Anne Nahm

ME: Try this {experimental food I just made}
HUSBAND: Mmmmm. Tastes like…. Freezer burn.

ME: I think the baby just ate something off the floor.
HUSBAND (Grinning): Yeah, she’s our own little Roomba.

ME: I’m going to the gym tomorrow. I’ve given up on inner beauty. But at least I’ll try to make the outside presentable.
HUSBAND: That’s probably for the best. And I like it when you look hot.

Today’s embarrassing confession: A lot of you had really great questions about the cheekbone implants. But instead of answering them like a rational adult, I’m avoiding talking about them right now because I feel kind of nervous about the surgery. When I scheduled surgery, the doctor gave me the caveat of, “I’ll see you Wednesday. Unless the swelling gets worse. Or it dimples. Or turns red. All those things might indeed happen. And if so, we will need to take it out immediately.”

(and also in a different sentence):

“I saw one of those implants get so bad it came right through the skin of a patient’s face.”

So I’ve been spending all my Neurotic-slash-Blogging Time (and quite a bit of overtime, as it turns out) poking my cheek and then wondering if it is red from constant poking or from popping-throughness. Ditto swelling. Because I’m perfectly sane until I’m not. And so I think that if I continue silently poking and worrying instead of talking about it, nothing bad will ever happen. It’s like Prince of Tides only my inner demon is plastic and I don’t get to bang around with Babs at the end.

Emailed various family members about the downturn with the cheekbone implants and their imminent removal. From one sister, I got an email which read in part:

I love you! I’m sorry you have to go through that… I could probably make some time to come up there if you needed….

And from the other sister, I got this email which read in its entirety:

You have cheekbone implants? Where have I been my whole life?

Squeee! I love them so.

Friday night, the husband took me to dinner. Here are the constellation of idiosyncracies that came together (like magic!) to allow this to happen:

1. Thursday afternoon, some teachers from the 3-year-old’s preschool combined certain madness and a desire for pin money to make Friday Night Preschool Night! Taking kids from 6 to 11 in the evening! And feeding them pizza! For 4 dollars an hour!

2. These fairy Godmothers (cleverly disguised as teachers) said they would also take the baby. Because they had the baby fever and needed to hold an infant to get their fix. And sure, legally that meant they would have to decrease the amount of kids they could take by SEVEN. But there would be no extra charge. Because pweshous wittle baby neck!

3. I got dressed. With make-up that was probably past expiration by now. But still! Perfume even! Rawr. I hardly recognized myself. Also? I had to dust my fancy shoes. That is how long it has been since I have needed them.
Then I had to practice walking around in them.
Then I discovered I have lost the ability to wear kitten heels.
Then I wore them anyway.
Take that, Universe!

And thusly, my sanity was restored. And as a little cherry on top? We arrived to pick up the wee children at the madhouse of Friday Night Preschool Night and while I was thinking clearly, the frazzled teacher gave us the wrong change and muttered deliriously, “my brain just isn’t working well this evening.”

I hear ya, sister. I know exactly where you are, and if not for your bravery, that would be me with a paper airplane in my hair. Thank you.

Cheekbone Implant of Horror Update

Out they go. Next Wednesday. I guess it is a little more involved than I first believed. See, it was explained to me that for the surgeon, it is a simple 20 minute procedure. He slips in with a little incision and he slips them out, cleverly unscrewing the little titanium screws as he goes. Easy, huh?

Not so easy on this end. This end now involves general anesthesia (and damn, I was hoping to get a valium and a couple injections of novocain. Because watching them come out? That would be effing cool! Gross, but cool.) And so twenty minutes turns into an hour and a half of pre-op work up and is followed by the one to three hours recovery wake up.

This will be followed by the liquid diet for a week. Nothing that won’t fit through a tea strainer. Second week, I will be upgraded to scrambled eggs.

So, bleh. On the plus side, they put a note in my chart to try and save the implants for me to keep. I will totally have them mounted and put in my office. Ok, I don’t have an office. But if I did, I would mount them on a little wood plaque like they were an 8 point buck. ***

Anyway, I am looking forward to my medically induced Celebrity Fantasy Vacation Week: I will lounge around the house all day, hepped up on pain killers, with my mother-in-law tending to the children while I take a doctor directed super-diet of chicken broth and heal from my plastic-surgery-gone-wrong.

As a bit of a downer, I was sitting in the doctor’s office yesterday, and the nurse brought in all my before and after head shots from when I was 17 years old. I am finally old enough that I could look back and see what a beautiful job this doctor had done on my face. And for the first time, I looked at the two sets of pictures and thought that the ‘after’ was who I really was – not just ‘before’ girl wearing a mask. And how my life would have been different if I hadn’t had the surgery, and how other people must have seen me ‘before’ as somewhat messed up, when at the time, I just thought I was me.

