Sweet Surrender Read Online Free PDF Page B

moment’s reflection I was getting ready to trot off to hospital.
    I was told to buy some concentrated spray-on arnica, to squirt under my tongue several times a day in the weeks leading up to the surgery. Arnica is a fantastic natural antidote to bruising and my doctor believed that having a good dose of it in your system before the operation would help prevent any massive swelling as a reaction afterwards. I dutifully squirted the arnica in my mouth and cut back on my drinking, again to prevent a post-operative reaction.
    As I lay in pre-op a few weeks later, I reminded the surgeon that I didn’t want radical surgery, just a subtle effect – the bare minimum. He was drawing lines on my skin to follow with a scalpel. David had opposed my decision. A hospital phobic, he had nightmares about me having an anaesthetic and the possible complications that could arise. And what if I ended up looking like a gargoyle? Despite my growing reservations, it was far too late to change my mind.
    When I woke, I felt fine, although I was told that I had suffered a minor reaction to the anaesthetic during the operation. I had a strap around my face but didn’t feel any pain or even much discomfort. It seemed like a doddle. Although I was still a bit groggy, I got chatting to the woman in the next bed. She was recovering from a lumpectomy for breast cancer, and was visibly distressed and quite fearful about her outcome. She didn’t ask the reason for my surgery, and I didn’t volunteer it. By now I was on a fully fledged guilt trip. Here I was feeling comparatively bright and breezy after what had been an elective procedure based on vanity. There she was struggling to come to terms with the possibility that her operation may not have succeeded in ridding her body of cancer cells. She was facing both chemo and radiotherapy. I was going home to rest for a couple of days until the swelling went down, then to go merrily on with my life. It felt very wrong.
    I was also keenly aware of the shortage of hospital beds for much more valid elective procedures. Lack of theatre time and post-operative beds is a major cause of our medical system’s long waiting lists, and I couldn’t help but wonder just how many plastic surgery procedures were clogging up the system. My surgery day had been booked within weeks of my initial consultation. It was a private hospital, but the theatre and my bed could have been put to better use. I wondered how the nursing staff felt about this situation, and that made me squirm even more. I was very keen to get home.
    True to his word, the surgeon had gone gently with the knife and two weeks after the surgery it was virtually impossible to detect thatanything very much had been done. I noticed a much smoother jawline – those little pouchy bits on my chin, directly below my mouth, had vanished, but otherwise I looked very much the same, perhaps just a little less haggard. I told quite a few friends but then stopped mentioning it, and nobody commented. Nobody said ‘Gosh, you look fantastic’, or ‘Have you been on a holiday? You look so relaxed’, or ‘How do you keep yourself looking so young?’. I certainly didn’t look thirty-five, or even forty-five. I still looked like a woman in her fifties, and for that I was grateful.
    What I didn’t realise then is that if you seriously want to intervene in the ageing process, it’s like being on a treadmill – very hard to get off. During my six-week post-op visit, the receptionists and assistants in the surgeon’s glamorous rooms were effusive about the results – that’s their job. They immediately suggested that I should get some Botox and Restylane fillers to ‘go with’ the S-Lift. They talked about me coming back regularly for more treatments – suggesting the area under my eyes could do with some work and that I could also have work done on my neck and chest area. There’s