The Untold Paradox Of A Nose Job

For the duration of my senior year of highschool, I was experiencing what I would categorize as sinister nosebleeds on a daily basis. This quotidian ritual would cause blood to clot up to what must have been some sort of uncharted frontier between my eyeballs and my brain, ultimately culminating in a Cronenberg-esque bloodsplosion. A particularly diabolical nosebleed landed me in the office of an ENT. These nasal hemorrhages, coupled with a lifelong inability to breathe, led the doctor to introduce me to a new word: septoplasty. I needed to get my deviated septum fixed.

If you’re a particularly oracular reader—or someone raised around affluent Jews—you might be sensing where this story is headed. I was quickly succumbing to the septoplasty-to-rhinoplasty industrial complex.

My first ENT visit is one of those memories you have engraved on the back of your eyelids. It requires no practice of recollection; you can just see it. The tan walls, the medical table’s coarse paper, the smell of the doctor’s cologne, my mom smiling, the fluorescent lighting, a revelation that I would not be able to unlearn.

“And while you’re in there, you can just shave that bump off of his nose, right?” my mom tossed to the plastic surgeon, as if asking if the meal comes with fries. I can’t really remember the details of the response. Something along the lines of, “That’s not how this works.” I was embroiled in a pandora’s box-opening style realization. I had never thought there was anything external that needed to be fixed about my nose. The nosebleeds and not being able to breathe were enough fodder for the visit. As the doctor explained how a rhinoplasty was a separate procedure that could be more conveniently added to a session under anesthesia for a septoplasty, he also remarked, “How many times have you broken your nose?” and chuckled through it. Almost to say, “Wow, that beak is fucked up!”

For the next few weeks, as I awaited a final consultation for the deviated septum surgery, it became all I could think about. I was plagued by it. In every reflection, even the briefest glimpse of myself, I was turning to my profile to get a better look at my newly developed deformity.

The cusp of one’s 18th birthday is a notoriously insecure time. Boasting a 6’5”-but-against-all-odds-mere-135-pound frame, I was not exactly an adonis. A few months earlier, in an—otherwise glowing!—review of my performance in the musical Anything Goes, the reviewer had written, “Kolbrener appears to be 6’6” and is still trying to figure out where his body is in space.” This is a direct quote pulled and produced verbatim from my memory, and then cross-referenced with the paper form I still possess. God knows why that part of the review has stuck with me all this time.

So I got a nose job.

A misconception about rhinoplasties is that once the procedure is done, you awake with a new nose. What actually happens is two weeks later you unwrap a swollen schnozz that will slowly deflate; you don’t see your doctor-promised new protuberance until nearly a year later. There’s no “Aha” moment where you experience a sigh of relief seeing your newly remodeled facial infrastructure. So you’re forced to stop thinking about it.

In the intervening period between my procedure and today, unorthodox beaks cemented themselves in vogue while I simultaneously crawled out of the shell of insecurity shrouding the first twenty years of my life. Two ships in the night. I’m left regretting a decision that I made young, and that shouldn’t have been so informed by the opinions of others and the cavalier avenues through which they expressed them.

On our first date, my girlfriend complimented my nose. And I—perhaps too forthcomingly—immediately dismissed the compliment as better suited for Jeffrey R. Raval, MD. The aftermath of getting a nose job at the ripe old age of 18 is the production of an intense dual identity between me and my appearance, posing more abstract questions about what is mine. Going under the knife felt like segmenting myself from my nose.

How many planks have to be replaced on the hull of the Ship of Theseus before it ceases to be itself? Surely just one plank—or nose—does not suffice.

Today, I fantasize about feeling my fingers run down a jagged nose that is uniquely mine. I frequently find myself optimistically feeling the emergence of a new bump. I consider the possibility of intentionally breaking my nose to commence the engendering of a new more storied muzzle, brimming with signifiers of my own personal history. Ironically, the cycle of resentment that spurred me to seek a restructuring plan for my original snout is rekindling in the form of a bitterness towards what I now have.

The curls of my hair loosening with age, the birthmarks that speckle my face (37 at last count), a jagged pinky finger disfigured from dislocation, patchy facial hair barely enveloping my cheeks, the raised mole that nestles between my right eyelid and eyeball, a pair of skinny legs, the sunken-in breastbone of my chest. I am trying to cherish these things—the good and the bad—simply because they are mine. Soon, this nose will be mine too.