The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance: A Memoir (29 page)

We spent the next week arguing over really stupid things. And then it was Friday. Hayes worked in the Mormon temple every Friday night. I met him in the lobby after his shift. I wanted to have “the talk.” But I wasn’t sure what to do, break up with Hayes for a guy I’d never see again, or stay and make it work. Either way, I wasn’t expecting what happened next. He walked out of the temple, still in his church clothes, and sat down in the seat next to me.

“Hi, sweetie,” he said.

“I have to tell you something . . .” I stopped, unable to finish it.
I’m breaking up with you,
didn’t feel right.

Hayes waited for me to continue.

“I—I love you,” I said.

We both started crying. No more kinks, no more wrenches. We were a couple.

A Body of Work

My family and friends thought I was crazy when I told them that on December 22, 2006, I was going in for major plastic surgery. I was twenty-four, a healthy woman with no visible flaws, and plastic surgery went against both my character—I am confident, I accept myself—as well as my religion. But I had a good reason. When I lost weight, I lost it fast. This left me with a layer of excess skin that hung off my body like a sweatshirt. I’d used skin-firming lotions, I’d exercised, but no matter what I did I still looked like a melting candle. Surgery—a doubleheader: tummy tuck plus breast implants—was my only option, and even though it seemed like a get-rich-quick method to becoming attractive, and even though I once swore, in a hospital bed, never to fall into such a trap, I decided to go for it. And to be completely honest, while my friends and family were frightened, I spent hours scrolling down the “Before and After” results page, daydreaming.

It was only on the day before the procedures, when my teenage sister Jill asked, “So, what time do you go under the knife?” that it occurred to me: I am about to be cut in half. Suddenly I found myself in a total panic, calling the number in the back of a self-help book
Prepare for Surgery, Heal Faster
, and paying $150 to talk to the author.

Miraculously, Peggy Huddleston, Harvard professor, expert in mind-body medicine, actually answered the phone. Her book was written for people with cancer, not someone getting a tummy tuck and implants, but I convinced myself that Huddleston was the only person who could help me. I explained my situation and she asked if she could walk me through a meditation to prepare me. She began to count backward from ten. Since I was paying by the minute, I thought about suggesting
, Can’t we just start from five?
Peggy’s voice was calm and breathy, it sounded just like it did on the meditation tape that came with the book.
Three, two, one.
Lo and behold I was in a meditative state.

“I want you to interview your body,” Huddleston began.

“Okay,” I said, willing to try anything.

“Ask your body how it feels.”

“Body,” I said, “how do you feel?” I waited for an answer. “It says it feels scared.”

“What emotion can you send your body to make it feel better?”

I listened to my body. I would have picked courage, superhuman strength, but my body chose something else altogether.

“Gratitude.”

“When does your body want gratitude?” Peggy asked.

“Every time I see or touch the scar across my stomach, I need to send my body gratitude, and then it will be willing to go through this surgery.”

“Can you agree to do that?”

It seemed like a fair enough trade. I give my body gratitude, it will accede to my cutting it in half. “Yes,” I replied.

“Alright, now say good-bye to the skin that will be leaving you.”

I thought about everything my skin and I had been through. “Good-bye,” I said.

 

My skin replaced my insecurity about my weight. I didn’t get to just feel complete. I transferred the feeling of imperfection onto the loose skin. With a weight loss of one hundred pounds or more, the average person is left with ten to fifteen pounds of sagging skin, draping from stomach and breasts, legs and arms, back and buttocks. On some people the skin retracts. Other people, like me, aren’t so lucky. It had been three and half years since I had become thin. There was no getting around it, the skin wasn’t going away. I took comfort in the modesty of Mormonism.

Only, after a few months of dating, Hayes started to bring up the topic of marriage, and that’s when it struck me:
I might be naked in front of someone else!
It wasn’t until the reality of marriage, and therefore sex, arose that I realized someone else besides me will see my skin. My body is not just mine.

