Official Book Club Selection (20 page)

These are my nose job “before” pictures. I had a deviated septum. Really.

When you’re an actress, you’re expected not to react to something like that. These people are supposedly trying to help you, albeit without any tact or compassion. You can’t get indignant—“Who the fuck do you think you are?”—and you can’t cry (because then in my case my freakishly deformed, gigantic nose would run), and you can’t argue with them: “Well, I’m beautiful!” They’re just going to say, “Really? Have you seen JAMI GERTZ?” If I may pull out of my memory an ’80s paragon of beauty for you.

I constantly heard from agents and casting directors that my nose was keeping me from being successful as an actress. And if you look at the lovely pictures I’ve provided, you can see that it’s not like I had a big bump or that it was crooked. It was just bigger. A little bigger. Not even a lot bigger. I wasn’t Streisand, where my nose was my most prominent feature and what everyone was talking about. It just … had a little character to it. And yet, this was what I needed, supposedly, so I arranged to get a nose job. I didn’t even think of it as surgery. If my philosophy was to do whatever it took to be on television, it seemed like a small price to pay.

It wasn’t a small price to pay for my parents, because they actually paid for it. Their attitude was matter-of-fact, too. If this is what show business requires, this is what you will do, they said. Nobody in my life for one second countered with, “Be who you are! Don’t let them get you down!” It was, “Start saving money because insurance doesn’t cover it.”

As for the surgery itself, it was insanely painful. I hate when people say, “Oh, it wasn’t that bad.” Let me tell you, it fucking hurts. First off, they break your nose when you’re under. I woke up during that part, by the way, because while they always have to be careful not to over-anesthetize you—it’s routinely considered the most dangerous thing about surgery, making sure you’re completely under but never so under that you stop breathing or anything—they sometimes can’t prevent you from opening your eyes for the “ick” moments. There I was, emerging from being knocked out, and seeing a little hammer and chisel as they broke my nose with an excruciatingly audible CLINK. They’d said to me earlier, “Squeeze the hand of the anesthesiologist when you are awake.” So I woke up, CLINK, and then crushed that person’s fingers as hard as I could.

That’s all I remember. When the whole thing was over, my face was completely swollen with two shiners. This was followed by a setting period, when they pack your nose with gauze, and because it’s broken they put a cast on it. Like it’s a fractured arm. And don’t think you can get any sleep with something like that on, either. This is all followed by the real express train to agony, when they have to pull the gauze out of both your nasal passages a few days later. “Okay, get ready, this won’t take long!” they said, and oh fuckChristholyshit did that hurt. To this day, it was the most intense physical pain I’ve ever experienced. I remember tears just springing from my eyes, like they were sprinklers. Why couldn’t they just novocaine my entire fucking head? I thought.

The nose job was a bitch, but I was pretty much fully recovered after a few weeks. Once the swelling and bruising had gone down, I looked at myself and felt a little bit better. This was what I had to do, after all. I had no regrets. Now it was back to auditioning, where the parts would be mine for the taking!

And that’s the story of the nose job that didn’t improve my life or career. At all.

I wish I could say I went on to become a very prominent nose model, but the phone didn’t ring. The offers weren’t coming in, or maybe I just couldn’t smell them, because of my puny nasal passages.

The irony is that, as you get older, your nose and your ears grow. My nose had changed form again, so in 2002—wait for it—I got another nose job. My problem with the second nose job was this: I still don’t think enough got sliced away. Yeah, that’s right. He was way too subtle. Fuck that. I wanted the full Naomi Judd. I say that because I worked with her one time, and I stared at her tiny nose and thought, Holy shit, it looks like somebody hacked the shit out of that thing. She’ll never have to get a second one like I did. I love it!

So after all that, I actually believe that my current nose is my original nose. I’ve just grown it back.

We’ll now move on to other battleground areas of my body, namely a war I almost lost—literally, as in nearly dying—to liposuction.

First, though, a quick update on my weight battles. A few years of off-and-on Overeaters Anonymous meetings in my twenties—introduced to me by the ever-supportive Judy Toll—helped me come to grips with the fact that other people had experiences similar to mine. For somebody who believed she looked like Meat Loaf—the old Meat Loaf—coming to a safe gathering place and seeing everybody from anorexics who were truly at death’s door to people who looked like me—in other words, not really overweight, but obsessed with the notion that we were—was a helpful breakthrough. After years of looking for what I thought was the Big Solution, the thing that was going to make me never want cake again, it helped me realize that there was no magic pill, just hard work and awareness.

