I decided in the end to take the plunge and get my eyebrows tattooed. I’m not loving it.
The lady has done a perfectly good job, and I now have generic brows that are completely unremarkable. I guess I was expecting my own weird quirky brows with the strange upper arch that I’ve always had, but just darker, like when I pencil them in for a night out. Here’s an old pic of me in an x ray gown at work that shows my “real” brows.
They are very dark currently which is typical at day two. I’m thinking of breaking the rules of the very detailed care plan in order to get them to fade more quickly. In the meantime I now have some idea of the dislocated sense of self that people sometimes get after they have their ethnic noses fixed. Is this me finally coming to terms with the constraints of the Western beauty ideal after years of anaesthetising people for cosmetic surgery procedures? Better late than never I suppose.
I looked after a young man earlier in the week, who has not done well after an assault last year. He has a Glasgow Outcome Score of 3, with severe disability. (Note I also learnt this week that you can say someone is in a “persistent vegetative state” but you can’t say they are a vegetable. This is apparently akin to calling a swarthy person in Europe who tries to rob you, a g***y, which is something I also learnt only this year. These social changes in what are acceptable terms doesn’t bother me at all, I’m always happy to learn new things. After all, when I was younger it was fine to say someone was ‘retarded’, and the term “intellectually disabled” was regarded as hopelessly politically correct. Society changes; language changes.)
Where was I? Oh yes, my young patient this week. He had a photo in his notes of him before his brain injury. He looked a perfectly unremarkable youth, although a bit of a rebel and likely a handful for his poor parents. It reminded me of the photos that are on the doors of the elderly inmates at the rest home my aunty is living at, which shows them how they really are or were before dementia struck. But who are we really? Am I the same person as I was when I was born, or at twenty, or even last week? Maybe I shouldn’t have given up so soon on that philosophy book I tried to read a couple of years ago. Maybe Bertrand Russell’s A history of Western Philosophy wasn’t the best place to start.
