No. I'm not going as Freddie Krueger for Halloween. Although I may want to consider it. Yesterday I donated my face to science. And here are the results. It actually looks much much worse in person. I wish you could see it. No, actually I don't. No, actually I do, or I wouldn't have taken half a dozen photos of myself and put them online.
I've donated plasma, been a hair model (not like in a Pantene commercial, but as in if you let them do whatever they want to your hair, the color is free!), a mystery shopper, a taste-tester, and pimped myself out in various other completely voluntary ways, but this one is worth documenting. It started off as an opportunity to get a scar blasted by a new laser that the staff in Ben's office were training on. The scar is on my forehead over my right eye. I put it there myself while testing an Ecuadorian herbal product that removes moles. It works.
But, as happens when you go to a plastic surgeon's office (or to a Vietnamese nail salon) you get more services offered than you had planned on getting...or felt you needed. Actually the latter part is not completely true. I have plenty of melanin that has worked it's way up to the surface that I would love to jettison. So when the opportunity presented itself, I capitalized. Plus I think these procedures are really expensive.
The pictures below are from yesterday, right after the procedure. I am intrigued by the pattern, which looks as if I fell asleep on a miniature honeycomb. A very very hot one. I didn't get to see the laser doing it's thing because then I would be blind (or have 20/20 vision), but it felt like a fine point pen was applying molten lava on my face, accompanied by snapping and popping and the smell of burnt something...skin I guess (
not chicharones). They had kindly applied lidocaine to my face prior to, but I'm not sure it made a difference, because they hit a couple places that hadn't been numbed and it felt the same.
Yesterday it wasn't so bad, except that I looked completely ridiculous with 2 cm of Aquaphor on my face. I would like to blame the petroleum jelly for my awful hair, but no, that's just how it looks in general. The photos below are from today. When I asked the doctor how much "downtime" there would be, he said only 3-4 days and you will just look like you have a sunburn. Uh, yeah, if I lived on the first rock from the sun. But pain (and ugliness) is just hyperpigmintation leaving the body.
I had been planning on going to the gym this morning as usual. But in an effort to not make people feel uncomfortable, I stayed home and had an ice cream bar to kick off Miles' birthday. If my face gets worse I will make sure to let you know.
Day Three Update - Not much better. Maybe worse. And I didn't get the 20/20 I had hoped for.
Day Five - Almost out of the woods.
Day Six - Flaky. Not sure if my skin is better than it was 7 days ago or if it is just relatively better from a few days ago. Ben says the results continue over a course of a few weeks.