Therapy helped, too. One time after a bad binge—stomach distended, hating myself, the whole nine yards—I went to a session with a therapist and she said this great thing that really stuck with me. I was talking about some audition coming up, and I kept saying, “I have to get down to one hundred ten! I have to get down to one hundred ten!” In other words, my weight when I was a freshman at Oak Park High.

Joyce looks like that because she’s pissed I won’t share the cake with her.

She just said, “Well, what if your goal weight was one hundred twenty-five?” As in, get rid of this stupid, unrealistic number in your head, and substitute another number. Suddenly, being 135 didn’t seem so bad, or so far away from a reasonable goal.

When you’re in this image-conscious business, though, the challenges to your perceptions come fast and furious. When I was on Suddenly Susan, I’d have to go in for fittings with the wardrobe people twice a week, and I have to say, those sessions were just awful. Here I was, a supposedly integral part of a big network comedy—there to make people laugh, not turn heads with my figure—and yet two times a week I’d be made to feel as if I was an anatomical freak. Really, the wardrobe people would just act as if the size 6 didn’t exist, or refer to it like old Jewish women whispering about someone’s cancer. And forget about it if you’re an 8. Then you’re twice the size of Style Network’s reality star Ruby. You know, before she lost the weight.

Well, I’d been hearing about this magical process called liposuction. It apparently wasn’t just about sucking the fat out. The word was they could sculpt your body at the same time. Actresses everywhere were doing it and saying it changed their life. “I went down two pant sizes!” you’d hear. So in between seasons of Suddenly Susan I had a meeting with a big-time celebrity plastic surgeon. I had heard hush-hush rumors that he had done Michelle Pfeiffer’s eyes, and whether that was true or not, who doesn’t want to look like Michelle Pfeiffer? I’m telling you—like talking about your body with an agent—those sessions with plastic surgeons are fucking brutal. It’s very much like the way you see it on Nip/Tuck: “Tell me what you don’t like about yourself.” Suddenly you’re discussing your “problem areas,” and then they take a Sharpie and write all over your body in the most humiliating fashion, reminiscent of the iconic scene in Billy Jack where the townies throw powder in the face of the “injuns.”

What happens is these plastic surgeons start laying on other shit you’d never even considered. My “problem areas,” you wonder? The biggest one was my brain. Get a load of the crazy shit I wanted to do to my body. As soon as I mentioned that I wanted to be able to stand so that when I touched my ankles together there’d be space between my knees, like you see on models in swimsuits, this guy said, “Oh, we could do that.”

“Really?” I said. “You can change the shape of my knees?”

“Yes, we can!” he said. Way before Obama.

I showed him a picture of Jennifer Aniston. “I can have Aniston’s lower body?”

“Yes!”

So the next thing I know, we’re scheduled to do my stomach, my inner thighs, my outer thighs, and my fucking knees, all in one long surgery that went on for well over four hours.

I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. I thought I’d just go to sleep and wake up skinny. I knew it was some sort of vacuuming situation, but what really happens is first they take a hollow knitting needle vacuum—it really does look like a mini-Hoover—and stab a bunch of holes in you. I really question whether or not these doctors just hated their mothers and felt like taking it out on me. Then they remove the fat cells, and also a lot of your bodily fluids as well. The next part—the juiciest, really—is that for a long time afterward you have to wear a medieval girdle, night and day, except when you’re showering. And there’s a hole in it to pee through. This is because they actually think that after they’ve abused your body, as long as you wear this elasticized gauze twenty-four hours a day, it will mold your body into shape. I’m pretty sure people don’t get six-pack abs from wrapping their bellies for a month. It’s crazy logic. It would be like taking a stacked woman, wrapping her breasts, then telling her, “In a month, you’ll be flat-chested!” It makes no sense. Wait a minute, it would be like someone’s Irish-Catholic box-of-wine-drinking mother telling their frizzy-haired daughter that if they blew dry their hair enough, it could be “trained” to be straight. Oh crap, I’m repeating myself.

