Looking Like Your Mother

My Own Anti-Cellulite 'Speriment

I just ordered kelp powder from Main Coast Sea Vegetables, a big bag of green, oddly odored powdery stuff. I understand that some people buy this stuff as a food additive. I am trying to find a way to create my own home spa, toxin and fluid draining paste to plaster all over my thighs to make them look smooth. 

So far, I have succeeded mostly in making a mess in the kitchen.

No, I am not crazy, just wild about any kind of kelp or seaweed body wrap and I cannot afford the time or money to go to the spa once or twice a week for the detox treatment. Because I cannot seem to find the body wrap pastes available retail, I am trying to make my own.

Why You Wouldn't Want to Be In High School Again

It's so ok to be, why, practically 40, when your oldest looks like Sela Ward, the middle-one tells you that her escort must have read the "How to Be the Perfect Prom Date" book because he was super cool to hang with, and the six year old notices you got contacts and says, "You look way prettier without glasses."

Except that I love glasses. They hide bloodshot. I can forget a mascara wand and not freak. I have different colors for different outfits and attitudes. I have wraparounds that make Bono look like an amateur.

And I studied enough to be able to stay away from the styles and accessories that aged me.I knew a 30 year-old who insisted on wearing one of those eyeglass chains. You know, the metal kind that went around her neck, and grasped the ends of her glasses as they draped over her breasts. I think she was going for sophisticated, but really, nothing could have said, "Excuse me, but I don't think I shall ever have sex again, thank you" more clearly than that fashion statement. I know they have eclectic styles (think more necklace, less key chain), but hers was definitely old school marmish.

No matter what style frame, however, when I was tired or angry or feeling a little off, they just didn't seem to work as a diversionary tactic anymore. There wasn't enough Botox in the world to erase the pissed-off vice principal look that was taking over my face. So I walked in and asked for what I thought was impossible: a very complicated pair of multifocal contacts.

When they came in I had to sit through a lesson on how to put them in. Once I finally got them in, the eyeglass man told me to take them out. I refused. Then he yelled at me that I had to take them out because he was not going to take my phone call at midnight when I couldn't figure out how to remove them on my own and my eyes hurt. So I had to take them out right then, in front of him. And I did. Then I got to put them back in again.

And I was so excited about being able to see, and he was so busy watching me be excited about being able to see and talking to other customers about these new-fangled contraptions, that neither of us noticed that I walked out of his office without paying.

I put the new eyes immediately to the test. I got out the camera, opened up Photoshop, created all this family crap that you are now stuck viewing. Take Selma's huge eyes. She cannot hide anything she is thinking. That is not a good thing. Or the photos above that at first glance suggest that girls and boys feel differently about prom, yet in fact each group seemed quite keen on avoiding eye contact with the other. The eyes, most of which I obscured for privacy sake, kept to their respective groups. And then there are the eyes of my youngest, the one who told me I looked prettier without glasses.

She took the ball away from a big kid who had been smashing all the other kids around out on the soccer field Saturday. It's not that she knew he was a goon and then made a conscious effort to do something about it. No, that would make her someone else's kid. I nicknamed her Calvin (see, Hobbes) because she exists in another world most of the time. When she is on the soccer field she doesn't know much about what is going on around her beyond zeroing in on the ball. Her eyes see only the ball and she goes for it.I figure she has a spot on the team until its time to learn to pass the ball to other team mates.

The trade off for growing up and seeing all, gaining perspective, being tougher to blindside, and having the capacity to multitask with only one set of peepers is that these eyes get tired and weak. I used to think that needing a stronger prescription every couple of years was a sign of decay. But my own kids have taught me how much my eyes work for me, how incredibly powerful they are, and how much more influential they become every year.

Whether it is with multifocal lenses or designer frames, at least we can accept presbyopia in better style. And according to my own youngster, I am now doing it prettier, except for the bloodshot part, and the application process. I had one of the lenses stuck to my forehead this morning until my youngest walked into the bathroom and thought it was a booger.

Yeah, way prettier.

Old Hands

This is a continuation of my exploration on new ways to make old hands look younger.

