My humps

January 25, 2006 - 1:03 a.m.

Remember that one time that I told you (all of you) to go fuck your mother? And then I decreed that Judith Light is a whore? It was because I had painful cystic acne and lived every day with wooden stakes in my neck and I spent the whole summer trying to HIDE it whilst trying to wear sexy, backless, low-cut, no-bra slutwear for my boyfriend (and myself).

There was a cyst that lived in the middle of my chest like a bull’s eye for 3 months. V-neck shirts created a sort of ARROW, pointing directly at the aberration, while it sat there pulsating and sweating. That cyst cyst-ematically ruined my entire summer.

My body was covered with fucking BARNACLES, and you’d think that the bottom of Lake Michigan is a bed I sleep in every night.

(Speaking of barnacles, shiver me timbers, I have a pirate joke:

A pirate walks into a bar and he has a steering wheel hanging out of his pants and the bartender says to him, “Hey buddy, why do you have a steering wheel hanging out of your fly?” And the pirate says:

“Arrrrr! It’s drivin’ me NUTS!”

Yes.)

I tried Proactiv and it didn’t really work and here I am slipping back in time, becoming a greazy pimply teenager right along with my goddamn wrinkles and gray hair, ashy skin on my arms and moth-eaten ovaries and that’s when I LOST IT. I do not use this word loosely but that shit is UNFAIR. To be old and wrinkled and still have acne until I’m 80? AH HA HA HA HA. Death.

Then I finally broke down and decided that I need Accutane, the evil drug involved in mega lawsuits, accused of being toxic, cancer causing, and responsible for innocent children committing suicide. I wanted to stay away from it. It can cause massive organ failure, blindness, psychosis, and there’s about a 100% chance that if you get pregnant, you WILL have a deformed baby. No ifs, ands or buts.

This is not a vanity issue. The pain drove me to distraction, and each breakout left a nasty scar on my fair skin. That became reason enough after awhile.

Getting Accutane is about as easy as getting a PhD from an Ivy League school. The amount of paperwork, consultations, screening and WAITING was beyond ridiculous. Multiple pregnancy tests for months before I could start the drug. I had to sign a thousand legal forms and waivers promising that I will use two forms of birth control for the duration and 2 months prior and after taking the drug. I initialed 27 paragraphs listing birth defects and photos of pinhead babies. The company who makes Accutane will pay for your birth control, your tests, and your abortion should you get pregnant. They’ll pay for everything, regardless if you have health insurance, because it is cheaper than paying for a lifetime of care for a retarded baby, and the lawsuits that soon follow.

I had to get blood work done, a liver panel, lipid profile, HDL, glucose, blah blah to see if my liver is functioning normally and I have to go every 2 weeks so they can draw blood and test me over and over again, to look for signs that my organs are failing. I have to get a pregnancy test every 30 days, and they will only give me 30 days of medication at a time to ensure that I keep coming back.

My doctor is watching me for signs of depression, suicidal thoughts and psychosis. Supposedly “normal” teenagers just up and killed themselves while taking this drug, though it has never been proven and their families have never won a lawsuit.

The deformed babies, however, HAVE been proven and they take that shit very seriously because it is like Thalidomide all over again. They lost every one of those lawsuits.

Other possible side effects: extremely dry, chapped skin and lips, brain swelling, nose bleeds, yellowing of the eyes, deafness, bone loss and etc. It may not have been wise for me to choose wintertime to start this program, as I tend to get all melancholy around the holidays anyway, and chapped skin is a problem too. But I asked for the drug in October and was finally given my first dosage on Christmas Eve! Yippee!

I remember in the early 1980s my brother took Accutane for his acne, when he was 15. I was only 8 but I remembered my mother complaining about the cost, that it was something like $1.50 per pill and even though her insurance was covering most of it, she was still outraged. It is twenty years later and I was dreading the cost. What might it cost now? Like, $75 a pill?

I went to the pharmacy and filled my prescription and when the man handed me my package I said, “Excuse me sir, I asked for the GENERIC of Accutane.” And he said, “But that is the generic.” And guess how much it cost for a 30 day supply? If you are like my mother and say, “ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLARS” you’d be wrong.

The generic of Accutane is five hundred dollars a month.

That’s more than EIGHT DOLLARS per pill. I hate math.

Shall we speculate as to what the real Accutane might cost? What do you think? A thousand bucks? And my insurance would cover 60% of a name-brand so I would pay like $400 a month and that’s like hell-to-the-naw. But I paid $53 for my drugs, which is 10% and not the 20% my insurance company asked for. A mistake was made, but I’m not complaining.