I decided to confide in my close friend Alison. (At this point I had shown only my mother the suit of skin I carried under the tight girdle I wore every day.) Alison looked at my skin and simply said, “Go get plastic surgery. You’ve worked too hard, you don’t deserve this.” She showed me a picture on the Internet of a tummy tuck. Until that moment, I’d had no idea I could be fixed.

As a Mormon I had always thought that the first man to see me naked would be my husband. As it turns out, that man was a plastic surgeon. I remember nervously taking off the medical gown for him during my first consultation. He looked at my body, took a step back, looked at it from different angles, lifted my breasts and dropped them. He then proceeded to tell me all the things I could do to change my appearance.

After I put my clothes back on, the doctor talked me through the fine print.

“I should warn you,” he began, “one of the side effects of getting breast implants is that you may lose your nipple sensation.”

“
What—”

“Not all women experience this . . .”

“
—your nipples have sensation?”

Aside from death, the potential hazards weren’t too detrimental: My boobs would feel fake. Hayes had never touched a woman’s breasts before, so it didn’t matter. I was ready and willing to go for it.

All I needed was ten thousand dollars. Yikes. I called my parents, explained how much it meant to me, and asked if I could use the money they’d set aside for my wedding to pay for surgery. At first my mother was opposed to it. She said that if Hayes were a good man, which she believed he was, he’d love me no matter what my body looked like. I told her that that was all well and good but that if she ever wanted a grandchild I’d have to get naked and as long as I looked like Lumiere from
Beauty and the Beast,
I wasn’t taking my clothes off.

She considered this. “Perhaps your extra skin was a gift from God,” she said, “a suit of armor given to you to protect you from premarital sex.”

“Wow,” I said, “you nailed it.”

My father agreed to support me, but he wanted to make sure it was safe first. And so I found a doctor near their home in Seattle that came highly recommended and was half the cost of a New York surgeon. In September 2006, I flew home to meet with him. My mother, still hesitant, came to the appointment with me. When they brought out a Tupperware full of fake breasts and I caught her feeling one, and then fondling her own boob for comparison, I knew she was on my side.

We scheduled my surgery for December 22, four months away.

Now that the surgery was set, I had to tell Hayes about what I was going to do. There was no way of getting around it. He knew I had lost a lot of weight, but he didn’t know about the skin. First I brought up the fact that I had to get implants to fill in the skin on my chest. He was surprised and said, “Boobs or no boobs it doesn’t matter to me. I look at it like an ice cream sundae. Boobs are the cherry on top. If I don’t have the cherry, who cares? I have a whole sundae.” Then he asked if he could see my stomach. In the six months we had been dating, I’d managed to avoid this. At first I said no. But one night, as we were lounging on my bed, I hesitantly lifted up my shirt, thinking how gross my torso must look to Hayes. His eyes lit up in what could only be described as sheer wonderment. He cupped the soft skin in his hands, stretched it out inches away from my body, and played with it like a kid would a new toy. When it became clear to me he could have gone on like this for hours, I pulled my shirt back down.

“Elna, everyone is self-conscious about their bodies,” Hayes said, and proceeded to take my feet in his hands—I was wearing red Mary Janes—kissed the top of each foot, and told me I was beautiful. A few days later I flew to Seattle.

I had thought I was ready, until the night before when my sister brought up “knives.” There was still one missing piece from the puzzle: gratitude.

 

I got off the phone with Peggy and spent the rest of the day preparing bedside activities for my future immobile self. But no amount of distraction could take away my anxiety. As I tried to fall asleep that night, I touched the soft, loose skin on my stomach and realized this would be the last night my stomach wouldn’t have a giant scar. The following morning the plastic surgeon would cut along my bikini line an incision that began two inches behind my left hip bone and ended two inches behind my right hip bone. The excess skin from my stomach would be chopped off, my stomach muscles would be tightened, the doctor would literally fashion me a new belly button, and the excess skin on my chest would be filled in with saline implants. I would be unconscious for over four hours and during this time my heart could stop beating. It’s funny, but there’s nothing quite like the prospect of death to put things into perspective. All the time I’d spent hating my body, I’d failed to realize one important thing:
At least I’m alive.
And while the odds were incredibly low, I was terrified of dying during my procedure. So I did what most people would do in this situation: I turned it around and blamed the God I’d prayed to for help losing weight in the first place. “WHY ARE YOU MAKING ME DO THIS?” That’s when I realized,
No one is making you do anything. This is a choice that you are making, so when you wake up tomorrow, you had better act like this is your decision.