I went to my doctor's all excited about the IPL part of my hand treatment. (As I had previously posted, Doc had recommended lasering the fingers for wrinkles, and injecting filler into the backs of the hand to help mask the blue, veiny look.) His medical assistant expressed some doubts about the procedure overall and wondered why we were going with the IPL laser instead of the Fractal laser which is better at wrinkle removal, but covered my eyes with the pads and gave me the warnings:  It would feel like a rubber band snapping on my skin and keep my darn eyes closed.

She coated my hands with a goo, waited five minutes, then tried to fire the laser. It worked only a small percentage of the time. When it did, it seemed through my eyelids as if the room exploded red and yes there was a snapping on my hand. There was also a singeing of my tiny finger hairs. The process had a kind of superhero aspect to it - but don't ask me to explain - something about the color flashes, I suppose, and all the Spidey trailers I've been seeing.

But sadly, the experiment didn't work. The laser isn't meant to function on a column, which is, after all, what a finger bone looks like. The assistant, after burning my knuckle, gave up, turned off her equipment, and freed my eyes. 

But I didn't. "Well, if this doesn't work, what might? If the idea is to remove skin through laser but laser doesn't work, how about a good ol' fashioned deep chemical peel?" I asked.

She looked at me and then tried to tell me that my hands look the way that hands are supposed to look.

In other words, she think I am crazy and that her employer is an enabler. I am not crazy, I am just one good salesperson and when I have the doctor and his nurses in his examining room and I talk to him about an experiment I want to try and he appreciates the low risk involved and he knows that I am still years away from turning myself into a cat face or anything, he gets excited because he is a man of science after all and I always wanted to be a woman of science so I do it in my own way.

I think I will have to turn to a dermatologist for the peel.

Botox for Keloids and Other Scars

If you have problems with scars, then Singapore's plastic surgeon sensation Dr. Woffles Wu has been experimenting with a treatment amalgamation - a hot combo - that has worked on a handful of patients to date: a combination of laser therapy on the scar and a Botox flooding of the scar area. He ran these experiments with keloids, and demonstrated the results last month in NYC, astounding the crowd of plastic surgeons, and me. 

I'll keep checking with the dermatology and PS journals for more information. Washington  dermatologist Tina Alster notes laser success with hypertrophic scars, too, but no reference to Botox. I suspect Wu's off label use of Botox was ok'd by patients who felt they had nothing to lose. Now, so many people stand to gain.

The doctors are moving in on it.

Last week a flyer came in the mail for a symposium in Singapore. It's still setting on my desk. The program is in October. I mean, this doctor does everything. It took me all of 24 seconds to start trying to figure out how to raise tens of thousands of dollars for some very thorough journalism.

I am the weakest person I know. 

Smart Lipo Confusion, Part 1

I actually postponed my consultation. I never do that. But I need some more time to do some investigation.

I felt fairly comfortable that smart lipo would be the answer to my stubborn, hip and thigh fat. Just a bit of contouring, I thought. You know, keep the weight on the rest of the body - don't want to lose it form the face, sternum or breasts, god forbid. But the side of the left thigh has plagued me since high school. And under the butt - why is life so cruel? The only time that part of me ever got smaller was on a vacation on the island of Santorini when for every meal we had to climb 700 steps and sweat 4 gallons of water. Then do the same afterwards. It's not exactly a lifestyle I can maintain. So I called my doctor, made the appointment, and practically begged to skip the consult - "It's me for crying out loud!" I sort of said over the phone to his surgery coordinator.

But in the meantime I went to a physicians seminar. One of the presenters, Dr. Z. Paul Lorenc,  raised some questions about the damage that the laser does to the remaining fat cells. The images I saw up on the screen are stuck in my minds eye. So five days before my consult I hit the eject button. I mean, if I'm going to do it - should it be the regular ol' lipo, or this laser method?

SmarLipo is a laser-assisted lipolysis procedure involving a small incision and insertion of a laser fiber probe. The doctor aims the laser probe at fatty tissue to disturb and rupture the fat cells. The smaller fats cells are supposed to be absorbed by the body. The larger fat cells are suctioned out. Because my skin is older and thinner now than it was when I was younger - and it never was so fabulously thick and elastic when I was a kid - it really matters what is left behind after such a procedure and how it will respond to such disruption because I am fairly confident it will show.

