From: "Shelly Roberts" Date: Fri, 26 Jun 1998 14:55:45 +0000 Subject: UNSOLICITED FEATURE - SHELLY ROBERTS WORD COUNT:1346 UNSOLICITED FEATURE WELL, IT'S NOT LIKE IT WAS BRAIN SURGERY! DUH! By Shelly Roberts When I was a mere Semitic pup, growing a hooked nose in a Wasp neighborhood my parents subjected us to in hopes of massive assimilation - it worked accept for the nose - they promised me one day I too would look like all the Aryan companions I accumulated over the course of surviving puberty and an out-of-place, ambitious Jewish family. They never came through on the nasal passage, so I, at a brainless 19, found a French-Canadian doc in LA (just don't ask, and no, I couldn't sue him as it turned out) who would do the "job" for the insurance money. What he did was cut out a piece of cartilage from the tip of my nose, sew the surrounding tissue together, and hope it would knit into something I wouldn't notice. Wrong. Within the first 10 days I got- with absolutely no side-benefit joy - the same kind of hole people in the 80's got from sniffing 6 figure salaries up their noses. It's called a "coke septum," and my insurance company bought me one without so much as a really good rush. Still never had the pleasure. Took eight years to find a plastic surgeon willing to attempt the fix. Even this week's surgeon showed respect at the mention of his name. But wait, I'm putting the story ahead of my nose. Unfortunately I was not then the ace journalist I am now, and didn't know that the question I should have asked was, "Can you fix my face?" Instead, I asked, "Can you fix the hole in my nose?" which he attempted to do, with great difficulty, and now-25-year-old techniques. The hole was closed, but he left me with a nose too small for the rest of the face. Did it bother me? Hey, no more than your average major neurosis. But I come from a displaced, dysfunctional family, so how could you tell? And besides, I lived in California where I could do pop psychology meditation on my inner nose. Over time the fix has gotten worse, and where there used to be a bridge, there was a bump. Bone? Cartilage? Implant material? Who knew? Shouldn't have been there. Itched like crazy in sneezing season, and looked, but hey, Doc #2 was a good surgeon, and besides, repair work costs time and big bucks, especially if you are sacrificing personal health insurance like I am right now to try to make a community vision come true, which brings us up to last month. It was a quick 25 years, don't you think? Went by in a virtual flash. A client of a friend of a friend of an acquaintance of an associate raises venture capital for businesses, and is interested in helping us get the major $$'s in line to do the Rainbow celebration concert for 2000. Coincidentally, he has as a business consultant client, this major-player plastic surgeon who is starting up a model operation for what is hoped to be a multi-site operation. Face-Lifts R Us? McDermablasts? Plastic Surgery USA? This beginning to line up for you yet? They asked for an ad. I did an evaluation and said, "So Doc, ya wanna do a little barter? I can fix your silent phones, if you can fix (I got the question RIGHT this time) my face." Can ya? Huh? Huh? C'n ya?" That was a little over three weeks ago. We came to an agreement; he mapped out a new face that fixes the collapsing nose, and balances it with a chin, jawline and cheeks, and what the heck, since we're in the neighborhood, a little lift here, a little tuck there. Here a neck, there a jowl, every where a frown-frown. Who could resist an offer like that. Not to mention a preview video image that even I'd like to ask out to a movie. Somehow it didn't occur to me that it was major surgery. Really. It didn't. Not till after I came out of the anesthesia. As a free lance Writer/Copywriter/Creative Director, I'm way too used to fighting for months to get paid. Getting paid in advance was going to be a welcome novelty. (What waz I, nutz? I told you not to ask.) So I says to the doc on a previous Friday, "How soon? Monday?" (Thinking payment - not thinking cutting and bleeding and anesthesia and intubation and bruises in your least favorite crayon colors - and thinking barter -cool. Get twenty five years of facial errors corrected for a couple of ads and a bit of brilliance. Hey, good deal for me.) "Nope," he sez, "Can't do it Monday, but Friday would be fine. " Cool. I'm ready. Hah! Numb and oblivious is more like it. He doesn't know what he can do. Either he can fix the collapsing nose enough to do the rebuild, and as long as he's in there, lift the eyes and the brow, or he'll repair the hole, then in a month build a nose that looks like it belongs on a human and not a cartoon. The rest will follow, or, if he's in a good mood, why not, he'll just do it all in one fell, (omigod, doesn't anyone bother to tell her this is major SURGERY?) swoop. They don't. I do it. Last Friday. Yesterday, or was it the day before, he takes out many of the stitches - Oops, before I get the bandages off, the 1st day out of the general anesthesia I call and say, "So whaja do, Doc?" "Hit a home run!" he replies. Now he's a modest guy, well, about as modest as jet pilots and surgeons ever can be, so I'm heartened. And apparently, nosened too. Several days later, when the splint is coming off he tells me the rest of the nose news, which it was just as well I was laughing-gassed during. Remember that little nose bridge bump of cartilage? Or bone? Or prosthetic? Simple excision.? Nuh-uh. Seems that in the breakdown of the repair, a teeeeensy fissure opened between the noselike part, and the bony skull part, and just this itsy-bitsy amount of "cerebro-cranial material" (that, for you medico-jargo-linguistically impaired, would be my BRAIN) had seeped through, stayed connected, and calcified. It meant that they couldn't just el-snippo for fear of creating a crainal fluid leak. So they had to go front face into the nose bridge and do a bit of brainectomy. Good thing I was asleep and didn't have to think about any of this. Or make a choice. Hmmm. Brain? Nose? Nose? Brain? Well, it turns out that everything is now fine. Perfect in fact. But in a year or so, I would have faced some serious stuff that I now won't have to. And I got this way cool nose. And I got it in one swell foop as my daddy would have quipped, and, Dad, it really is swell, AND swollen, so you would have been right - twice. So that is how I went in to write an ad for a thousand bucks for a new client, and ended up with half of a whole new face, some surprising (and thankfully minor) brain surgery, and this nifty nose which nearly looks like it will belong here in a few months. In case you're wondering why I didn't give you more warning, this entire scenario took place within 10 days. Sometimes the universe tells you to just move and you have no choice. I get the rest of my face, the cheeks and chin and jaw to match the newly built nose next month. I have been single for nearly a year now. And as someone pointed out, some lesbians will do nearly anything for a date. (Which isn't exactly what he said, but I'd have to blush and laugh if I quoted him exactly, and it hurts when I laugh. Really.) So I figure that probably makes me the only kid on your block to scored brain surgery for BARTER. Ow. Hey, I told you it hurts when I laugh. Shelly Roberts is an internationally syndicated lesbian humor columnist, speaker, and best-selling author of the Roberts' Rules for Lesbians series. She recently moved to Atlanta to begin planning a nationwide Gay 90's celebration concert for the year 2000. She is currently anticipating, after the road kill phase, enjoying the sheer pleasure of washing her hands AND looking in the mirror on the same trip. Obviously she has no shame.