Another ridiculous thing they said was, “Now, once we suck out the fat in these areas, if you’re not careful with diet and exercise, you’ll gain it back in other areas of your body.” This should have been the tip-off that diet and exercise were what I should have been doing all along to lose weight—that the whole operation was a scam. So according to the doctors, the fat stays out of my belly, but eat too much and it’ll go to my arms? That made no sense, either. But when you’re in that office, you want to believe. I was an idiot.

Something else I didn’t know at the time was that a plastic surgeon isn’t necessarily someone who’s trained for years and years. It might be an EMT who went on a weekend retreat and then opened up shop as a way to double-dip. You might be having this very serious, potentially dangerous surgery done in a place that looks like it’s in a hospital—cause it has the gurney, the equipment, the lights—but it’s just a broom closet some doctor has converted next to the room they do checkups in.

In any case, I was sold on surgically slimming myself down, so I went through with this painful liposuction surgery. The first indication that something was wrong—with their protocol and my recovery—was that I wasn’t peeing. Nobody told me that I shouldn’t go home from the procedure until I’d peed, or voided, as they say in doctor lingo. I didn’t know it was a big deal if you didn’t pee. So they sent me home, I went to bed, and I was bleeding from the incisions. Bleeding all over the bed. The pain was unbearable. Finally I got the surgeon on the phone late that night and he said, “Have you voided?” I said, “No, I can’t seem to pee.” It felt like I had to pee, but I couldn’t, and now I could barely move or walk.

My post-op lipo photos? Or first date with Chris Brown?

He said, “I’m sending a nurse over to your house, and she’s going to put a catheter in you.” Great. A plastic tube stuck up my vagina. I was so distracted by the pain that I just said, “Okay.”

The nurse came over, and said, “Well, I’m glad I had my beeper with me when the doctor called, because I was at dinner having a glass of wine.”

With Maggie Griffin, perhaps? What an odd thing to admit. I’m pretty sure this is probably considered to be a highly inappropriate thing to say if you’re in the medical profession. Did she really have a glass of wine and some crystal meth, but decide the crystal meth part was inappropriate to tell me? They didn’t have anybody who wasn’t drunk that they could send? Oh well, it was late and I was in hellish pain.

As I’m sure you can imagine—even those of you without vaginas (that’s you, gays)—that catheter in my poor little peesh hurt like hell, especially the trial and error it took to find where it went. But I have to say, once it was in place, I did feel relief. The doctor had said whatever was causing my lack of peeing would be gone by tomorrow, so after the nurse cathed and then uncathed me—ouch—she took the bag of pee and left.

Next day comes and I still can’t pee.

I call the doctor again. “What should I do?”

“Well, come into my office. We’re going to cath you again.”

Get ready: I went to his office for five straight fucking days to get cathed.

Each day it was, “Well, this time we’ll cath you and you’ll be fine tomorrow.”

By the fifth day, I wasn’t going through the lobby anymore. They had me entering through the side door. Gee, I wonder why. Bad for business to see a lipo patient returning over and over again in excruciating agony?

On that fifth day I walked into the office, doubled over in pain. I’m barfing and sweating. I actually think I had dementia. I truly wasn’t thinking straight. Suddenly, this guy on a gurney nearby, who must have been there to get a facial done because he had the shower cap on and looked like he had been freshly lasered, looked at me and said, “Oh my God, what happened to you?”

“I got liposuction and I can’t pee.”

Then, like a scene out of some movie, he bolted up, tore his shower cap off, and started yelling for a doctor. He said to me with no small amount of urgency, “You have to go to a hospital right now!”

“What?” I said.

When my doctor showed up, this guy started screaming at him: “You’d better take her personally to the ER right now! I’m calling the hospital. What the fuck did you do to this girl? What did you do to this girl?”

Get this: My hero was a physician who indeed was there to get a facial. One look at the color of my skin, and he knew it was bad. So the lipo doctor took me in his car to Cedars Sinai Hospital, where they rushed me into the ER, and what they discovered was that because my urine wasn’t exiting my body, it was going through my organs and up into my back. My kidneys were close to being permanently damaged. The ER doctors were seriously freaked out, and so was my lipo doctor, who I’m sure cared only about the fact that I was surely going to sue him.