Driving home, I started wondering if I was going to die from the anesthesia, and if those pictures were my version of ‘life flashing before your eyes’ leading up to it. And jeez, Anne, I love melodrama as much as the next girl but enough, already.

*** And isn’t the world a strange place that whilst googling ‘mounted buck’, this NSFW picture came up first?

I know – I need to take a class in how to search for things while having zero sexual connotation.

Ughh, people. Taking these new antibiotics? Every time I wake up, my tongue looks like Phil Donahue’s head. Tastes just as controversial.

Anyway, a few days ago, Waya did a television meme at her place. It got me to thinking. When I was young(er), my girlfriends and I used to try and name both the most-handsome-yet-unsexy guy as well as the most-fugly-yet-somehow-also-very-sexy guy. Waya’s naming Remington Steele got me, because he has been and probably will always be my handsome unsexy guy. He has everything – thick dark hair, piercing blue eyes, strong jaw. And somehow has the sex appeal of wallpaper.

My secret sexy fugly guy was John Malkovich, circa “Dangerous Liaisons”. Knock kneed, balding and cross-eyed. Yowza! Rawr. And also at the exact same time? Bleh.

After some lengthy soul searching (mostly during the newly re-started Mommy & Me sing along session. Whee!) I have decided that Johnny Depp, circa “Pirates of the Caribbean” is my new fugly sexy guy.

And yet, after even more soul searching, my new pretty boy with zero sex appeal is Johnny Depp in anything else he has ever done.

How can this be?  How can he be so ubersexy in POTC and yet so hairball in every other plane of existence?  I am as sexually confused as an adolescent boy at a Transvestite convention.

Hi dolls. Things are sucky to the tenth power of suckitude this week. I am on my second course of high-powered antibiotic for the cheekbone implant. There is strong suspicion I will have them taken out next week. Unplanned surgery on my face. Good times.

The antibiotics make me feel tired and sad. Plus, I have had to make a billiondy-hundred phone calls to find out if each different antibiotic is breastfeeding compatible.

I called my pediatrician’s office. The nurse said I would need to discontinue breastfeeding while on that particular antibiotic. I started asking perfectly rational questions like, ‘Ok, how much formula does an 8 month old need?’, and ‘what are some techniques for sudden (if only temporary) weaning of a baby?”

But it all kind of ended in my blubbery crying as I realized I had no idea how to feed a child past stuffing a nipple in her gob when she got fussy. Yay advanced motherhood! I don’t know crap.

My tearfulness got me put on hold. When the nurse came back, she informed me that after speaking with the doctor, it would be quite all right for me to nurse my baby while taking those antibiotics.

And what just happened? Did crying just change a drug interaction? And wow, I know you meant to make me feel better, but now I just don’t know which way to trust you, and that makes me feel a lot effing worse.

And then the drug got changed again and so I got to call someone else and cry and ask about breastfeeding. And then make the person on the line swear that she wasn’t telling me I could nurse just because I was bawling into the telephone at her.

She pinky sweared. I told her I loved her. We bonded.

Also? The house my parents were going to rent fell through. Two weeks before their move-in date. This resulted in my looking at another 10 houses and listening to my parents swear a blue streak over the phone while I yelled into the phone whether or not I thought my mom’s couch would match the paint.

Then yesterday, as I was picking up my new dose of antibiotic at the grocery store, I found myself in the check-out line hosted by a rather miltitantly religious checker. She always manages to slip a “God’s will” into a conversation that otherwise would only include “your total comes to $80.04″ and “please sign here, Ms. Nahm.”

I was buying a pregnancy test because the antibiotics can cause birth defects. I was buying roses for my husband because our anniversary is coming up. I was buying wine for my husband because our anniversary is going to probably involve: 2 kids, Raincoat of Love, and me falling asleep at 7 o’clock with stinky antibiotic induced farts. It was sympathy wine. And a fairly high end one at that.

But I could see how she couldn’t resist. As I stood there with my two screaming kids hanging off of me like I was Momma Monkey. Between about 3 “God’s will!!”, and caressing the pregnancy test knowingly, she asked me the age of my youngest screaming monkey, said she hoped I had a boy next, and smirked as she rang up the bottle of wine. Mean woman. I wanted to tell her I was drinking the wine before 5 pm, giving half to my monkey kids and getting a paternity test to see if the new one had the same baby daddy. You know, just so her smirk would be justified.

And whooo-hooooo! Not pregnant as confirmed by the Advanced Peeing Test.

And that, my dears, is what I have been doing during the 50 minute interim I get two times a week to write you all. Depending on how the Mutant Cheekbone Implant of Horror goes, I may well be scarce next week as well. Or hepped up on post-surgery vicodin and blogging. I apologize in advance for any mouthy comments. It will be the drugs, ya’ll.