Dr. Lorenc has placed none of his presentation on the web. I will have to search elsewhere. In the meantime, I upgraded my iPod, added some songs to my excercise playlist and hit the closest piece of exercise equipment to the magical Greek island I could find: the dumb Stairmaster.

Experiments for Old Looking Hands

Ever since I read a year or two ago about getting fat injections into the backs of hands to help them look younger, I have been contemplating some experimentation. I mean, jetting off to a good fat extraction specialist in NYC sounded good and all, but something inside me yearned for a technique more industrial strength. Something inside me usually does.

I have talked to a plastic surgeon about it a few times. He smiles at me. He knows that I am giving myself up as a guinea pig. I even suggested we do each hand differently, so we can compare results. I also asked if he couldn't shoot the back of my hands up with a ton of fat and then dip my fingers into a high acid peel. I wanted to impress him with my creative thought process. He interrupted me.

He agreed, however, with treating the wrinkled fingers separately from the thin-skinned, veiny back of the hands.  I'm feeling pretty optimistic about the fingers, but I'm suspect that the back of the hands is going to cost like a pair of new boobs. "The companies don't giif thiis stuv avay anymore," he says, in his wonderful I crawled across another contintent and swam an ocean to get to the wonderful country accent. "Such a seller's market." Plus, it will have to be a non-permanent filler He says the permanent fillers are still too risky to trust - risky because they can bead up and because they are permanent.

He has set me up to do a test strip on the fingers with an IPL laser and then we will start injecting different parts of the back of the hand with different vials of fillers. I don't know. If it cost many hundreds to fill up a line on the face, what's it going to cost to jack up the canyons that are otherwise known as the backs of my hands between the tendons? And how long will each hand last? When I asked him about fat injections he started talking about the extraction process, the storage issue, and the whole question about whether the fat will take to a particular part of the body or not and - as usual - I begin to wonder if he is opposing it because he doesn't do that kind of treatment. 

I have more research to do on it, like look into my archives and see if I can find that old Vogue article with the hand fat doctor. And maybe get a fourth job.

Primm and Propper

Ok, this is more personal than it needs to be, but I have great breasts. And they are all mine. They are probably great because they are small, and kids and gravity cannot have such a field day with small. I can go braless and no one's stomach will turn. Think Sheryl Crow and Kate Hudson, and well, you've got the picture.

For once, it seems, a break.

Until, of course, I get the Boston Proper catalog in the mail. Suddenly I feel like a foreign species.  Where do these women come from? I mean, with Victoria Secrets somehow you know, well, they are supermodels and there really isn't any competition. VS just wants to inspire you to put at least some thought into your underwear. But BP's catalog layout makes it seem that every other woman in the grocery store aisle is stacked from waist to neck and ready to pounce on anything that even hints of having a Y chromosome, even John Sedgewick.

Before I order a set of sacs of silicone, I'm going to learn the stance: legs spread 18" apart, chest out, butt out. All I have to do is think the dog in heat, be the dog in heat. I can do it. I can do it.

Personally Trained

I hate this guy. I love this guy. He is a constant reminder that I am unmotivated and in a bad way. He is the only one who makes me feel like there is hope. In the three hours before we meet, my anxiety level rises as I come up with a hundred reasons I need to stay at work or home. From the second I am done, I can’t imagine what all my fussing was about. I do need his help. I can already tell I am not going to be able to move tomorrow. I would never work out that hard without him. Then again, I never follow through on my promises to exercise faithfully between out weekly sessions.

I had a personal trainer once before. It was years ago and a relatively new concept for the non-aspiring athlete. My experiment was practically guilt free.The gym was within walking distance of the office, the session only lasted thirty minutes, I could afford it, and I needed it. I was stuck in a mid-thirties malaise brought on by a reality check. I was no longer in my immortal twenties, and not yet in the fortified forties with a soul protectively thickened by another ten years of disappointment. I reckoned that if I spent enough money, I could find my twenty-five year old body again and everything would be good. Once I looked better in my jeans, there wasn’t a boss, client, child or spouse that could defeat me.