So far, no crazy. My skin is very dry, flaking off skin continuously and everywhere I go I leave a trail of honkey ash behind me. It’s snowing honkey when I enter the room. A snow globe without the globe. A dust storm of epidermis. I feel bad, subjecting the world to my cells, carpeting their carpets with my epithelials. But all I can say is: Sorry. But I am a very hygienic person so my scales are clean and smell of coconut.

And I get nose bleeds. And by “I get” I mean like five times a day, maybe ten. It gets annoying. Sometimes it’s just a little when I blow my nose, sometimes it gushes down my face at inopportune times, like when I am sitting at my desk at work, speaking face-to-face with a client. And something about the heat makes it gush in the shower, blood running down my chest, staining my towels.

I took a nice candle-lit bath, laid my head back, closed my eyes, and woke up in a blood bath.

The other day I was cleaning my toilet, bent over, scrubbing like a maniac and just when I was almost done and it was sparkling white porcelain, I noticed that the swipe of my rag was leaving a streak, and blood was falling from my face splattering all over the rim, so red, and so contrasting to the white it seemed fake like a movie.

And what do you do when fluids leave your body without your consent? You poise your body over a toilet bowl - and I just filled that fucker with blood and then cleaned it all over again.

I have yet to wake up in my own bed in a pool of blood, but I won’t be surprised if it happens.

So I know the question you’re all dying to know the answer to:

Is it working?

Oh my god.

It is working.

The first two weeks was like a reptile shedding his skin. Just…one thick layer of skin came to the surface, all bumpy, and flaked off in chunks, revealing new skin underneath.

The smoothest, healthiest most pristine skin I’ve seen on my head since I was 10 years old. By three to four weeks I was a new person, and while it still just sloughs off and I have to remove dead chunks every day and slather on moisturizer, it is so smooth and beautiful.

I found that my scarring was not nearly as extensive as I had thought. What I had thought was scars were actually just acne and it FELL OFF. I didn’t know this but the bad skin was making me look old. It was so dry and incredibly dull it looked AGED. I look YOUNGER! Hallelujah! My face is girlish!

It’s so radiant and youthful…

Dare I say it?

I look like an angel.

All vanity aside, BY COMAPRISON, I look like a cherub, a girl whose face should be on a package of toilet paper.

And I think I have a fighting chance of being cast in the next Dove commercial; Dove soap or Dove chocolate. Me with a pair of white wings. I can see it now.

I can’t stop caressing my cheek and forehead because I am just so soft.

I no longer hide from fluorescent lighting, harsh overhead lighting or bright sunlight; that would just make my skin look like hell. Now I can be scrutinized under a spotlight and I’d feel pretty comfortable. I’m not greazy. I look cleaner, healthier, younger, fresher and less tired, if that makes any sense. When I sweat at the gym it looks cute, not haggard.

A good analogy for the effects of this drug is like it works from the inside, boiling all the crap until it rises to the surface and spills out my pores, like a gurgling swamp. The gunk that has come out of my pores…it’s like I was just filled with GARBAGE. I’m constantly cleaning this garbage, washing it a few times a day, and it is CHUNKY, let me tell you, this is no refined, sophisticated garbage pouring out of me. It’s as pretty as the floor of a subway.

I’m almost 30, the last time I had healthy skin was when I was 11, so that is 2/3rds of my life, miserable. Ugly, dirty, high maintenance, constant fretting, multiple products. Scars, insecurity, hiding my face all the time. Why did I wait so long? Why suffer for TWENTY YEARS? HELLO! There isn’t ANYTHING I’ve done for TWENTY YEARS – except have chicken skin.

I remember asking my parents for Accutane in high school…they said no because of the cost. And realistically, this is probably the first time in my adult life that I can really AFFORD this treatment on my own.

I don’t even want to know how much this will cost in the end, I’ll think about that later. Every doctor visit has a co-pay, the lab work is not free, my insurance company contests and rejects all the testing I’ve had…who the hell knows. A lot. But it’ll be worth it even if it cost five grand, shit.

The drug comes in little packages of five days of dosages. Each one has this label on it:

Yummy! Pinhead baby! One of us! One of us! My favorite part is where they list “absent ears” as a possible birth defect.

“Where are your baby’s ears?”

“Oh, they’re absent.”

Like they stayed home from school that day or some shit.

And each morning and night I take my little life-threatening miracle pill, and they are not in a bottle, each pill is individually wrapped in a little bubble with this sticker on it:

To sufficiently scare the ever-loving shit outta me.

You are now cordially (and I mean CORDIALLY) invited:

To come over to my house and touch my face. It’s a real treat. I mean it.

Previous - Next

The Latest Babel

The Fast, Days 1-6
January 28, 2007