by Dom Harvey
I called and made an appointment for a ‘cosmetic consultation’. That is what they call it. It takes fifteen minutes and is done by a cosmetic nurse.
This would be good. Really, I just wanted some Botox injections so I could see what all the fuss was about and whether or not it actually made a difference.
Plus I had a lot of questions I wanted answered.
How many years could they take off my face?
Would the changes even be noticeable?
If the changes were noticeable, would it be in a good way or a workmates-snigger-behind-my-back way?
Would I still be able to frown and laugh?
Could it end up making me look like one of those celebrities who went too far? Like Michael Jackson, Kenny Rogers or the Duchess of Alba. Next time you’re online, do a Google image search on the eighty-six-year-old Duchess. The poor old duck has had so much work done she looks like an alien from a Spielberg film. Still, the work must be good enough to fool her sixty-year-old third husband, who she married in October 2011.
I went for my appointment and was met by Sally, who led me from reception into a consultation room. The place was stylish and sparse and felt like some sort of a cool hospital. Sally was impeccably groomed and in great physical shape. She was maybe in her early forties—hard to tell, though, since there was barely a wrinkle on her face. Obviously she had been making good use of whatever staff discount she was entitled to.
Sally got the ball rolling. ‘When you look in the mirror,’ she enquired, ‘what do you not like?’
‘The old guy looking back at me,’ I replied and laughed nervously and loudly.
‘Are you serious?’ Sally replied, clearly trying to make me feel better about myself. She wasn’t fooling anybody, though. I knew what she was looking at. I had stared at the same thing many times over the years and watched it deteriorate. Some men my age have what are known as crow’s-feet around their eyes. My lines probably resemble the feet of an adult ostrich more than those of a little bird like a crow.
We established that there wasn’t really anything in particular I was self-conscious about—I was just keen to try out some cosmetic work to see what the fuss was all about.
‘Just looking at you, I definitely don’t think you look thirty-eight,’ she lied, before getting down to business. ‘I would probably say I would treat . . . that,’ she announced, pointing towards two crevices that formed what looked like a deep letter ‘A’ carved right between my eyes.
I nodded in full support of what Sally was saying. She generously responded that most of her guy friends have these lines and they are usually caused by concentration rather than being an angry person. I wondered if she said that just to be nice because she didn’t want to make me mad.
I then found out something no one had ever told me before—I frown more with my left corrugator than my right one. How embarrassing for me! Why had no one told me this? It’s as if I had been walking around for years with a piece of toilet paper stuck to my shoe.
I had no idea what Sally was on about but she certainly seemed surprised by this whole left corrugator thingy.
She explained that the lines were a result of muscular contraction. Botox would paralyse those muscles, which would stop them from contracting. With repeated courses of Botox the lines could even improve and get better.
She did go on to warn me there was one problem with Botox. I was prepared for her to say it can make your face look funny over time (like some of the vain celebrities we have all seen in magazines who have taken a liking to Botox). That was not her answer, though.
‘The only problem with Botox is it can be a bit addictive,’ she laughed. ‘In the sense that you see really good improvements and you don’t ever want to stop using it. It works really nicely. A lot of women find if they can’t get their Botox, they don’t like it when their frown comes back.’
But what about the pain involved? I hate needles. I avoid them at all costs, so having multiple injections in my face for reasons of vanity seemed absurd.
‘It doesn’t hurt.’ Sally assured me. ‘There will be five very superficial injections and then it takes about three or four days to start to work.’
Even worse than my fear of needles was my fear of parting with money, so I asked about the cost involved.
‘Every case is individual and it all depends on how many units we have to use, but it is $18.50 a unit, and I would start you off on just a standard dose of about twenty units. Sounds a lot, but it isn’t twenty injections—it’s just four units into each little injection. So you would be looking at $370,’ she announced without flinching. Or maybe she was flinching, but I saw no noticeable movement in that smooth face of hers.
‘Cool, all right, let’s make an appointment!’ I said.
She looked through her diary and the next available slot was an entire week later. Evidentially, this Botox is a booming business.
We ran through a series of health-related questions, then she sent me on my way with an appointment card and an information sheet. As she walked me out I asked out of curiosity how many male customers she had.
Sally told me it was maybe a fifth or a quarter. ‘I get a lot of male clients—lots of guys want to look their best. Most of my male clients come in during their forties, but the age of guys ranges from mid thirties to mid sixties.’
That surprised me. Once you’re in your sixties why would you waste hundreds or even thousands of dollars on this sort of thing? Even without wrinkles surely the slow walk or smell of urine would be a giveaway to your advanced years.
The following Tuesday was Botox day. I was highly sceptical, but I was prepared (and even secretly hoping) to be proven wrong.
I went to reception and was taken to a waiting area, where I had a few minutes to read the brochures about other services they offered for men including a procedure called ‘high definition liposuction’. This is lipo for people who are carrying only a little bit of excess weight and not people who are fat, fat. The before and after photos were of a shirtless guy. Photo 1 showed him with no visible abs (no beer belly either, mind you). Photo 2 showed the same bloke, now with abs and a fake tan.
