Pepperone nose

Nando, meanwhile, was laughing. "What a trip!" he kept saying. "Boy am I stoned. I am a pepperone. I want to scratch my nose but I can’t find my nose. Hahaha."

He wanted to know where he was and where I was and what time it was -- the latter question he repeated often. He also kept insisting that his nose itched but he couldn’t find it. So I scratched it for him while he laughed delightedly.

As stoned as he was -- and he DID realize he was stoned -- he had the wherewithal to insist that his blood sugar be tested with his portable tester. So the anesthesiologist was rounded up, along with a nurse, to help Nando figure out the correct insulin dose and administer it.

Talking turkey

We developed the Thanksgiving pictures today, shortly after the event. I looked fine in one of them, not gorgeous or sexy, but me -- with an unbroken chin line and nice cheekbones. That was one picture. But the others: in the one of me eying the turkey head, it’s hard to tell whose appearance is more scraggly. And the one of me gesturing proudly to the half-cooked bird, well, put that one next to the "great shot" of me after dinner and it’s almost like a before and after facelift contrast. I am halfway minded to bring both photos with me to show Dr. Delos and challenge him to better the "after" image. "And my before and after didn’t cost me anything and didn’t require surgery," I’d like to point out to him.

Through glasses darkly

I picked up my glasses today; the first glasses (other than reading glasses and sunglasses) I have owned in 38 (ouch) years. Among the instructions from Marseille was the admonition that contact-lens wearers should expect to wear glasses for the first week or so after the operation. Because I didn't own a pair of glasses I had to find a local optician who would make me a pair quickly. I figured I’d better get used to them BEFORE the surgery, because I didn't know how long it would be before my eyes could wear them afterward.

Oh the first time I put on the glasses, they felt so STRONG. Blinding, almost. Could the fact that I haven’t owned a pair of prescription glasses since the age of 16 have something to do with vanity? I had stubbornly refused to buy them all these years because it seemed like a betrayal of my faith in contacts, but now I wonder if egotism also had something to do with it.

The telltale . . . crow

Nando showed me the photograph we had taken with John and Nicole six weeks ago. "Look at this,” he said. "You are the only one in this picture who doesn’t need a facelift." It was true; in the photo, at least, my laugh lines had curled around to frame my smile, so you couldn’t see the sagging skin. The camera -- or was it the lighting? -- tempered my crow’s feet, and the angle was such that I was the only one without a telltale roll under my chin.

"Ah, if only I looked like that in real life," I said, "I’d be nuts to bother with surgery."

Cabbage in Cannes

Delos brightened. "Yes, a woman in Cannes. She might be available. I don't know what her hours are but this is her phone number. If you are able to see her this week and tout va bien, I could schedule your surgery the first week of December. Say, Tuesday, December 4. Would that be all right?"

I started to say, "We will discuss this and get back to you" at the same time Nando was saying, "That sounds good for me. Doesn't that work for you, Cipo?" ("Cipo" is short for "cipollina", or "little onion," my husband’s public term of endearment for me. It may sound strange in English, but it’s not so different from "ma petite choux", or little cabbage, in French).

Gulp. I withdrew my objection because, after all, we might not get in touch with the anesthesiologist. Or we might get in touch and something would prevent our going ahead. Or we might be okay for anesthesia but not okay for the surgery. That is, I might not be okay for the surgery.

So I smiled grimly and we ended the visit with an exchange of email addresses, a flurry of salutations in French and Italian, and a shaking of hands all round.

Surgical shopping list

"If you decide to do it, you will be given all this information. Ne vous derangez pas. Don’t worry. But to answer your questions: yes, the stay at the clinic is included in the price, and I do the procedures right here. This is my clinic. Your wife must come the day before the surgery and stay overnight. In your case, I would not charge you for staying here the night with her. She must also stay the night after the surgery. Because of your diabetes and blood pressure, you might also want to stay here the second night with her. I would not charge you extra for that either."

"Meals are included {I am sure he smiled to himself when he said that. No one in their right mind wants to eat after this ordeal}. I check you here two days after the surgery and then a week later, when the staples are removed from your wife. All your costs here are included. The only extras are the medicines I ask you to bring with you when you come for the surgery, and the cost of a consultation with an anesthesiologist once you decide you want to go ahead."

Speaking franc-ly

"If we both decide to do this, how much will it cost?" My husband wanted to get to the bottom line at this point.

Delos jotted some numbers down on a notepad. "Eye bags alone are FF 18,000. A facelift for your wife is between FF 50,000-60,000. For the two of you together I charge FF 60,000. I can do both of you the same day and you would share the same recovery room."

My husband likes things spelled out clearly. "Does that include the hospital stay? WHERE do you do the surgery? Do we have to come the day before? How many days do we have to stay? Are meals included? Do we have to return for a checkup after the surgery? Is anesthesia included? What costs are NOT included?"

Facing leather

There were a couple of leather albums on Delos' desk, along with his computer, phone, electronic gadgets and neat stacks of papers. The doctor opened one of these albums to a page where men and women looked out at us with heavy eye bags on the left, and almost nothing on the right. I say "almost nothing" because the places where the bags had been looked like something had been there. But they didn't look unaesthetic, and they certainly all looked natural.

"How come I don't get to see before and after pictures of facelift patients?" I thought to myself. "Probably because monsieur le docteur figures I don't need convincing. Joan and Nicole did all that work for him."

Extra baggage

I returned to my seat and Delos to his place behind his desk. I looked at my husband. Nando cleared his throat. "As long as I am here with my wife, umm, I wonder what you think about the bags under my eyes. Is there something you can do? You should know that I am a diabetic and I have high blood pressure, so I don't want a major operation."

"Hmm," said Delos. Now it was Nando's turn to get up from his chair and be inspected in the sunlight.

The verdict: "There are two ways to handle this problem. One is to cut and pull up the skin; the other is to scrape away the fat. The first solution won't work well with you because of the structure of your face and eyes. You will wind up with white permanently beneath your irises and you will look strange. I advise the second solution, because it is simpler and does not require general anesthesia. The whole thing takes 20 minutes and you can walk out the same day."

An old bag

"Hmm, you don’t have any 'borses' (bags under your eyes)."

"I have a small face, though. I don't want to do anything that will interfere with my smile. My smile is my best feature (I smiled to emphasize my point) and I don't want to be pulled so tight that it's hard to smile. And my eyes are already small and a little slanted. I don't want them pulled tight either."

"I don't share the same philosophy of my American colleagues. They believe in pulling the skin tight. I don't pull the skin. I work with the muscles under the skin. The result is more natural."

Medicine, markets, menopause, migraines

I was online to do market research about a medical company, and the website happened to feature a story about facelifts. So I followed the links and wound up with several graphic descriptions of actual cosmetic surgery procedures. As I now have my appointment in Marseille scheduled, I began to read them with interest. And suddenly I felt light-headed, dizzy, almost nauseous. Uh-oh, I thought. If I can’t even get through READING about this stuff, maybe it’s not my destiny to go under the knife.

But then again, maybe it’s menopause. I have hot flash attacks frequently, several times a day at least, and I have headaches too, sometimes starting when I wake up in the morning. A few weeks ago I woke up in the middle of the night (maybe 3 am?) and said, "This is bad. I am about to have a migraine attack." Bizarre -- WAKING UP from sleep to experience a migraine. And it was a bad one too. Not the worst, but a Force 7.

The knife and me

Living in a country where you live and breathe architectural and cultural beauty every day, you find yourself nudged toward the quest for the Holy Grail of Grace and Glamour. When you embark on such a beauty quest after the age of 50, you know that massages, face creams and spa treatments are not going to do the trick. It’s got to be the sword, er, knife. Yes, it all gets down to the knife . . . "going under the knife."

I’m one of those people who turns pale at the smell of alcohol and faints at the sight of a needle. A simple blood test is a major ordeal for me. Surgery and I do not get along, and therefore we’ve kept our distance for most of the last 50+ years, with the exception of a tonsillectomy, a wisdom tooth extraction, and a couple of broken wrists. The very thought of subjecting myself to surgery for VANITY’s sake is more than anathema, it is pure insanity.

Yet, in spite of my fears, the prospect of cosmetic surgery was beginning to formulate in the back of my mind. Like pasta in Italy and politics in France, it was raising its knife-and-needle-filled head in conversations with my female peers on my annual trips to the U.S. It was THERE, dormant, awaiting the catalyst that would bring it out of the dark recesses of my increasingly wrinkled face.