My trainer was a kid, young and intense, with stegosaurus hair and a piece of rope tied somewhere about his wrist or neck. He was also extremely serious about physical fitness and so wired that his energy level alone convinced me to give him a try. He had me take lunging steps across the room. He had my back up against a wall, pretending to sit without a chair. All of my long silent muscles started to scream, which was the point. He would also encourage me drink coffee before a work out, lots of coffee for the extra energy buzz. This kid was Bull Run way before its time.

I didn’t stick around for more than a month, probably just eating the cost of the last few weeks instead of showing up. It was hard work that I didn’t like so much. Plus the soreness proved that I was in such bad shape that unless I did this a lot on my own, too, I could never get enough traction to see the results I needed. So I did the only logical thing. I quit.

A decade later, I ran into an old friend. We exchanged compliments. Mine were sincere. “You have a gym at home?” I asked, repeating what she had said while picturing a glistening workout room with mirrors and treadmills but missing the inhabitants because that’s how it goes. “You have a personal trainer, and he comes to the house” I said, again echoing. Only this time, I could not really picture the situation in my head. It was too foreign to me. Three times a week, she explained, and she had been doing this for the last five years. Let’s see, that meant that for every year she worked this hard, she ended up looking two years younger. I went home and rested my forehead against the refrigerator door. If I had stuck with it, I would now be twelve.

My new personal trainer is nice. He is the kind of guy my mother could have raised. He doesn’t yell if I am late, it’s not a problem if I cancel. I still have a hard time getting to the gym without angst. I will probably never lose the “me time” guilt. A big difference today, however, is that instead of thinking that by working out I can subtract the years, I am now focused on addition. I want to avoid the broken hip for another fifteen years beyond the age for which I am genetically encoded. So it’s fitting that I get confused on the locution. I’m not certain that for me there is much of a distinction between personal trainer and physical therapy. 

Another big difference is the exercise. Forget bench presses, sit-ups, or suicide line drills. Exhaustion and stiffness are delivered through equipment that looks soft and friendly but will kill you in your sleep. Nothing looks dopier than a balance ball, but it feels as heavy as a cannon ball after the 117th repetition. And forget about complaining during the routine. It’ll only seem to others that an oversized balloon could wrestle you to the ground. Rubber bands deliver fire to every muscle that has been hiding for the past few decades, they elicit as much respect as a pink hair scrunchie. BOSU (both sides up) balance trainers feel like a surfboard underfoot, forcing half the muscles into working just to keep from falling, while the other half of the body contemplates a squat, bend, or lift. Wait, did I suggest surfing? An elephant at the circus balancing on a kickball is more accurate imagery. All the equipment is sky blue or cheery red, but those colors are a lie. They should be caution yellow and pass-out black.

I saw my old personal trainer a few weeks ago. I was going out of a place while he was going in. I recognized him, and cocked my head to try to remember why. He said my name, and extended a solid handshake. He will do well in life, I thought, and then went to the grocery store for a fresh bag of coffee.

More Than Skin Deep

I have listed my plastic surgeon as my primary care physician on all my HMO forms. I doubt it will slide by the account administrator. Maybe I should have submitted the papers with a Tim Horton’s free doughnut and coffee coupon attached by paper clip over the doctor’s name. The coupon idea hasn’t worked so far on any correspondence to the IRS or the City’s parking enforcement bureau, but never say die, I always say.

Actually, I always do say that, and I always mean it in every sense. In I Feel Bad About My Neck, Nora Ephron (author of When Harry Met Sally) put into print what I years ago acknowledged as the true undercurrent of all my internal vanity wars: a downright fear and loathing of the “D” word. When I drive by the local cemetery, I stick to the farthest away lane the law allows. Sometimes all I have to do is look at my kids and my throat tightens. I never want to be gone, I always want to be here, and I will do what it takes to mellow my mind a little by pretending that death is far off, even if my real brain knows that a fraxel treatment is only a temporary trompe d’oeil. But the events that have lead me to my next big plan of switching doctors has less to do with aging, and more to do with pregnancy. Loved having my kids. Hate what it did to my body.

