I wanted to pay a visit to my friend the other day, but was informed that she was visiting her niece in hospital. Consumed by worry I decided to call her up to find out about the problem in greater detail.
“Oh, nothing major,” she commented brushing off my concern. “She just has a slight problem with her sinuses.”
I though it a trifle odd that a minor condition such as sinusitis could present itself in an overnight stay at the hospital, but left it at that. I spoke to my friend later that week and out of politeness tinged with surreptitious curiosity asked about how her niece was faring now.
“I visited her at the hospital today,” she divulged sounding somewhat perturbed by my inquiry.
“Today?” I blurted out. “Hasn’t she been in for a week now?” I added rather blatantly.
“Yes,” was her definitive response.
“That’s strange. When I asked my father about the procedure he said it was conducted on an outpatient basis, but I guess things here must be practiced a little differently.”
“The point is,” confessed my friend, her voice trailing off somewhat, “she has had a nose job!”
“A nose job?” I remarked astonished.
“Apparently, the doctor noticed that her nose was somewhat crooked and slightly too long for her face and so offered to correct the problem for her simultaneously.”
I was too embarrassed to debate how it was that an ENT surgeon happened to have an additional major in plastic surgery and decided to double up as a cosmetologist whilst he was examining her sinuses. Unless of course he had been transported off the set of one of those dreadful soap operas where doctors are qualified to perform every procedure from heart transplants to lobotomies. It was patently obvious that things probably happened the other way around and that the patient in question had decided to have the nose job and was just using imaginary bouts of sinusitis as a ruse instead.
Another newly-wed friend of mine decided to try and pull the same stunt recently by telling her husband a similar sob story of how she had silently suffered all these years with a concocted nasal problem. He gave her the go-ahead to have the surgery but, like me, was shocked that it was scheduled to take about a week for her to recover. So shocked in fact that he too made his own personal inquiries with regards to the procedure.
What sealed her fate and almost ended her marriage was that he casually mentioned this alleged medical history to her parents who insisted that their daughter had the most perfectly working nose in existence. What they did giggle about was how she had often complained about its snout-like appearance, but then again aren’t girls always essentially dissatisfied with their looks? Unnerved by the prospect that she had lied to him, he followed her one day and found himself parked outside a plastic surgeon’s clinic. Needless to say he was not amused.
What perplexes me are the lengths that these women are willing to go to in order to endure such frivolous procedures. I mean do they really earnestly believe that if they decide to have their nose narrowed or shortened or straightened that the rest of us are sufficiently ignorant to believe that this is a side-effect of a procedure to improve their respiratory tracts? Where is the logic in having a bit of your nose taken off on the outside to allow the air to move in a bit more freely on the inside?
A friend of mine visited a Levantine holiday destination and was surprised to see several shoppers mulling around the malls with strips of plaster across their noses. Quite bemused by their appearance he asked a local why such a peculiar fashion had sprung up amongst these ladies and whether there was a hidden meaning behind it. He was horrified that this apparently cultist fad was nothing of the sort, but rather an aftermath of music channel inspired plastic surgery. Women these days, it seems, are not satisfied with just emulating the fashions of various celebrities, they now want to copy their body parts.
It’s a pity that we are eternally ungrateful. I find it appalling that our desire to strive toward superficial ideals of perfection has clouded our superior judgment of what constitutes the really important things in life. To me this signifies an inherent dissatisfaction within many of us that cannot be removed by a surgeon’s knife. Such attention to outward appearance doesn’t really conceal what lies beneath. If you don’t feel worthy or happy on the inside then no amount of rearrangement of your external physical features is going to change that. The beauty of all of us lies as much in our flaws as it does in our perfection. Our individual features are what distinguishes us and makes us unique.
What a dull world it would be if we all looked the same even if we did resemble Helen of Troy. How peculiar it is that on the one hand we believe in variety being the spice of life, and on the other we aspire to being clones. We need to be grateful to God for having created us in an impeccable form. But for those of you who remain unconvinced by my theorizing, trust me on this. A trip to the proctologist will not end up in you having a derriere to rival that of J Lo!
(Lubna Hussain is a Saudi writer. She is based in Riyadh.)