The funny thing is, in the ‘after’ photo he had the abs . . . but his arms were still a bit flabby. Perhaps he was going to go back for some of this high definition liposuction on his arms once he had saved up some more money.
Sally came to grab me and took me through to the procedure room. She got me to sign a consent form, which I did without reading it first. It was probably just a promise from me that I wouldn’t take legal action against this place if I ended up looking like Shane Warne.
I lay down on the bed and Sally started stretching and moulding the skin on my forehead with her fingers, the way you might flatten out a piece of paper that had been screwed up and then retrieved from a rubbish bin.
‘This is a little test that I do. There are two kinds of wrinkles—dynamic lines and static lines. Dynamic lines appear only when you move your face, but static lines are there all the time, even when the face is at rest. Botox helps to relax your muscles, so when you try to frown, you won’t be able to. It’s all about preventing dynamic lines from getting any deeper,’ Sally explained. ‘But it’s a bit trickier with static lines—like this one here.’ She showed me a deep line on my forehead. ‘See, even when I pull the skin, it’s still there. Now not even Botox can remove that. So after you’ve had your treatment, don’t feel disappointed if the line is still there. At least it will keep you looking natural. In fact it could be quite strange if you came out and there wasn’t a line on your face at all.’
‘WAIT. A. MINUTE!’ I thought to myself but was far too polite (and gutless) to ask out loud. ‘So I am about to pay hundreds of dollars for a procedure that is supposed to take the lines off my face and you’re telling me it won’t take the lines off my face?’
This was a joke!
Don’t feel disappointed if the line is still there! Are you kidding me? Of course I will feel dis
appointed.
If I take my car to the mechanic because it is making a strange rattling sound, he is not going to take my money and then tell me, ‘Now, don’t be disappointed if it still makes the rattling sound. It might be strange if all of a sudden the rattling sound was no longer there.’
Maybe my eyes gave away what I was too chicken to say out loud, because Sally continued with her spiel, trying to sell me on the positives of Botox.
‘With repeated Botox treatments, that line will get better and better. If it still bugs you, we can use a little bit of filler. That’s a bit like injecting poly-filler into the skin. It lifts the skin, so the line won’t seem so deep. But my view is prevention is better than a cure. Start with a course of Botox and we can take it from there.’
Talk time was over. The time for Botox was now. I lay down on the bed and was given one of those rubbery stress balls to squeeze on. Sally placed a small icepack on my forehead to help numb the area between my eyes. Then she cleaned the area and showed me the needle. It looked slightly smaller than the needle a doctor would use for blood tests. But, still, it was a needle and it was about to pierce my skin, right between my eyes. FIVE TIMES!
‘All right, close your eyes and remain nice and still. Are you comfy?’
‘Comfortable enough, I suppose.’
I inhaled as instructed and could smell nothing but balloons. It was Sally’s latex gloves hovering just above my face as she prepared to begin.
‘How does that feel? It’s just like a little scratch, isn’t it?’ Sally asked and then answered on my behalf.
I could feel the needle go in. Her description of it being like a scratch was pretty accurate. It didn’t hurt, but I wouldn’t describe it as a trip to Rainbow’s End either! It was probably more the anticipation than the pain that had put me on edge.
This procedure was repeated another four times: ‘Inhale. Eyes shut. Relax. Breathe.’
And then we were done.
‘So it’s going to look like you’ve got mozzie bites. That’s because you’re still going to have fluid settling into the muscle there. Keep your head elevated for the next couple of days—that means no yoga or Pilates where you put your head down into inverted kinds of positions.’
I had no intention of doing either, but I’m assuming they are both popular activities for a lot of the well-heeled Botox customers.
‘It won’t start to work immediately,’ she warned me, again. ‘It will take about three days for it to start to work and from there the onset is gradual. In two weeks’ time it will be working to its maximum.’
I was led out to reception, where I paid for the treatment: $370, as I’d been warned during the initial consultation.
The receptionist pointed out that I had drops of blood appearing from a couple of the tiny needle holes. She reached over to a box of tissues and pulled a couple out. Under usual circumstances I would have put my hand out to take the tissues and dabbed my own blood. But since I had just been stung $370 for five tiny injections, I just leaned forward and tilted my head down, leaving the poor receptionist with no option but to do the dabbing for me. What an arsehole!
I walked back to the car and did what I imagine every single customer does—checked my face out in the mirror to see if there had been any instant change. As warned, it hadn’t kicked in yet.
Over the next few days I kept a watch on my face to see if there were any changes. These were my scribbled diary entries:
Wednesday: No change yet. Still look old.
Thursday: Still no change. I actually look two days older than I looked two days ago.
Friday: 72 hours now and nothing. No comments from anyone and the line looks as deep as ever.
Tuesday: One whole week. Definitely a change. Subtle. The line is still there but nowhere near as deep.
Tuesday: Two weeks. Botox at its peak now. I must admit, the change has been quite dramatic. Those deep lines are still there but nowhere near as deep. No comments from other people . . . but I do feel better when I see my reflection.
The changes were pretty subtle but made me feel a bit better about the way I see myself. Friends only commented on the changes once I pointed out I’d had it done.
So, Botox does work and many people seem to swear by it. If you are one of these people, good for you.
Is it for me? No. I am reasonably vain and I hate looking older than I feel . . . but I hated spending $370 on something so meaningless even more. Even if I was super loaded, I think I would still have a problem with this.
So I am sworn off Botox for life now. Botox cost almost $400 and, at best, made me look a year or two younger before it wore off a couple of months later.
Since then I’ve come up with a way that I can feel young that doesn’t involve any sort of surgery and costs next to nothing. Whenever I feel old and need a bit of perspective I just pop down to the RSA round the corner from my house and drink some very reasonably priced beer and eavesdrop on the conversations the other blokes down there have. There is nothing that makes me feel better about my age than listening to proper old people talk about everything from their medical ailments (especially gout), to the heat, the cold, the government, the cost of everything, untrustworthy teenagers riding skateboards, the Asians ‘taking over our country’ and ‘those bloody Maoris’.
These men and these conversations remind me that appearance is actually only a very small part of what makes all of us tick. So whether you are eighty with a face that looks like an old pair of R.M. Williams boots or twenty with a complexion as smooth as Justin Bieber’s gooch, if you are a grumpy bastard, it doesn’t matter what you look like—nobody will want to be your mate.
RUN THE BOSTON MARATHON
I am a marathon runner. A marathon course is just a shade over forty-two kilometres. Some people will run one marathon in their lifetime just to tick it off their bucket list. I, like many others who never seem to learn from our mistakes, run them over and over again. People often ask me why and there are a few good reasons:
1. I am an idiot.
2. Running keeps me in shape, which means I don’t feel as guilty when I overindulge in my love of red wine, deep-fried food and refined sugar products.
3. I don’t have the required coordination to do any other sport.
Growing up, one of my less-generous PE teachers told me I had the coordination of a newborn baby giraffe. This makes me unsuited to (useless at) pretty much every other sporting activity. But I can walk okay and running is basically just extreme walking.
Sadly, I am not fast. If I may follow the lead of my old PE teacher and use more animal kingdom comparisons, I am more a hedgehog than a hare. By the time I eventually make it to the finish line, the skinny African blokes who dominate this event have had ample time to drive home, shower, check out their newsfeed on Facebook, watch an episode of CSI: Kenya, then drive back for the prize-giving ceremony.
For my bucket list, I wanted to run the Boston Marathon. Most Kiwis who want to run an overseas marathon go for London or New York. Boston is different from these events for a few reasons. For one, it is a considerably smaller field. Boston is limited to 20,000 runners each year, whereas New York and London both attract double that number.
But the main point of difference between Boston and every other marathon in the world? You have to QUALIFY to take part.
The amount of hoops you have to jump through before you can even get to the start of the Boston Marathon in the small town of Hopkinton is enough to put most people off.
Firstly, you need to run a marathon in under the qualifying time (for your age group) and it can’t be any old marathon. It needs to be one that is known as a ‘Boston Qualifier’. For New Zealand, the only Boston Qualifiers are the Adidas Auckland Marathon and the SBS Marathon in Christchurch (now known as the Christchurch Airport Marathon). Then, if you manage to run one of these qualifiers in under the appropriate time, you have to get online when Boston registrations open and fight with other mentally deranged runners from arou
nd the world to buy one of the limited places.
So, what’s the appeal? Why is Boston known as the Holy Grail of marathons? The answer to that probably depends on who you ask. But for me the attraction is the need to qualify and the effort required to get there. Because you have to earn your spot in the field it makes ordinary runners like me feel like a champion just by taking part, as if they’ve achieved something worthwhile.
This may be hard for non-runners to understand, but some runners end up depressed, insane or divorced in their quest to qualify for Boston. When you talk to other runners from around the world at the race expo the day before the event, you realise just how much it means to some people. One fella I spoke to drove around the US in 2008 to take part in qualifying races until he finally cracked the time he needed, only to be unsuccessful in securing a spot in the field for the following year.
In 2009 he did the same thing again but didn’t manage to finish the run in his qualifying time. In one of these qualifier runs he missed the time he needed by eight stupid seconds.
In 2010 he was finally successful. He ran a qualifying time in an approved marathon and was lucky enough to secure a spot in the Boston field. So here he was at the 2011 Boston Marathon. For many, Boston becomes more than just a run—it turns into an obsession.
Fortunately, my road to Boston was nowhere near as intense as Mr Obsessive Compulsive’s. In October 2009 I ran the Auckland Marathon in 3 hours and 19 minutes. Before this I had heard of the Boston Marathon but was blissfully unaware of the hype surrounding the race. After I finished, a good mate of mine informed me that my time was only 4 minutes off the Boston qualifying time. He takes his running far more seriously than me—he wears those tiny shorts with the big splits up the side and runs with a little backpack full of water—but the way he spoke about this Boston run made me feel like it was something I should know about, so I went home and hit up Google to find out a bit more.
