Essay On Personal Narrative-Septoplasty Surgery

It’s a scary thing to stand before a mirror and realize that the face you have known all your life is about to be altered permanently. It’s scarier to know that the situation is your own doing.
I thought about this under the harsh glare of the fluorescent lights, which have always incited the scrutiny of my own appearance more savagely than anything else. In this moment, I was wrapped in the lavender felt of a hospital gown and sewn to the IV that would fill my veins with anaesthesia. I had gone into the bathroom before my surgery and while washing my hands, realized that, yes, this was the last time I would ever see my face as it was conceived, that the next time I would meet my own eyes they would be bruised.
In all honesty, I had never liked my nose. It rested unevenly between my eyes and stretched downwards, hitting my upper lip in a thick arc. After getting hit by a swinging door I was left with two breaks and a caved-in nasal cavity. Septoplasty was urgent, but while discussing this surgery, the point of having rhinoplasty simultaneously was brought up. After spending years developing a dislike for my nose, I knew that I would like to have rhinoplasty, but seemed to be

blocked mentally from making that decision.
While having a rhinoplasty certainly wasn’t against the social codes of my family and community, it had grown to be against my own personal code. Colliding with my views on feminism, which both my upbringing and my intuition had taught me to hold in high regard, I somehow deemed plastic surgery to be a sign of giving in to the uneven societal standards between men and women. That said, I never judged anyone who chose to have plastic surgery, but I certainly never considered it an option for myself.
However, knowing that I would need to have surgery to reconstruct my nasal passages, regardless of whether or not I had rhinoplasty, led me to reevaluate the reasoning behind my feminist and moral beliefs.

In doing this, I thought about the women who influenced me -- Betty Friedan, Marge Piercy, Gloria Steinem, and my grandmother. All of these women are independent thinkers with varying views on plastic surgery, but who all agree that the cardinal rule of the women’s movement is that all people deserve the right to choose for themselves what they would like to do with themselves and their bodies. The second wave of feminism wasn’t just about equal rights. It was about choice. And with that reminder, I chose to do what I wanted, which was to undergo plastic surgery at the age of

seventeen.
Undoubtedly, I have made decisions and challenged beliefs of higher consequence to those around me, decisions, both internal and external, that have actually helped shape the course of my life. I know it doesn’t seem like much -- the decision to add rhinoplasty onto an already scheduled and inevitable surgery. This was not waking up after a horrific accident. After all, it was just a nose job. Still, it changed my life in a completely unexpected way. It forced me to confront ideas that I had about myself, to reexamine my identity as a woman, a feminist, and a teenager. And it is quite possibly the only decision I have ever made that I would make again without hesitation.