I used to have a belly button. It disappeared about the time belly shirts and hip huggers resurfaced. Every time I watched any type of television programing, it seemed that a navel ring was always in the script, so I was constantly reminded of what I no longer had. The same could be said of perky breasts and narrow hips, I suppose, but I don’t have a story about that. Yet. Anyway, what I had bedecking my mid-section after three pregnancies was something altogether different than what we think of as a navel. In fact, it looked so different that it did not have a name. Nobody’s does. I simply referred to mine as “that part of me where my belly button used to be.” I mean, for something that so permanently adorns a big lot of us in this world, it is strange that we haven’t come up with a name for the distention and stretched skin, a cute name like “the belly umbrella,” “navel-x,” “the wink,” or “ET’s mom,” or even something less cute like “the abdominal esophagus.” Yeah, ew.

I could no longer try to look young in a bikini. The absentee navel was a big giveaway. I had taken to one piece Speedo’s instead. But slowly, denial gave way to the sad acceptance that no one was ever going to believe I was on a high school swim team. So I decided to directly confront the real culprit, the missing body part. I went to a plastic surgeon and asked, “Is there something you can do to get it back?”

He poked about my abdomen, looked at me with widened eyes and said, "You have a hernia, a hole clear through to your insides. Here, you can feel it.”

I really didn’t want to feel it. I believed him. He made me do it anyway. He asked me if I felt it. I said I did even though I didn’t know if I did, just so I could pull my index finger out of the area reserved for small intestines. I was mildly creeped out. He was smiling the kind of appreciative smile that happens when someone throws a twist into a common predicament. I walked out of his office feeling like the ugliest blow up doll on the adult toy store shelf.

Two days post-surgery I walked into the doctor’s office looking less plastic and more like a giant question mark. "You're moving so well," said the nurse. Well, actually, not so well at all, I thought. I was doing the nursing home shuffle and could only see my feet. What kind of belly button did I get, I wondered. Maybe the gold was already in it, and it was weighing me down.

"You won't believe what I found," started the doctor. In my Lortab fog I was counting the stones in the floor tile. "Your rectus abdominus was spread apart so far above and below the umbilical hernia, that I had no choice but to sew everything back together,” he continued. Well sure, I thought, wondering if the pain medicine was supposed to make me want to throw up. Did he say rectus? Isn’t that in another part of my body? I thought I should try to focus, so I listened harder as he described what I could best imagine as a six pack of Coke that was supposed to be my stomach. The center line of the plastic rings was stretched to a thin, useless three inch width, split apart, in fact, where the handle would be. “Gee, thanks,” I hope I said, as I shuffled out the door, clutching a new prescription. “Don’t do anything at all for awhile,” he ordered after me. “Do my knees always look that fat when I walk?” I replied, seeing things for the first time in my new hunched-over perspective.

Then it clicked. My back. I had spent the past two years in physical therapy and chiropractic care trying to figure out how to ebb the onset of increasing back discomfort. I was actually beginning to wonder if my poor spine was disintegrating, fizzing away like a giant alka seltzer tablet. I worried about other things, like a lifetime on pain pills, spinal fusion, and disc replacement surgery. The back stuff had the potential to severely interfere with my plan to live forever and I was not happy.

I turned back towards the doctor and nurse who had not yet left the reception area. "So wait," I said. "If I haven’t had stomach muscles, could that explain back problems?"

"Sure. You have had no support,” he said.

I thought of my stupid balance ball and how I dragged it into the office just so, it seemed, I could tell every express mail carrier and the water cooler guy how old I was getting. I threw sports equipment in the basement and learned to walk the embarrassing speed walk. I was this close to switching to flat soles for-ev-er. I was working on mathematical formulations that would allow me to calculate how much ibuprofen I could take with my “Honey, I’m home!” wine, without having to factor dialysis into my daily regimen. I was convinced of rapid degeneration, when the problem was founded in the process of gestation. I was hearing “core, core, core” as if it were a new religion, but no one ever bothered to say, "Hey, you’ve blown your midsection out to the size of a VW Beetle a few times. Let’s check out your abdominals."

