I’m ashamed I had cosmetic surgery
Kasey Edwards kept a guilty secret for more than a decade – but now she reveals how embarrassed she is over her liposuction
‘You’re not being vain,’ the man with the clever hands holding a felt-tip pen assures me as he draws circles on my legs. It’s 2002, I’m 26, living in a small town an hour’s train ride from Amsterdam, with a boyfriend who won’t marry me. My nasty inner voice whispers to me late at night, “He won’t marry a fatty”.
Which is one of the reasons I find myself preparing to have liposuction on my thighs. My jeans are a size 10, but if I could just get rid of the saddlebags on my thighs I could possibly squeeze into a size eight and then my real life as a confident person could begin.
The cosmetic surgery I find myself in looks nothing like a hospital. If I didn’t know better I could be fooled into thinking I am visiting the offices of a high-end lawyer or accountant. The giveaway is that I’m wishing I’d worn better underwear.
The doctor looks to be in late thirties – softly spoken with an endearingly, awkward manner. He gives me a choice of anaesthetic. I can have a general anaesthetic and wake up when it’s all over, or I can have a local anaesthetic and stay awake for the entire procedure. I opt for the local anaesthetic, partly because it’s slightly safer – dying from vanity surgery would just be embarrassing – but mostly because I feel like I should experience the fear and the pain. I guess it’s a bit like penance. I deserve to feel the pain for wasting my money and time – not to mention the time of a man who could be working on burns victims – on a medical procedure that is totally unnecessary and conflicts with a big chunk of my values.
As I lie naked on the operating table, feeling the anaesthetic injected into my thigh, I worry I’ve made the wrong decision. “That really hurt,” I say. “It’s going to get a lot worse than that,” the doctor says. He isn’t kidding. Liposuction feels like a cross between chiselling paint off a wall and stirring up an ants’ nest with a stick. The sweat gathering on the doctor’s forehead tells me that I am not imagining the force of the blows. Each stroke hurts and the next one seems to hurt more than the last. In my pre-op consultation, conducted by a sales person rather than the doctor, I was lead to believe it was going to be simple procedure that wouldn’t take much longer than a massage, and I’d be home by lunchtime. I begin to worry that this is not going to be the case. I try to distract myself by watching my fat flow through the tube and into the measuring container. It’s a rich golden colour with a silky texture. I’m surprised by how good it looks. Something that I have always viewed with disgust and contempt looks quite beautiful from a different perspective.
After the procedure, which took about an hour but felt like more than a year, I’m wheeled into a recovery room and given a pair of tight, crotchless bike pants to wear to minimise the swelling. I stand to put them on but fall back onto the bed and then vomit. I am unable to stand without fainting for 24 hours.
As it turns out, my you’ll-be-homeby-lunchtime procedure morphs into an all-day-all-night-and-most-of-thenext-day-this-wasn’t-in-the-brochure procedure. What also wasn’t in the brochure was that I could barely walk for a week and I was covered in so many bruises I looked like a Muppet for two months. Liposuction is a serious medical procedure and it hurts like hell. Despite the slick marketing, it’s more like a trip to your local hospital to get your tonsils out than a visit to a spa to get a pedi and a wax. I’m not proud. In fact, I’m so embarrassed about it that it’s been my guilty secret for over a decade. I told no one. Not even my best friend.
The biggest reason for my embarrassment is that admitting to having lipo is akin to admitting to being superficial. It’s about revealing to the world that, despite pretending otherwise, you are haunted by body insecurity. For heaven’s sake, I’m supposed to be a feminist.
What I didn’t realise all those years ago (I am now 41 years old with two daughters of my own) was that I didn’t walk into that surgery because I had a problem with my legs. The problem was with my self-esteem. I believed in two lies: my legs were fat, ugly and hideous; and the shape of my thighs was a black mark on my character and an impediment to my happiness.
I swallowed both of these lies whole and underwent a serious medical procedure, suffered complications such as low blood pressure, nausea, and pain that lasted over a month, and spent a lot of money searching for self-acceptance. It is absurd, not to mention pointless, to reject and hate a normal and natural part of my body simply because it doesn’t look like it came off a Mattel production line.
And it is even more absurd to think that sucking a litre of fat out of my legs would have any impact on the quality of my life. The very act of having cosmetic surgery just reinforced my belief that I wasn’t good enough and that I needed to be fixed.
After the swelling subsided I did manage to squeeze into my size eight jeans. Initially people complimented me on my weight loss.
But it didn’t give me the satisfaction I thought it would. I just felt like I was carrying around a dirty secret. And of course it didn’t fix my boyfriend’s commitment issues. I had actually done him a disservice in thinking that it would. Any man who would base his decision to marry a woman on the size of her thighs is not worth having.
And given that 10 years later I am still working on my body image it is quite clear that the lipo did not solve any of the problems I thought it would. I found out the hard way that happiness is not found at the end of a surgeon’s scalpel.
I have never been able to shrink or change my body enough so that I was satisfied with my appearance, even though I’ve been lucky to naturally fall within the normal weight range. Over time I realised that the problem was not with my body, but with my thoughts.
I learned to change my criteria for judging my body. Rather than despising it for its imperfections, I now value it for all the amazing things it allows me to do, such as living a rich and full life and growing my children.
I make this promise to my body every morning: I will not hate you today. And my day goes a lot better when I keep it.