To Fill or Not to Fill
Adventures in L.A. dermatology.
It all started off with an innocent trip to Trader Joe’s. Now, I’m not one of those Westside moms that gets a blow-out to drop off her kids, but I had bathed that day and managed to put mascara on my sparse Asian lashes. I thought I looked good, like if I walked by a construction site there was a twenty percent chance I’d get a cat call from someone high enough on a building frame to not notice I was forty-three years old.
In the check-out line, I was tossing my fifteen-month-old toddler up and down when an older woman in dark sunglasses and a maroon polyester track suit walked up with a smile.
“What a cutie-pie. Is that your grand-baby?” she said reaching for my daughters pudgy hand.
I felt like all the air had gotten sucked out of me. I stopped bouncing Serena; I almost dropped her. Then as if to defend myself to the strangers around me I started saying loudly, “She thinks this is my granddaughter. She thinks I’m a grandma.”
“Don’t get all upset. I’ve got sunglasses on,” she retorts, puckering up.
“So I look like a grandma in dim lighting?”
Now she’s the one who’s annoyed. “Hey, watch it, I’m a grandma.”
“Of course you are! You’re seventy-five-fucking years old!!” I scream loudly in my head. But in reality, I said, “Congratulations. I’m not.”
The woman shook her head and stomped off. Thank God Serena was too young to be embarrassed by me, yet.
Outside, I slammed my car door and vowed never to go to Trader Joe’s again. This would not have happened in my Brentwood Whole Foods.
I pull my car mirror down to see just what this crazy lady was talking about. In the harsh light of the sun, I had to admit I didn’t look good. My skin was mottled with brown spots. My dark circles were as pronounced as charcoal on a football player’s face. I did not look this bad in the morning. Perhaps because my bathroom is a dark cave lit by thirty-watt bulbs. I surveyed my face some more. When I didn’t smile, I had jowls. When I did smile, I had crow’s feet so deep they looked as if a turkey had etched them. Maybe the annoying lady at the market was not out of line after all. The time had come to act.
I had put off doing injectables for years. Not because I didn’t need them, but because I was scared. My Chinese mother had free-form silicone injected into her boobs in the sixties in her homeland of Taiwan. This did not turn out well.
The other reason I kept putting off Botox was I considered myself a feminist, despite still liking when men paid for dinners. I just wanted them to pay for all women, not just the good-looking ones. That would be sexist.
On top of everything else was the money issue. How could I feel right about spending hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars on my face when there’s starving children in the world and my for-profit preschool needed money to remodel the dress-up loft? Actually, fuck my pre-school. The twenty-eight year old faces at drop-off were the main reasons I had issues.
As luck would have it, a group of pitying friends pooled resources to buy me a $400 gift certificate for Botox as a baby shower present. They reasoned that my geriatric pregnancy (yes, a real medical term) aged face would need a present more than my dewy skinned adorable new baby would. They were right.
My appointment was with a well-known dermatologist in Santa Monica. After waiting thirty plus minutes in the expansive waiting room with about twenty other forty-plus ladies, I was called back to a fluorescent lit photo room. Here I was told to not smile or emote for a series of mug-like photographs of my front face and profile. These photos are taken at most every doctor’s office that specializes in youth so they can track your progress from old and wrinkly, to old and worked on. Btw, If I wasn’t sure I needed work before, these photos definitely would have convinced me. I went on to enter the examination room where a nurse met to talk about my ‘problems.’
“When I smile I get these crow’s feet,” I tell her. “So I’ve been trying not to smile especially in direct sunlight but that can get socially awkward so I thought, why not Botox my crow’s feet so I can get back to smiling.”
“I see” she said completely straight-faced. “So the other issues don’t bother you?”
“What other issues?” I asked sincerely.
“The melasma; the loss of fat on your cheeks; the marionette lines” she said talking about my brown spots and the lines that had developed between my nose and lips.
She handed me a mirror so I could enlighten myself.
“Oh, I thought it was normal to wear really heavy foundation. And what fat loss? You mean my cheekbones?”
Suddenly the door opens and the doctor busts in with another perky assistant glued to her side, notepad in hand. She has short dark hair and oddly plumped skin for a woman over fifty. The doctor doesn’t introduce herself or shake my hand. She glances at me and jiggles her head a bit, as if she’s shaking off the visual of my face. The nurse next to me tells her she’s been talking to me about Botox and micro-needling and Juvaderm.
“God yes, she needs all the help she can get. Her face is so lopsided I can barely look at her,” says the doctor, actively suppressing disgust.
I never knew my face was lopsided. I picked that mirror up and stared hard into it. I couldn’t see it. But they were looking at me like a blind idiot, so I finally conceded, “Yes, I do see what you’re talking about. Ugh. Can’t believe I‘ve been walking around like this.”
“Well it’s nothing Scuptra, Botox, Juvedorer and several skin treatments can’t help,” the doctor says.
“You could have a lot of that old fullness back in your face,” adds the nurse.
“I really don’t want my face to be fuller. I always felt like I had a fat face in my twenties,” I say.
Dad used to call me pumpkin head growing up so, until today, I thought losing fullness was a bonus.
The doctor turns to her assistant. I could see she was angry even though her forehead couldn’t furrow, “I told you not to say ‘fuller’.” She turns back to me, “We want to add contours.”
“Oh,” I say, not convinced, but too emotionally broken down to say so. “Actually, I have an event to go to tomorrow and I really can’t be bruised or puffy at all. Is there a chance of that?” I am lying through my teeth unless stopping for milk at Whole Foods can be considered an event.
“You’d better hold off until next week, then.”
“Okay,” I say trying to look disappointed. But then I remember my gift certificate. I want to use it today so that I do not have to come back. “But I could do Botox today for my crow’s feet?”
“Sure.” She says and within the same breath her assistant has already handed her. “Smile,” she instructs.
I smile and within a millisecond the needle is puncturing my face quickly.
The doctor surveys my crow’s feet. I swear she looks disappointed. She does my other eye and the thirty seconds later I’m all finished. She turns and stalks out.
The nurse is smiling brightly, and car salesman-like. “I’d start with the vampire micro-needling where we get stem cells from your own blood. We see great results with that if we do full vials of it.”
“Thanks,” I tell her and head to check out. It turns out that two vials of my own blood will cost me over twelve hundred dollars as explained by the check-out girl. If I book six sessions, I will get a whopping ten percent off. I tell her I will think about it. That day’s session cost $650. $400 for Botox and $250 to learn how inadequate I was. I don’t know which was the worst part of the deal.
Two weeks later I can’t see much of a difference. I decide I’m done. It was worth it. For a mere two hundred and fifty bucks, minus my gift certificate, I learned what I suspected all along: that this new-fangled face fixing was not for me.
But then several weeks later I met two good friends for an early spin class. Barbara is ten years my senior and Rona is five. But Rona, forty-eight, partied, smoked, ate crap and didn’t exercise for the better part of her life. Also, she had very fair skin and we all know what time does to that. That morning, Rona’s skin looked fantastic. Pore free, smooth and wrinkle free. She even had a healthy-looking rosy glow before spin class.
“Rona, your skin looks fantastic. I can’t believe what this new exercise routine has done for you.”
“What are you talking about? My skin looks better because of my skin doctor. I haven’t slept in like two weeks.”
“Do you guys think I should go in?” I ask.
“Yes,” they both say in unison.
“Just open your wallet and do exactly what she says,” said Rona.
Her doctor’s office was not swanky. It was in a cheesy medical building near Hancock Park and there is only one couch to wait on. I like her better already. Barbara accompanied me to make sure I didn’t chicken out and is surveying her fifty-four-year-old wrinkle free face in the mirror.
“I’m scared. Does filler hurt?” I ask Barbara.
“You know, I took my mom to the dermatologist to get a mole removed and she was such a baby about it. I told her she could never survive in today’s culture.”
“I take it that’s a yes?” I asked. Barbara can be so cryptic.
Just then the doctor barrels in, all one hundred pounds of her. She is a tiny powerhouse. She wears no make-up, a simple bob haircut and horn-rimmed glasses. She looks like a grown-up version of a likable teacher’s pet. She smiles widely and turns to me.
“Oh my God, I love your bra. Who makes that?” she has a mild southern accent and an easy energy about her.
My bra straps are embroidered daisies and I immediately pull up my shirt to show her the brand.
“And the nice thing is they work for small boobs and big boobs,” I add.
The doctor doesn’t hesitate to reach into her top and pull out two silicone pads or ‘chicken filets’ as they’re commonly called.
