Beauty Marks in Three Parts
Last summer, fake freckles were the fad. Glitter freckles, eyeliner pencil freckles, henna freckles. And dammit, would you believe it, some people actually tattooed freckles onto their skin.
I get it. Freckles-- though historically considered unseemly and inelegant-- have made a comeuppance in the last century. Once the antithesis of fair and lovely, make up vloggers and trendy hipsters used methods and tricks of every kind to decorate their face with moles and dainty sprays of freckles. They’re like a little bit of sunshine you carry around on the bridge of your nose, a kind of lemonade and music festival you can wear on your cheeks. And they’re pretty. Fairy-like and innocent.
I don’t have as many as my mom does. Her freckles are like splatters of paint on her skin. But when I’ve been outdoors a lot, mine come out. Especially those summers I spent lifeguarding at the neighborhood pool. They disappear to almost nothing in the winter, but I still have a few here and there. Behind my ear, a pair on my collarbone, one or two on my shoulder, and too many to count on my neck and chest.
Multiple Endocrine Neoplaysia Type One is more of a mouthful than even most of my doctors have the lingual dexterity to say. There’s my specialist, of course, who is probably the best in the state. But every general practitioner, psychiatrist, radiologist and nurse who has had the misfortune of reviewing my medical summary trips up with that one. It’s a flash card in grad school and then lost from their memory forever.
The symptoms of MEN1 range. You could have high blood sugar, from a pancreatic tumor. Kidney stones, because of hypercalcemia. Those are two I haven’t had the pleasure of joy-riding. I have, however, felt the joint pain from hyperparathyroidism. The mental fog and the anxiety and the depression. The galactorrhea and amenorrhea, which-- in layman’s terms-- means I’ve got no period and breasts full of milk. A built-in birth control system, which would be handy, if I felt even a smidgeon of sexual desire for anything at all. And I’m out of breath every moment of the day. Weak, fatigued, uneasy. Courtesy of the lesion less than a centimeter large in my pituitary gland.
And you know what else is a less commonly noted symptom of MEN1? Freckles.
“Babe. Is this a new one?” I say, tugging down the neckline of my shirt so my boyfriend can see the spot I’m pointing at. Just a little dot of pigment, right where my cleavage would begin.
“I don’t think so?” he says with a raised brow and less surety than I’d like. Because he’s wrong. It’s new. I know it’s new.
I want to scratch it. Burn it off. I just found a new skin tag on my shoulder a few days prior, I don’t want another discovery. They’re not cute anymore. Not charming, like the pair of moles that just appeared after my senior year of high school in the UV rays of pre-college days by the pool. It’s more like the little white lump under my breast, or the fleshy nodule on my nose, or the stretch marks on my ever expanding belly. Unwelcome. Unwanted. And permanent.
I want them all removed. Every single one. Until my complexion is as clean as porcelain, my skin smooth to the touch and flawless. And sure, a dermatologist could handle one or two, but I doubt I could afford to have every little spot removed, or that I could find a doctor willing to do it.
But of all of the symptoms that this wretched disease has gifted me, this one freckle on my boob makes me the angriest. The inside of my body is falling apart, dissolving into bloodwork and MRI scans and radiology reports. I find out that this month my alkaline phosphatase is high and next month that my prolactinoma has grown, and maybe in a year I’ll finally be able to figure out what that persistent ache in my chest is. My liver? My lungs? Acid reflux or the psychosomatic result of my life interrupting anxiety? I am constantly in the dark, constantly uninformed, forever wondering if this pain in my side is a kidney stone or a sore hip from sitting at my desk all day. Am I light headed because I’m out of shape or do I really need someplace to sit before I pass out? Is this headache from stress? My medication? My tumor growing so large it’s finally pressing on the nerves in my brain?
Who knows? I don’t. There’s only so many tests I can take, so many scans I can afford, so many days I can take off of work to ask this doctor what will help the depression, ask that doctor if my aching bones are my imagination, ask this doctor to help me keep the scale from tipping any higher. I can’t deduce or research or buy the answers I need, but this freckle-- this godforsaken freckle. I can tell you for sure that this freckle is new and that means absolutely nothing to anyone but me. It’s not glitter or makeup or ink, it’s an overproduction of pigment that I can’t control, like everything else in this shitty, obese, diseased body.
And it doesn’t even feel like mine anymore. A new mole, another piece of me I don’t recognize.
One day I will be all bones and fat and beauty marks and tumors, and there will be nothing left of me but a diagnosis.
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