Behind the Ironic Column

One of the few things I’m almost completely sure of (how many hedge words can I get in this sentence) is that I’ll never have botox injections.  Not only does it sound  unappealing – an ugly word like botox coupled with the ominous “injection” – but it’s designed for those who intend to preserve smooth, unwrinkled faces.  It would have to do something more valuable than that for me to accept any needles pushed into my face.  Not that I care if other people use it.  I’m just not worried about wrinkles myself.  If I were going to alter my appearance significantly, that wouldn’t be the place to start.  Interestingly enough, just as a little side remark on changing appearance, when I created my avatar in Second Life I didn’t make it dramatically different from me.   It never occurred to me to make myself virtually  tall, for example.  I’ve been more or less five feet tall for years so I’m not looking to change that. 

But the reason I brought this up in the first place is that I got a small taste of how a botox injection must feel yesterday.  I had the misfortune to spend the morning with my dentist.  He’s a great guy but dental work is way down there with injections on my favorites list – and this work of course involved several of those numbing injections.  The ones where they have to give you a brush-on numbness treatment so you won’t feel the needles that do the serious numbing.  Best not to think of it at all and keep your eyes closed.  My dentist is very serious about making sure everything is sufficiently numb and I quite agree with him.  The sensations involved in getting a root canal are unpleasant enough – if you can keep any pain away,  you should. 

So I’m sitting there in the chair for something over two hours and I have on the goggles and all the other paraphernalia that is part of the process.  I noticed that my vision wasn’t quite right but just tried not to think about it since the goggles were pressing into my temple anyway.  As we got to the end of the process, I was sitting up and able to take the goggles off.  That’s when I noticed that not only was my right eye not focusing, my whole face felt weird.  I expected everything in my jaw to be deadened (and it was) but this was in my forehead and eyelids.  My dentist had gone out of the room to look at x-rays, etc., but when he walked back in he looked at me and said something like “oh, we got too much there…”   Apparently, the nerve that services the brow and eyelid and the top half of your face is very close to the nerve that takes care of the lower jaw.  One of the doses of numbing agent had gone into that facial nerve. 

The good news is that it wore off much faster than the jaw part and everything returned to normal.  But while it was “dead” I could touch my forehead and it felt like wood – and I couldn’t have frowned to save my life.  In order to blink I had to close my eyelid with my fingers.  That rigid, lifeless face is exactly what I see when they show someone on TV who has just had botox injections or maybe had a little too much.  No motion and a perpetually spooky expression.

Thanks anyway, but I think I’ll keep my wrinkles and the ability to raise my eyebrows at the issues of the day.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS