Like Plucking Your Eyebrows

 

I recently had minor outpatient surgery that required external stitches. My doctor did a beautiful job sewing up the incision, telling me to come back in two weeks for them to be removed. (There are also internal stitches; those will dissolve over time.)

Yesterday was my return visit for the stitches to come out. The PA examined the incision site, asked me some questions, then gave the nod to the nurse to go ahead, telling me as she left the room to come back in three months. 

The nurse laid out the equipment: a pair of tweezers and a tiny pair of surgical snips. She asked me if I had any questions.

Only one. "How much is this likely to hurt?" 

She laughed and said that the doctor had recently been asked that same question by a young patient, an adolescent girl. The doctor asked her if she knew what it felt like to pluck a hair from her head? Yes. The doctor said that you don't feel that kind of pluck, but this is more like plucking your eyebrows and there is some sensation.

"Like plucking your eyebrows." I burst out laughing and then told the nurse my eyebrow plucking story.

Over 55 years ago, when I was hitting adolescence, my mother and my aunt Ginger sat me down in the kitchen to pluck my eyebrows for the very first time. No self-respecting girl would walk around with her eyebrows meeting up in the middle of her face and it was time to give me a beauty lesson. Ginger had her tweezers ready; Mom had a bowl with a few ice cubes. Mom applied the ice cube to my brow to numb it, Ginger leaned in, tweezed a hair, and...

I shot up and shouted, "STOP IT! DON'T EVER DO THAT TO ME AGAIN!"

What the hell? Women did this to themselves? Voluntarily? 

Ginger and Mom tried to reason with me. I needed to "get used" to it. It didn't hurt "that much." It was just what one did.

I shook my head. Not me. Not then, not later, not ever.

And I never did pluck my eyebrows. I had a razor (this was back in the day when everyone shaved their legs and underarms, so girls got razors early in life—the kind with removable blades that, in retrospect, could be pretty lethal) and I took it to my brow and learned to shave instead of pluck. All these many years later, I still do that.

The nurse started laughing. "Well, if the pain gets too intense, we can call the PA back in and she can give you a local to numb it, but let's try it without so we can skip the needle. I'll take it easy."

And bit by bit, she snipped and carefully pulled the stitches out. There was one that stung, not unlike my distant recollection of my eyebrows episode, but the nurse eased the others out with only a few twinges here and there.

I thanked the nurse and told her she did a great job. She did. 

I walked out to my car, thinking back to that long-ago experience. And I smiled, thankful that I still have never plucked my eyebrows.