My Parents Died So I Got Plastic Surgery

I remember realizing my nose wasn’t exactly small when I was in my early teens. I felt betrayed. The family line was that I was BEAUTIFUL, I was just overweight—a message that led to a lifetime of disordered eating and a messed up relationship with my body that I’m still untangling—but here was proof that in addition to being big-boned I was also big-nosed?

“You have a French nose,” my dad would say, because at this point he was lying to us about being Jewish. The Frenchiest we get is my dad’s mother was half Alsatian, which I suppose is Frenchesque.

And she did have a big nose. Her husband meanwhile had a small nose. My mom and sister, all of us Jewish I would later find out in my early 20s, have small noses. If their noses made a sound it would be a beep or maybe a purr. My dad and I meanwhile have noses that honk.

And thus began my curiosity about nose jobs. I wanted to be an actress at the time and I had a manager. I had little jobs here and there for which I would get to miss school which was the most fun ever. These chances to feel special felt like oxygen versus the airlessness of my regular life at a high school in Orange County, California where I never fit in.

I became friends with a girl I repeatedly saw at these jobs. She lived in Canoga Park and was Jewish (whereas I was French.) Her older sister was very blond and cool, had guest roles on a lot of sitcoms, and had changed her last name professionally. I remember seeing head shots with her sanitized name.

My friend hadn’t yet changed her last name but she did get a nose job one summer.

I remember wanting to see her so badly after the nose job. Sort of like years earlier I wanted to see my friend after she got braces because I was so fascinated.

My friend told me her leg was bouncing in the car on the way home because they packed her nose with cocaine to stop to the bleeding. Having had a nose job recently (and having done cocaine years ago), I can say with confidence they don’t do this anymore.

“It won’t make you happy,” my dad said when I brought it up. “You’ll just find something else you don’t like.”

My dad was a doctor and he was extremely opposed to elective procedures. He had story after story of tragedies and traumas he had witnessed. I think he had the skill to be a doctor but not the temperament. He was too affected by things, too anxious. I think it all added up to him distrusting doctors and avoiding them except when absolutely necessary.

In a sense we were the proverbial cobbler’s kids, medically. We got our childhood vaccines but beyond that we never saw doctors. He oversaw our care even though we also grew up knowing doctors aren’t supposed to treat their own family.

My father was also terrified of anesthesia outside a hospital setting. I had to have oral surgery twice for an impacted cuspid in my teens. I was given the choice of local anesthesia or sedation. Most people chose sedation. Per my father, mine was done under local.

Even at the age of 29, when I got my wisdom teeth out, I allowed him to dictate that I would be awake for that as well.

So my fascination with nose jobs grew—I used to boast that I could always detect a nose job, a rare and useless talent that’s sort of like my ability to get the bowling ball over the first hump but not over the second in that carnival game—and my dismay at my own nose grew with it.

From the front I didn’t mind it so much. And from one side I thought it was sort of exotic and sophisticated. But from the other side it was beaky. It protruded. It dipped when I smiled. And my nostrils were too long. The older I got the worse it seemed to get.

“I’ve determined the reason I haven’t had the career I want is my nostrils are too long,”I announced on one podcast. I was joking, but still.

I remember asking an injector if botox in my depressor septi, the muscle that pulls the tip of the nose down, would do anything for me. This is something I had seen on Tik Tok.

She had me make a few expressions and said it wouldn’t help me and said something about “the hook.”

I felt surprised and hurt. Is that what I had? A hook nose?

I remembered the drop of Andy Dick saying, “hook-nosed Jew” that used to get played often on The Adam Carolla Show where I worked as news girl for four years. I never knew the context but if it’s possible to feel self-consciousness tingling in the tip of your nose, that’s where I felt it.

My dad had already passed away at this point but if he were alive I would have called him up, “She said I have a HOOK nose. Do I have a hook nose? Are you sure I shouldn’t get a nose job?” I would have demanded.

Why, in my forties at this point, did I still care what my dad thought, you might be wondering? This is a great question and I don’t really know except to say my parents, both of whom are gone now, took up a huge part of my psyche. It took me a long time to separate myself from them and their judgments and opinions, all of which I know intimately and can still produce.

