the point of a jewel-encrusted egg?
My first patient on Groundhog Day was an egg-shaped woman. Or maybe she was groundhog-shaped. She was some kind of egg and groundhog hybrid, so fat it was impossible to detect any expression in her face.
“My little boy’s about to start school,” she told me, “and I’m worried he’ll be bullied.”
“Why would that be?”
“Because I’m fat,” she said flatly.
She was fat, but her reasoning seemed thin. I sensed there was more to this maternal concern than met the eye and, sure enough, when I examined her, I found badly healed burn scars that must have been causing her great discomfort. She’d put on all this weight since the burning incident, so the stretched skin was pulling at the scars and irritating them. After she got dressed, I sat her down and asked about the scarring. Without much hesitation, as if bursting to admit it all, as if all that fat was just layer on layer of smothered trauma and protest, she told me the ghastly thing that had happened to her. She’d been married to a guy who continually raped her, sometimes at gunpoint. When she became pregnant, he flipped completely and doused her with kerosene while she slept, setting the bed alight. Nice guy. Her little boy was born unharmed, but she was badly burned. And when she started divorce proceedings against her husband, the lawyer tried to rape her too!
So the whole thing about the kid, her anticipation of his being bullied, was really a side issue—the woman was sick of being mistreated herself . She needed a full-time shrink! Not my field. My training only equipped me to alleviate her physical symptoms. In recognition of what she’d been through, I offered to fix her scars for free. (My colleagues would grouse about it, but so what? I too could be compassionate.) But she didn’t care about the scars, she said, she was only interested in protecting her boy from ostracism. Reluctantly, I then suggested a gastric band (not something I could do but I could find a friend who would, and I’d gladly pay)—but she objected to this too.
“There isn’t time. He starts kindergarten in March.”
Lipo was what she wanted and lipo was what she insisted on getting. This too was outside my province. My patients are rich, and the rich are rarely fat these days. The poor are fat, and the middle classes are the ones you see jogging everywhere: the thinwardly mobile. But I gave her the name of a lipo guy and told her to come back afterward and we’d see to those scars. She said she’d think about it. Then, with the assistance of my cane (which Cheryl found so sexy), I limped out to the foyer with the woman to prevent any chance of her being bullied, mistreated or ostracized on her way out.
I’d forgotten the dreariness of our waiting room, despite our marketing advisor Andy’s extensive efforts to de-medicalize it. What we needed to establish, he’d informed us before the revamp, was a calm, clean, cozy atmosphere, so that as soon as they stepped inside the door, our prospective clients would get the feeling that plastic surgery’s no big deal. “It’s not like buying a house, or a car!” he said. “You’ve got to make it. . . fun. It could all be fun!” So the place had been done up to look like a kind of luxury holistic therapy center or relaxation and meditation spa, with minor elective procedures on offer—rather than the sadomasochistic, money-grubbing, life-endangering torture chamber it really was. Under Andy’s direction, an interior decor consultant installed thick creamy carpets to break any shaky patient’s fall (and muffle the whimpers), and indirect lighting that glowed kindly on post-operative abnormalities (as kindly as energy-saving bulbs can glow). We were also advised to position fresh flowers everywhere to mask the smell of piss and pus and disinfectant. Casual attire was the agreed look; no suits, no ties, no white coats, just a loose shirt and jeans, even a baseball cap. We all
My first patient on Groundhog Day was an egg-shaped woman. Or maybe she was groundhog-shaped. She was some kind of egg and groundhog hybrid, so fat it was impossible to detect any expression in her face.
“My little boy’s about to start school,” she told me, “and I’m worried he’ll be bullied.”
“Why would that be?”
“Because I’m fat,” she said flatly.
She was fat, but her reasoning seemed thin. I sensed there was more to this maternal concern than met the eye and, sure enough, when I examined her, I found badly healed burn scars that must have been causing her great discomfort. She’d put on all this weight since the burning incident, so the stretched skin was pulling at the scars and irritating them. After she got dressed, I sat her down and asked about the scarring. Without much hesitation, as if bursting to admit it all, as if all that fat was just layer on layer of smothered trauma and protest, she told me the ghastly thing that had happened to her. She’d been married to a guy who continually raped her, sometimes at gunpoint. When she became pregnant, he flipped completely and doused her with kerosene while she slept, setting the bed alight. Nice guy. Her little boy was born unharmed, but she was badly burned. And when she started divorce proceedings against her husband, the lawyer tried to rape her too!
So the whole thing about the kid, her anticipation of his being bullied, was really a side issue—the woman was sick of being mistreated herself . She needed a full-time shrink! Not my field. My training only equipped me to alleviate her physical symptoms. In recognition of what she’d been through, I offered to fix her scars for free. (My colleagues would grouse about it, but so what? I too could be compassionate.) But she didn’t care about the scars, she said, she was only interested in protecting her boy from ostracism. Reluctantly, I then suggested a gastric band (not something I could do but I could find a friend who would, and I’d gladly pay)—but she objected to this too.
“There isn’t time. He starts kindergarten in March.”
Lipo was what she wanted and lipo was what she insisted on getting. This too was outside my province. My patients are rich, and the rich are rarely fat these days. The poor are fat, and the middle classes are the ones you see jogging everywhere: the thinwardly mobile. But I gave her the name of a lipo guy and told her to come back afterward and we’d see to those scars. She said she’d think about it. Then, with the assistance of my cane (which Cheryl found so sexy), I limped out to the foyer with the woman to prevent any chance of her being bullied, mistreated or ostracized on her way out.
I’d forgotten the dreariness of our waiting room, despite our marketing advisor Andy’s extensive efforts to de-medicalize it. What we needed to establish, he’d informed us before the revamp, was a calm, clean, cozy atmosphere, so that as soon as they stepped inside the door, our prospective clients would get the feeling that plastic surgery’s no big deal. “It’s not like buying a house, or a car!” he said. “You’ve got to make it. . . fun. It could all be fun!” So the place had been done up to look like a kind of luxury holistic therapy center or relaxation and meditation spa, with minor elective procedures on offer—rather than the sadomasochistic, money-grubbing, life-endangering torture chamber it really was. Under Andy’s direction, an interior decor consultant installed thick creamy carpets to break any shaky patient’s fall (and muffle the whimpers), and indirect lighting that glowed kindly on post-operative abnormalities (as kindly as energy-saving bulbs can glow). We were also advised to position fresh flowers everywhere to mask the smell of piss and pus and disinfectant. Casual attire was the agreed look; no suits, no ties, no white coats, just a loose shirt and jeans, even a baseball cap. We all
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