On Thursday I say goodbye to the saggy side of my face forever. Three years we've been together now. Bye-bye, palsy.
It's weird how you get sentimental about these things. Ever since my right cheek muscle started drooping, I've wanted it either to start working or be replaced. Now it really is on its way out, I'm starting to feel oddly nostalgic about it. Perhaps I'm about to be overcome with affection for George W Bush, too.
Then again, what tangible harm has my palsy - as distinct from the brain tumour which begat it - ever actually done me? It doesn’t inflict any physical pain. Nor has it ever cost me financially. True, it nearly got me into a fight in Camden once. But, really, the blame for that episode lay with me for drinking, and the other bloke's parents for educating him privately.
What inconvenience my mild disfigurement has ever caused me has been entirely trivial. The odd second glance from strangers; feeling obliged to duck out of the way when someone produces a camera at parties; moments of social awkwardness when I can tell casual acquaintances are debating internally whether or not to ask me what caused it (actually, I usually quite enjoy this last one).
All of this I've been psychologically robust enough to handle – damnation with faint praise as that may be. Still, there's no point being high-minded. I'm as vain as the next Topman customer. I'd like to look no worse than sort of vaguely normal. Otherwise I wouldn't put myself through two fairly extensive and discomforting operations, would I?
It's not done for men to admit to physical self-consciousness, even in this age of metrosexuality and moisturising. This is, I think, a good thing. My granddad didn't kill lots of Germans so I’d end up fussing over what I looked like.
I appreciate that a woman similarly afflicted would be judged far more harshly by the misogynist, patriarchal order from which I benefit whether I remember to put the toilet seat down or not. And of course I couldn't tell you whether my romantic encounters over the last three years would have been quantitatively or qualitatively improved by a palsy-less countenance.
But like it or not, we live in a superficial culture. And if I’m offered the opportunity to look, at worst, anonymous, to not have to explain away my appearance, then I’m going to take it.
And if I’m truly honest, it’s not even principally vanity that’s driving me here. For more than three years now, my face has been a permanent reminder of the tumour. All this time I’ve been determined that its removal would neither leave a defining imprint on my character nor be the most significant event in my (nonetheless fairly uneventful) biography. It’s not easy to assert all that with confidence, however, when the first thing anyone notices when they look at me is the damage inflicted by the neuroma.
What I suppose I’m hoping for, then, is some kind of conclusion, a full stop to the episode. Some might call this “closure”. However, I’d rather employ Karen Matthews as a babysitter than talk like a character in Friends.
I’m not particularly looking forward to going up to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary tomorrow. I’m familiar enough with surgical routine now to see it as an inconvenience rather than something of which to be nervous – much as a businessmen might regard air travel, I suppose. But will be glad when it’s all over – and when, some months down the line, assuming everything is successful, I can (hopefully, eventually) smile again.
Farewell then, palsy. See you soon, everyone else.
headcase
