Facing the New Year

2014 is being faced with a new face. Literally. 

When all is healed I may even look better than my profile pic, which was taken five or six years ago.  Wattles are gone, my chin singled, heavily hooded eyelids now as taut as a teen’s. In short, everything was done as promised by Lifestyle Lift.

Yet even now, nearly a month after the procedure, the skin of my face, neck and scalp can barely tolerate touch. Yes, the bruising has all but vanished and the swelling recurs rarely and only momentarily, but the incisions still burn and itch. This is a much more serious undertaking than I’d figured.

And despite rather promising results, I have to ask myself:  why would such a strong, healthy person voluntarily go under the knife? Routine household tasks exhaust me. I take several naps a day. I look like a character in a Tim Burton cartoon. I probably won’t leave the house until Superbowl.

There may be another reason healing is so slow. Very much on my mind is where I was last year at this time: a shabby Motel 6 in Santa Rosa, CA, spending as much time as possible at a hospice where my sister was succumbing to cancer.  

I arrived New Year’s Eve after a frantic 3-day drive from Houston. I was with her through her birthday on January 3rd, but didn’t make it before her death on the morning of the 4^th.  

There followed a couple of weeks in a daze of arrangements and sorting through the few worldly possessions in her tiny mountain cabin. My sister’s friends and neighbors were very kind and helpful, but my own kith and kin were thousands of miles away. Phone calls and emails were very limited in the remote and rugged altitudes. While I have many grateful memories of the place, it’s the weight of grief and loneliness that haunts me now. It will pass, as it always does. And so will the pain from this surgery.

It is, after all, a new year.