Oh, boo, my lipstick application has gone awry, I might cry.
It is a very peculiar sensation, applying lipstick to lips that you cannot all the way feel, and I hope I should not have to do it again soon. Suffice to say that without the guidelines of ~feel~, it is astonishingly easy to colour outside the lines. Yes, even as your eyes follow the actions in the mirror. The senses, when you have all of them, work in tandem: what you see is what you feel and vice versa. And when you take a long relied upon sense away suddenly, everything goes a little loopy. It's fascinating, and a little distressing. Not in a big world-altering way — we are talking about lipstick application, FFS — but in a way that makes you feel a little silly after the fact. Oh, boo, my lipstick application has gone awry, I might cry. But when you couple that with post-surgery pain and general physical weakness, I'll be honest, I did shed a little woe-is-me tear.
Short story, I had surgery. Big surgery. Inside my mouth, the orifice that has given me a litany of grief over the last decade, up to and including a very painful bone graft situation. I am no stranger to pain at this site, and yet this was perhaps the the worst I've ever had? It made me wake up sobbing, and when an oral surgeon did an X-ray, she recommended we yank all four out. Among other things.
(This is where I roll my eyes a little bit at the American healthcare system.)
Look, I understand private healthcare – that is the route I took in the UK when my own dental woes began (bless good credit and the flexible freelance lifestyle I was living back then). But it still felt alien to pay money at the site and time of healthcare being administered, and that of course, is before you even consider how much it costs. The cost of a CT scan, (not covered by my insurance: surprise!), for example, knocked me for six. And then came the itemising. The upper back left wisdom tooth costs the least to extract and sedation comes priced in blocks of 15 minutes a pop, with the first 15 minutes costing less than all subsequent blocks. It felt stunningly transactional, even in this, the greatest capitalist nation on earth. It was impossible to not think of necessity vs greed (let me stress: my surgeon appeared capable, sincere and kind) and that avatar for profit, outsized dollar signs, danced in front of my closed eyes. Slowly the surgeon and the nurse morphed from kindly white-coated professionals into something rather more sinister. Which is saying something. I mean, these are dentists. AKA the horror movie go-to torture medical professionals! Turns out I can deal with injections and drills and clamps and saws without breaking a sweat. But an itemised bill of what my insurance would do or not do raised my blood pressure. I miss the NHS like a relative.
The surgery ended up being having unforeseen complications, and when I came to, much later than the surgeon had planned, the sides of my mouth were torn (they make you sign an agreement that is a potential outcome, and that you're okay with that) and I could not feel my face (they make you sign a thing about the nerve that may or may not be damaged during surgery, leaving you with localised permanent numbness, too). Slowly, the feeling has been coming back, and with it, a burning pain that hums during every waking moment, sometimes exploding in sharp, pointed pain. Shoutout to strong painkillers. The inside of my mouth feels like a crime scene: swollen and angry, and oozing blood intermittently, as if to say, "I'm still here, bitch, and I'm pissed." I am on a soft food diet now (so many legumes! so much yoghurt! a surprising volume of mashed potatoes!) and will remain on it for a while longer. I haven't had a cup of tea in almost two weeks and I am basically a husk of a woman as a result.
But back to the numbness. We are at the wait-and-see stage, eager to see what will return. Right now, in the lower left quadrant of my face, I have no feeling in a small patch that includes most the lip in the area. I have read too many accounts online of people who have never got it back post-surgery and I now live inside the terrified emotional space that is about the size of a needle eye and yet feels like a football pitch. After all this time and study, the human body is a known unknown thing, still. The most pragmatic part of me recognises the important things. My brain (post-surgery, and still woozy from the anaesthetic, I asked my friend N – who took care of me like I paid her generously – "do you think they took some of my brain by accident?") still works fine. I am literally returned to my pre-surgery state in almost every way that truly counts. Still, I have had a crash course in my own face this month, experimentally tiptoeing my fingers across my face and pressing down on a landscape that has been made to feel foreign to me all of a sudden. It's a small thing, but it's oddly significant. It feels like an on-the-nose metaphor for life in my 30s.
All this because my lipstick went too far left. LOL.