He was not being impassive about this. I had thought that when doctors delivered bad news, they used a med-school cultivated matter-of-fact delivery. My doctor’s voice broke.
I had come to him thinking I had an enlarged lymph node in my neck. I was 31, hadn’t been sick, and was a little nervous about a random bump appearing at the corner of my right jawbone. The doctor diagnosed a parotid gland tumor. The only option was surgery to remove it. I shuddered to think my smile would be removed with it.
I have always been a smiler. I was a happy little girl with blond curls and a perpetual smile. Every picture I’m in shows me grinning. Smiling has been my secret weapon for making it through nerve-racking job interviews and successfully eating cabbage served by a friend who didn’t know I couldn’t stand the stuff. The chances were slim that my parotid tumor would be cancer–it didn’t fit the profile. But my doctor couldn’t tell me the chances of partial facial paralysis.
“I won’t know until I’m in there,” he said. These types of tumors often lay on top of or are entangled with the facial nerve. The nerve could get stretched or cut.
A few weeks before surgery, I went to have a CT scan. In the waiting room, I sat next to a woman in her 70s. She smiled at me. I smiled back. “You’re very pretty,” she said. “You are, too,” I answered. But when I turned away, I stopped smiling.
I rebel against the traditional stereotypes of beauty. I see joy in unique-looking people. I deplore fashion magazines and have vowed that no daughter I have will think looks are more important than brains. I will go to my grave saying that beauty is only skin deep. But when there was a chance I could lose the thing I liked most about my own face, I became a narcissist.
I began to see perfect, smiling, winking faces everywhere. I practiced smiling in the mirror, holding the right corner of my lips down to see what I looked like. The effect was bad, physically and mentally. My smile went away long before I was ever under anesthesia.
The night before surgery, I was frantic. I lay awake, talking to my husband. I turned the slim chance of cancer into an inevitability and started thinking about how I could quit my job and order groceries online, avoiding public outings. He let me babble. When I gave him a chance to talk, he said, “I love you. Everything will be OK.” How many times have people in this world said that to each other before operations? But I did my best to believe him.
It was an early morning surgery. In the operating room, I looked up at the doctor. I wondered if he was apprehensive. A nurse, with a round face and a grandmotherly air, held my hand, and then I went under. I didn’t have any funny dreams, epiphanies or anything I can remember. For me, it felt as quick as a blink, and I woke in the recovery room to the doctor’s voice. “Vicki. Vicki. Smile for me, Vicki. Come on.”
The room was fuzzy, made blurrier by the fact that everything was white and gray and green. But I saw my doctor, surrounded by nurses. It felt like the scene in “The Wizard of Oz” where Dorothy wakes up in the end and says “And you and you and you were there!” The thought made me smile. And I could.
I doubt that people often cheer in the recovery room of hospitals. The grandmotherly nurse clapped. My doctor laughed, and left quickly. I found out later that he went right out to tell my husband and family in the waiting room that everything had gone just fine; no cancer, and the tumor had only been near the facial nerve. He was able to work around it.
Because of the surgery, I’ve lost a little feeling in my right ear, and it feels strange to put in earrings or when I can feel a cold breeze on the top half of my ear and not the bottom. But I have complete use of my eyes and lips, and only a little numbness in my right cheek. My smile works perfectly.
The only visible remnant of the surgery is a four-inch scar near the corner of my right jaw. It’s light pink, and curves up from my jaw to my ear. I have to wear sunscreen to protect it; if it gets a little redder, it will look just like a little smile. But I wouldn’t mind that. I’ve learned that smiles shouldn’t be taken for granted.