Well, I have a belly button again. It’s the exact same one. Maybe that shouldn’t be such a thrill, but it is. I had had it my whole life and it’s mine again. And I got my back back. No more therapy, no more drugs. I can’t help but wonder if this doesn’t justify making all my future cosmetic ventures fully covered events. The doc is bound to find something wrong in there beyond an overgrown conceit. My husband can’t keep from wondering why I didn’t put the whole thing on my insurer to begin with. It’s hard to image he would put a price on my belly button. It is harder still for me to picture myself on the phone with customer service:

“Well, see there is a hole there and I feel like a blow up doll and it’s none of your business why I was there in the first place, and no this has nothing to do with wanting to wear high heels again, but . . . but . . . Do you have a supervisor?”

The Mommy Factor

I mentioned that I had stopped the twice daily Obagi skin care program, but that was only because my life was a bit interrupted by major surgery. I went in to a plastic surgeon to explore the prospects of a tummy tuck.  Basically, I wanted to rediscover a part of my body that was totally destroyed by huge pregnancies.  It was supposed to be just a little cosmetic reconstruct. Then my doctor, poking about my abdomen, looking for what had become of my navel, said, "You have a hernia, a hole clear through to your insides."

I was mildly creaped out.

"If it is tiny, I will sew it up. If it looks like a problem, I will not. You may want to have a general surgeon on board just in case, but it is your call."

Malpractice insurance issues, I surmised.  "I trust your judgment," I replied, thinking that I could not afford this, let alone back up doctors. 

What happened next has kept me in such a mild state of shock that I have not been able to do my usual writing, exploring, or generalized idioting around. 

Two days post surgery, I walked down to the car for my first post-op visit.  I was bent over like a question mark.  I walked into the "quiet, dark, Saturday morning so no one would see me and be frightened off" office.  "You're moving so well," said the most wonderful nurse in the world. (I see her more than most friends.)   It did not feel like it.

"You won't believe what I found in there," started the doctor, in his thick accent.  "Your stomach muscles were spread apart so far, that I had no choice but to sew everything back together towards the middle and then down.  That is why your stomach was sticking out above the midline. The fibers were stretched from their usual 'this close' to about 3 inches apart. Oh, and I am sorry. The doctor who said he fixed you after your first two children? He did nothing. I found nothing done inside.  I am truly sorry. Sometimes that happens."

I knew what he was saying.  The rectus abdominus, the six pack muscles, were stretched apart so far from pregnancy and then heavy landscaping work, so that the fibers that make up the long vertical line down the middle were destroyed. And they were destroyed enough so that they actually separated in the navel area. 

Within 3/4 of a second, I thought of my back. 

"So wait," I said.  "If I have had no stomach muscles, is that why my back has fallen apart so badly?"

"Very well could explain it. You had no support. There was no fat there.  It was just that everything on the inside was falling forward."

I had spent 6 months in physical therapy.  I had bought a balance ball. I quit all sports and exercising.  I thought my discs were disintegrating along with my eyesight and the problem all this time was because I had three kids and no one ever bothered to say, "Hey, how about if we run a scan on your abdominals?"  I got pain medications instead?

Then I got kind of angry.  How many other moms have some variation of this?  My guess is all.

I have had my share of surgery. Nothing, including the c-sections and post-partum stuff ever laid me out as this one.  It has been almost 2 months now and I still cannot lie straight on my stomach. It is risky to even stretch.  He stitched me tight as a drum, and put extra stitches in for good measure, he explained, because he suspected I would be too active too soon. 

He is my hero.  He gave me a major chunk of my life back. He gave me my back back.  Plus, he went far beyond what he had been hired to do. Maybe he felt bad because of what another doctor had promised to do but didn't. Maybe he wanted to make up for it. Or perhaps he, as any other person who loves their work, saw something wrong and knew he could make it right and did so.  I don't know, but if I could offer one piece of advice to anyone who has had children or who lifts a fair amount of weight about at work or at play, push for a scan of the abs. Pay for it out of your own pocket if necessary. Create a baseline, if nothing else, so that years later you can determine whether the fibers have separated along one of several critical connecting lines resulting in the loss of precious core continuity and core strength. 

As bad as this recovery has been, I could only imagine what disc replacement or fusion surgery recovery would be like, to say nothing of life on pain killers. 

I am still in shock. I expect to have my sense of humor back by next Tuesday.  I expect the UPS man will bring it on his early run.