I spent pretty much all of last year dealing with my mom’s sudden death. Losing the first parent is hard but losing the second is a full-time job on top of the grief. Dealing with the financial and legal paperwork, cleaning out and selling the house they lived in for nearly 50 years—the only house I ever knew— was the most adult and most joyless thing I’ve ever done. And it fractured my remaining family.

I decided near the end of last year that I wanted to finally get the nose job I’ve been wanting for most of my life. Some people get tattoos to mark their grief. I would change my face.

I wasn’t actually thinking of it this way, but I wasn’t not either.

Over the last handful of years I’ve become fascinated with watching aesthetic medicine content on Tik Tok and Instagram. All the anti-aging devices and lasers, creams and potions, injections and procedures, I know about all of them and find it endlessly interesting. It’s my reality show, my brainless content.

I had only done botox and a couple face lasers at this point, in addition to a developing a solid skincare routine, but I found myself more and more curious about filler or sculptra to address the aging of my lower face.

For a long time filler was a line I would not cross as I knew it was the thing that began making people’s faces look weird, but I had recently decided maybe I should reconsider.

At the same time this fascination with aesthetic procedures is pretty off-brand for me, given my whole thing is authenticity. And I am very aware of the irony of how empowering it feels to make the decision to look more like how society tells us we’re supposed to look.

At one point I would have thought it was Stockholm Syndrome, thinking you yourself are choosing the thing that society is demanding of you. Now I’m just much more laissez-faire about it (cuz I’m French obvs) and feel like we only have limited time so who really cares. Do what you want.

Both of my grandmothers had work done but my mom never did. No botox, no anything. My mom was insanely beautiful and youthful looking to the end, but I knew how her face aged. I knew where the jowling I was just starting to see on my own face was headed.

Left unattended, I was going to look like a dried apple magnet.

“Is it bad to look old?” my therapist asked me shortly after I had my first son and told her I looked old.

“Yes!” I exclaimed. I knew what she was trying to do and I was semi-joking when I answered but I mean c’mon, who doesn’t want to look young for as long as possible?

I look at pictures of myself now when I was in my thirties (I am 50) and realize how much I just didn’t appreciate how I looked. I think my thirties was my best decade looks-wise. I had lost most of the weight and kept it off NOT THAT IT MATTERS yet still had the plumpness of youth in my face. And I was going on television a lot as a talking head on various shows so I have professional hair and makeup in a lot of the photos. And yet I never really felt confident because I was obsessed with being overweight. (I have written extensively about this in my book.)

Availing myself of a GLP-1 a few years ago allowed me to finally achieve the weight loss I wanted without killing myself to do so and healed my relationship with food. As long as I’m on the medicine, I can eat what sounds good to me, you know truly “listen to my body” which doesn’t work when your body is working against you, and maintain a healthy weight. It’s been a huge miracle for me, something I never take for granted, and it’s freed me up to stop worrying about my weight and start worrying about my nose and face.

In that way maybe my dad was right? Maybe this whole thing is a game of wack-a-mole?

Once I made the decision to get a nose job, I kicked the tires with my therapist a lot, bringing up all the things I had heard growing up that were ringing in my ears. “I’m not getting a nose job to make myself happy,” I explained. “I’m getting a nose job to change my nose.”

If you had a birthmark that was disfiguring and you could do something that would make it so you weren’t bullied for it in school and save you suffering, would you do it, she asked me?

So she agrees I should get a nose job, I thought to myself.

My husband also was VERY supportive. Which is a lose-lose for him.

I made the decision in December to get the nose job and went under the knife with a plastic surgeon in New York on March 16. Why I chose him instead of someone closer is a whole longer story, along with my process of consulting with a bunch of doctors which was confusing and expensive and time-consuming but an invaluable part of the process.

The surprising part is that a couple weeks before surgery I made the decision to add a midface lift and fat grafting. Here is how that happened.

I had my second virtual consultation with my doctor a couple weeks before surgery. I asked if fat grafting to my nasolabial folds (the lines going from the outside of my nose to the corner of my mouth) and chin hollows and maybe a little in the hollows in my cheeks would help. As I said earlier I had begun to be really bothered by the melted candle look of my lower face. He said what I needed was not fat but a lift and a very small amount of fat. And that he could add this to the nose job with beautiful results. He seemed incredibly enthusiastic about this. Not pushing it on me, he kept reiterating that he would never want to pressure someone into a surgery, but his confidence in how well it would turn out was palpable.

My gut reaction was WAIT A MINUTE. Am I ready for a facelift? I watch a lot of facelift content on social media, usually people who go to Mexico for the works, but that seems so intense. He was presenting it like it was a little liftaroo. How is the midface lift different from a full on science fiction face transplant that I see on Tik Tok?

He explained that this would just be dealing with my midface, basically my cheeks, as opposed to including the neck which is what a full facelift does. He went into some detail about how it’s done which freaked me out. The idea of adding another three hours to the surgery which was already scheduled to be three hours freaked me out as well. But what freaked me out the most was I had taken four months (plus my whole life) to make my nose job decision. Was it really a good idea to add a couple more procedures on a whim, in the same way you might grab an US Weekly and pack of Rolo’s while checking out at Vons?

I did some thinking and as much research as I could in basically three days. I went back and forth and finally decided that I wanted to do it. I knew I would love the results and I was going to be in New York in a hotel for a set amount of days anyway, with a nurse scheduled for the beginning, why not just bang it out.

I had a very good experience and yet this whole thing, which I did to myself, has been hard. Physically and emotionally. The Tik Tokers who say you just need a Tylenol and it doesn’t hurt are LYING. Or they have a pain tolerance that is much higher than mine. I don’t think the rhinoplasty really hurt, was more just uncomfortable, but the face lift hurt. And still hurts. And my nose is still uncomfortable. I still wake up feeling like a dried out, headachy and tight.

I look forward to just waking up and feeling like myself. I love my nose and face from the side, thought I am still adjusting to the difference, but from the front my nose looks wide and shapeless. I knew this was a phase I was going to go through, nearly everyone does, as noses are swollen for a loooooong time after rhinoplasty. True results can’t be seen for around a year. And as for the face lift, it’s like from the front I’ve adjusted so quickly to it that I already forget what I looked like before. Or maybe when I look in the mirror I am just reacting to the nose? I don’t know, it’s still weird seeing myself in the mirror and though everyone around me is stunned with the early results—with the way I still look like myself, just better and younger—I am still in the funhouse of adjusting to the difference. Which, to his credit, my doctor warned me would happen. That there is just no way you can change your nose as an adult and not have a big psychological adjustment.

To be extremely real, I did have a low moment yesterday where I was looking at pictures of me as a child and I thought, “What did you do to her?”

I don’t have a satisfying conclusion to this. I’m glad I have therapy this week. I know I will be happy with my results, I’m just adjusting. I know I chose my surgeon carefully and chose him well and I know he does good, natural work. I know mine will be both. I know this is something I wanted to do and chose to do, I’m just tired of feeling crummy and also tired of thinking about myself and my face, which I know sounds silly given this whole thing is about both.

I am now more invested, emotionally and financially, in my face than I was. Previously it was just a thing on the front of my brain that I did not choose and had to deal with. But now I got in there and monkeyed around. What if the monkeying looks worse? What if I look weird and surgerized? What if I look the same and went through all that for nothing? Etc.

I am trying to internalize the advice of everyone around me which is to be gentle on myself, it’s a lot to experience and process. I really wish I could wear pajamas and hide out for a few months but life is requiring me to show up before I feel ready. For example I am volunteering in my kid’s class today, which will be good for me, but I can’t help worrying someone will notice the stitches on my ears and ask about it.

And I did my podcast yesterday which was great and so much fun until we took photos, the first since all of this, and I started spiraling. “I don’t look good, I don’t look better,” I said to my husband. Suddenly the judgments of everyone concerned me. They are going to wonder why I did all this for these results.

Which I suppose is the danger of being so public about it all, except I don’t know any other way. We’re in this together, you guys. And we have a headache.