When I woke up the next morning I was a different person. I felt confident and prepared: I was in the zone. We drove to the surgeon’s office. Outside he had placed a statue of a golden swan. I turned to my mother and thought of every other woman who must’ve seen this swan before her surgery and rolled her eyes. “Your ugly duckling is finally becoming a swan,” I joked. We went in and I signed a bunch of legal papers—“in case of death” I won’t hold anyone responsible. Then my parents left and I was escorted to a room in the back where I would disrobe and the doctor could draw on me. As I stood completely naked in the center of the room, watching in a mirror as the doctor, using a purple marker, covered my stomach, lower abdomen, armpits, and breasts in dotted and straight lines, I realized that over the months of preparing for surgery I had completely redefined my relationship to being naked. I had taken my clothes off so many times—for sizings, doctor’s opinions, and my “Before” pictures—that I was no longer nervous or embarrassed by my skin. I was what I was.

I entered the operating room and stood under a bright light while a nurse took a cold sponge and covered my body in Betadine, a sanitizing solution. It turned my skin a brown-orange color; I remember thinking that I looked like a sweet potato. She walked me over to the operating table and I lay down. Another nurse connected the IV. I looked down at my body. “Thank you,” I said, just as the IV kicked in and I passed out.

I was under for four and a half hours. The doctor removed roughly two pounds of flesh from my stomach, and added two pounds of saline to my breasts. I woke up in severe pain. My entire torso was tightly bound with thick bandages that pushed my shoulder blades together, preventing me from taking a full breath. Two drainage pumps inserted in my stomach drained blood, pus, and guts from me, and it would be my father’s job to empty the pumps every few hours and record the amounts.

A nurse leaned over me. “Everything has gone very well. You’re doing great sweetie; now we just need you to stand up and walk to your car.” I knew I was an outpatient, but how could anyone send me home like this? They lifted me up—I was not myself, I hurt so badly. Someone called me by my name, “Elna,” and I thought,
I’m not Elna.

A few hours later, in my bed at home, I regained consciousness. I asked to speak to Hayes on the phone. One side effect of the drugs was that they made me act like a five-year-old. In this state I explained to Hayes: “I feel like the bad guys got me and tied me up real tight to the railroad tracks, and you were supposed to save me but the train came, and instead of running over me I was too big and it hit me but it couldn’t get past, and now the train is on top of me.” Which in the simplest terms is exactly how I felt. I went in and out of consciousness for the next few hours. At about 3 A.M. I hit the lowest of my lows, waking up in so much pain that the thought occurred to me,
I don’t want to exist anymore.
But the smarter me, behind all the pain and drugs, replied,
Are you saying you want to die? You are not going to die over a boob job. I won’t let you.

The next day they removed the bandages. I secretly hoped it would be like the blind woman receiving sight. It wasn’t. My stomach was bruised and severely swollen. The incision, with stitches poking out, was bloodred and stretched across my entire midsection. My boobs were swollen and it felt like two aliens were trying to escape from under my skin. I closed my eyes and they bandaged me back up.

I realized then that surgery wasn’t the quick-fix method I had presumed it to be. It doesn’t break any of the laws of the universe. It’s not cutting any corners. You pay for what you get. And all I could think was, it didn’t have to be this way. I was born healthy. I brought this on myself.

As I dealt with this unexpected remorse and physical pain I became very aware of my body. I thought about what I learned when I was five: that having a body would be the foundation for my character and would be the means by which I achieved good in the world. I started mulling that idea over in my head. And you know when you stare at something for too long and it loses its shape?
Why,
I wondered through a scrim of pain and remorse,
is it only through a body that I experience life?