If you read all the celebrity magazines like I do, then you know all about all the things one can do to push back the wrinkles of time and to make one look young and beautiful again.
Years ago we lived on the upscale island of Key Biscayne. We had an oceanfront condo in the famous Towers and just one floor above us lived a friend named Fred — Dr. Fred — and his specialty was plastic surgery.
I remember many times sitting in our kitchen with him as he described this miracle injection drug named botox, and I also remember how I wished I could do such a thing. I sort of tucked the dream of Dr. Fred shooting my face and neck with botox and coming away looking 20 years younger. It never happened. Dr. Fred moved to Hollywood and we moved to Kentucky.
Well, just three weeks ago I finally had my dream come true, more or less, and boy, was I gypped!
About a year ago, I started losing weight. I was never hungry and usually gave half of my food to Gene. And then things just started rebelling in my body. The rods in my spine even began to pull away. I lived with constant stomach pain and my whole body screamed that things were going very wrong.
Tests proved me right. Nothing I ate ever reached my stomach and when I finally collapsed, I weighed in at 84 pounds. The next three weeks I barely remember. The University of Colorado Hospital in Denver saved my life. Four doctors went down my throat to try to stretch that opening up and the next day they went back into my stomach, and seeing that they had successfully found a way to keep it open, do you know what they did to more permanently open it? Darned if they didn’t shoot it all up with botox!
Now, you gotta’ realize the gravity, the unfairness of such a thing. Unlike what Dr. Fred would’ve done to shoot any part of my bod with botox, no measurements were taken, no pictures of sagging flesh taken, no discussions at all with me ahead of time about what my expectations might be. Nope, they just went right in there with injections of botox into my esophagus in the hopes that everything down there would relax and sag and look its beautiful, youthful best.
Upon awakening from the surgery, they were saying they thought they had found and fixed my problem and that, in time, I should be able to eat, retain and regain. With a huge grin on his face, the chief surgeon announced that my esophagus was now beautiful, beautiful, thanks to botox, and that in 6 months or more, I should be eating every two hours and go from 84 to 110 pounds. He was jubilant!
I looked up at that man and tried to be as well. Of course, I was thankful beyond words that the doctors “fixed me,” but ya’ know, you could look at me all day long, from every angle, and you would not have a clue that I had botox in my body. I still look like a skinny, 81-year-old gal from Winchester. I mean, not one wrinkle had disappeared anywhere. It just does not seem fair but then life, often, is not fair.
The good side is that we believe that botox will give me my life back and that is a beautiful thing. Maybe I ought to email Dr. Fred about this.
The view from the mountains is wondrous.