“Well you can tell which camp I’m in! These things fall out too. Now that’s embarrassing!”
I love this woman.
“So who am I looking at first?”
I raise my hand. “What really bugs me are these crow’s feet and wrinkles on my cheek when I smile. I mean I know I have these jowls developing but I don’t know what to do about that.”
She steps over and lifts her right hand to reveal it’s in a wrist brace.
“What happened to you hand?” I ask.
“Oh, I fell when I was at a convention in Houston. “Just slipped in the hotel bath.”
She starts surveying me intently as I mentally try to figure out the likelihood of this bulky brace interfering with her jamming a needle around. She was so focused on lifting my cheek skin and poking my chin she didn’t seem to notice how nervous I’d become. It was as if she was a painter and I was her work of art (or a really old couch she’s been assigned to refurbish).
“Those lines have a lot to do with dead skin cells, so you need to exfoliate but what I’m seeing is you need a little filler in your chin and on your cheekbone up here. Filler in your chin will create the illusion of a jawline. Your face hasn’t fallen so much as lost some fat. That’ll lift everything up. We can finish off with a little Botox around your eyes.”
“And it won’t be hard to do wearing the brace?” I ask.
She waved this off, or at least I think she did, as her wrist movement was negligible in that brace. Either way the needle was placed in her hand right then by a 120-pound male nurse with a Clark Gable mustache.
“Please just do the bare minimum,” I plead. “I will not be upset if I can’t even tell you did anything. I just don’t want to look different. Well, you know what I mean.”
I was nervous and excited at the same time, almost like the first time I tried cocaine or a Sprinkles cupcake. I lay back as the nurse takes my hand.
“This is going to sting a bit, honey,” the nurse says in a heavy Cuban accent as the doctor jams a needle into my chin with her gimpy hand and starts jiggling it around.
It felt like she had injected a quart of some liquid into my chin and was jamming it around so violently I thought the needle would surely poke its way out of my lip. Oddly it wasn’t so much painful as terrifying in its strangeness. I felt violated.
“How much are you putting in?” I try to ask without moving my lips.
“Honey, you can talk as much as you want once I finish this but please we need your face still to do this right,” said the doctor.
I clammed up immediately. I didn’t want to exacerbate problems with what I was sure was going to look horrible. I stopped breathing as best I could to avoid any movement.
“Just get through this because you are never, ever, doing this again,” was my mantra as I closed my eyes for what seemed like hours.
“Okay take a look,” says the doctor as they sit me up and hand me a mirror.
I was shocked. I was dumbfounded. Not only could you not tell there had been the least bit of trauma to my chin area, but my face looked better in a totally undiscernible way. I just looked, dare I say, younger?
“Oh my God,” was all I could say.
“I told you I was just doing a little bit.”
“This is fantastic. Keep going,” I said and lay back down on my own accord.
I was completely done in about five more minutes of jarring jabs, the next time to my cheek area. This time I didn’t mumble a word until I sat up.
“Oh my gosh, I love it,” I said, so excited I could barely contain myself.
“Yeah, isn’t it empowering? It’s like telling aging it can go fuck off,” the doctor said.
“Yes, that’s exactly what it’s like.,” I replied, taking in the hugeness of this realization.
When I got up off the chair, all I could do was stare at myself in the mirror. I looked better and I wasn’t even swollen.
“I wish I didn’t keep telling her to put in the bare minimum, I’d probably look even better,” I thought to myself, like an alcoholic who turned down a case of Kettle One by mistake.
After Barbara got about a thousand shots of Botox we headed to check out.
“You were right. I can’t believe I waited this long,” I tell her as we walk to check out.
The sweet twenty-five year old, (or maybe thirty-five year old who had told aging to fuck off) receptionist handed me a bill. My jaw dropped, or at least I thought it did because I was still a little numb.
“Oh my God,” I reflexively say out loud.
“You can put back the sunscreen,” offers Barbara.
I do, which lowers my bill by .01%. We walk out.
“I can’t believe how much money that was,” I said.
“That’s the price of passing 40,” said Barb matter-of-factly.
When Rona said to ‘open my wallet’ I had no idea how wide. It looks like Elyse’s pre-school will not be getting the loft update I was planning on.”
But then my face was in much worse shape than the loft, anyhow.
