mom to buy me Dermablend, which is an extremely thick, waterproof, foundation-like formula which I found online. The kit was over $100 and turned out to be an absolute disappointment. It was chalky and didn’t stick to my leg. It was too light for my skin tone and didn’t cover the birthmark realistically. Mom was fed up and regularly reminded me that things could be so much worse; I was lucky to be me. She was right – my family and I were healthy, I had an exceptional education and great friends. She reminded me of the importance of inner beauty and that only made me feel worse about my leg. She was my mom and she was supposed to say all of those things.
***
When I got to high school, I did my best to pretend that my birthmark didn’t exist. I was tired of being unhappy and wanted to look at life from a different perspective. High school was easy anyways, no one cared or said anything about it. Every time my insecurities snuck into my thoughts I tried every way I knew possible to push them out. I knew there was so much more to life than a fucking birthmark. Besides, there were so many other things that I could change about myself, like when I learned how to put on makeup. If I had to live with my birthmark, I was determined to change other aspects of my body. I constantly obsessed and went through phases to change my body to fit my own twisted unrealistic ideas of beauty. I lost weight, became obsessed with fashion, perfected my hair and makeup skills, you name it. I even became so obsessed with the art of beauty that I enrolled in Cosmetology classes.
My parents eventually gave in; Mom was my biggest advocate. They agreed to let me see a dermatologist about my birthmark. My sisters weren’t happy with what I was doing, but I didn’t feel the need to justify anything for them. I was pretty much fully grown and willing to do anything to have legs I wasn’t ashamed to show off. I convinced my mom that I would love my body if she let me remove the hideous thing.
The dermatologist was my only hope at getting to a doctor that wasn’t just a plastic surgeon. Mom wanted a general surgeon; someone who really knew who they were doing. Kaiser Permanente also had a lot of general surgeons that would get the job done. “We’re worried that with the size of the birthmark, it could cause skin cancer and what not,” my mom exaggerated to the dermatologist. She and I both knew we weren’t concerned about the health risks of the birthmark, we just wanted it gone.
“That’s very unlikely…but we can look into it and we will let you know.”
***
Next thing I knew we were discussing when the first surgery would be and planned our schedules accordingly. My parents let me do a lot of things that I wanted to do at a young age, which I can’t even begin to thank them enough for. They ultimately just wanted me to feel comfortable in my own skin. Plastic surgery to many people probably sounds extreme, over the top, or just too much to handle for a girl in high school. I made it the only solution and I was determined to fix the thing that stopped me from loving myself.
I met with multiple doctors and they explained how they would get rid of the birthmark. They explained that it would have to be removed with three surgeries; each time they would cut out a part of my leg and stretch the skin over. The surgeries had to be at least 6 months apart, and I would come out of each surgery with nerve damage in my leg. It was going to be a little over $5,000 in total, since insurance covered almost none of it.
My surgeries were not easy. My first one was in September of 2011. After the first one, my neighbor’s dog jumped on my incision and tore the stiches wide open. I was rushed to the ER and had to let the scar heal wide open. My younger sister was with me and we both had no idea what to do. The emergency room was clammy and gross. Mom and I sat in the enormous waiting room for at least an hour. We watched HGTV and I apologized for being there on every third commercial break. We both knew it wasn’t for a “real” emergency, as did the doctors. They cleaned it and told me it would take twice as long to heal. It didn’t heal well, which made the first surgery pointless. I couldn’t help but think that it was karma for being so vain. I ended up with a wide, large scar that was almost as bad as the birthmark.
I waited over a year to get my second surgery, which was in May of 2013, just a few months before moving to college. The second surgery was even worse than the first – my incision looked awfully infected and my right leg had never been so swollen in my life. Mom took me to five different doctors and all but one couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I was tested for Staph, Strep, and MRSA. It ended up not being a flesh-eating disease, just an intense allergic reaction to an antiseptic chemical used during the second surgery. I was too scared to go through with the last surgery until four years after the initial surgery. It wasn’t worth it anymore, but my parents insisted that I finish with the surgeries after already going through so much in the first place.
***
Who are we to blame for our obsession over looks? Our society is infatuated with the obsession of unrealistic ideas in order to look perfect. I will never be able to justify to every single person who asks why I went through three surgeries over five years of my life to remove a single birthmark. Prior to the surgeries, I thought a three to four-inch blemish on my leg restricted me from living my life the way I wanted to.
How did I grow up this way? Was it the dolls I played with, the shows I watched as a kid? Did I have underlying envy towards my sisters? I don’t know if I’ll ever be fully at peace with my body, but I sure am a lot healthier today than I was before my surgery. We all have things we don’t like about ourselves, I still do. Accepting the body and the skin I’m in has taken a long time. My scar looks like I’ve physically been through a lot, when it’s almost all mental and emotional distress. I admire anyone who owns their body the way it is, because altering the human body through surgery is not natural. It’s not normal nor is it healthy. Everybody has their own insecurities about themselves, and it can take a lot to overcome things that aren’t ideally attractive. Life is so much more than looks or fitting in or feeling like one little blemish ruins it all. Being perfect isn’t a realistic or healthy goal.
Plastic surgery helped my self esteem, however it helped me realize that it won’t fix everything; just what’s on the outside. Loving yourself for who you are, inside and out is what matters. One day my scar will fade and people will stop asking about it.
***
August 11, 2015. After the same overly talkative nurse woke me from my sleep, I was terrified to see how it turned out. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to see what it looked like for weeks, and this was the last time I was going to do this to my body. First the pain was sharp, all the time. Five days later, the pain would come and go. It ached for a long time. The third recovery was by far the worst, maybe because it was the most recent and still present in my mind. The pain was almost unbearable, but the outcome of the surgery kept me from dwelling in my pain.
After a few weeks passed, the stitches were healing and it was time for my post-operation appointment. My last post-op. I drove up from school hung over and ready for my junior year of college to begin. Dr. Gour welcomed me into the patient room and was his regular, cheerful self. I watched every one of his facial movements as he peeled back the bandage. He told me how good it looked, and I beamed. He explained that the rest of the birthmark had to go to a lab for abnormality testing, and everything came back fine. The check-up lasted less than five minutes.
“It’s all gone. Just a scar, and it’ll fade with time. Was it worth it?”
Yes.
