I’m Margaret, I’m fifty-seven and I live in York. Inside my head I’m about thirty-two. I walk the walls on a Sunday and I still laugh far too loudly in restaurants. Then I’d catch myself in a shop window on Stonegate and there’d be a worn-out woman keeping pace with me.
I knew from about fifty-two what would actually change it, and the word was facelift. I ran from that word for years — partly the money, since I was quoted twice here and both figures were the price of a decent car, and mostly the fear. One night I stopped scrolling and typed the real question: is a facelift in Turkey safe? Not how much. Is it safe. I wanted the clinic name next to a named hospital, so I looked up Just Clinic Istanbul facelift. My first message didn’t mention money. I sent the wind-tunnel face, the expressions, the ears, the hairline, and being put in a taxi hours after an operation on my head. The reply went through every one of them before anybody mentioned a price. Here’s the lot.
The Saturday in the Co-op
It came on in stages. My cheeks dropped. The jawline I used to have went soft and blurred into my neck, and my neck went loose, so that looking down at my phone there was a fold under my chin. People at work took to saying, “Are you all right, Margaret, you look tired.” One Saturday in the Co-op a woman I barely know asked if I’d had bad news. That’s the one that stuck. My face was telling everybody a story about me that wasn’t true.
I threw money at it for ten years. Night creams at forty pounds a jar, two courses of radiofrequency, fillers twice. After the second lot of filler my cheeks were full but everything else still slid downwards, so I looked like a tired woman with full cheeks. None of it lifted anything, because none of it can. I avoided the mirror in the hall for about two years, which is a daft way to live in your own house.
The shop window on Stonegate
We’ve all got the same picture: mouth pulled sideways, cheeks flat and shiny, stood at the front of a boat. I’d rather have carried on looking tired, and I said so on the video call. My sister said, “Don’t come back a clinic monster,” meaning it as a joke, and it kept me up for a week.
The surgeon didn’t laugh. That look comes from an old way of doing it, where the skin is dragged backwards and stitched tight and asked to hold the whole face up. Skin can’t do that. It gives, and while it’s giving it drags everything into that stretched shape. He works on the layer underneath — the SMAS, the sheet of muscle and ligament that’s actually what has come loose. He puts that back where it used to sit and secures it, and the skin is laid over the top and trimmed, so it isn’t living under tension. Nothing you smile with is cut.
Once you’ve learned pixie ear you start looking at every lobe you see: tugged down and stuck to the side of the face, no round bottom. If the skin carries the weight of the lift it creeps and takes the lobe with it — a lobe is only skin and fat, no cartilage to argue back. If the weight sits on the deep layer there’s nothing pulling on the ear. A year on both my lobes are round, the shape they always were. I wear my hair up most days now, which I hadn’t done since my forties.
The cuts run in the crease in front of the ear, under the lobe and back into the hair. Through the hair the blade is sloped so it passes between the roots instead of cutting them off. The hairline isn’t moved backwards because the tension is taken deeper down. I’ve compared photographs. No bald strip behind the ear. My hairdresser of eleven years knew I’d been and still had to hunt for the scars.
Day ten, the square face
I was swollen and square-looking for three weeks. Around day ten I had one bad afternoon when I thought I’d ruined myself. Then it settled. What I’ve got now isn’t a tight face. It’s my own face at about forty-two. Rested. Nobody has ever used the word tight about me.
For a fortnight my smile felt like it was happening behind a cushion. Swelling makes your face heavy and one side wakes up before the other. Don’t judge anything before three months, he said. By two months it was mine again. By three there was nothing to talk about. What people say now is that I look rested, or ask if I’ve been away. Not one person has said, “You’ve had work done.”
Nobody warns you properly about the numbness. For the first few weeks the side of my face and the top of my neck didn’t feel like they belonged to me — cardboard taped to the side of my head. I could feel that I was pressing, but not really feel the press. That is expected. The small nerves need time. I’d been told to plan for one to two months, and that was about right. From the third month the tingling started: pins and needles, small stings, an itch you can’t reach. By six months I’d stopped noticing.
Two nights on the ward
The story that kept me away for a year was teatime in a hotel with a bandage and a paper bag of tablets, hours after theatre. For an operation on your face and neck that sounded reckless.
I came out of theatre and up to a room on the ward, and I stayed two full nights. Ice packs on a proper schedule. Blood pressure through the night — that’s the thing that matters most after this. Drains checked and written down. Tablets and the drip on the dot. The surgeon came himself both mornings before I was allowed to the hotel. I was in Istanbul nine nights altogether.
You’d be soft not to ask why it costs less. When I sat down properly with facelift Turkey I stopped lining figures up and wrote a list: which hospital by name, intensive care and A&E in the same building or a room above a shop, the surgeon’s registration, how many facelifts a year, who is giving the anaesthetic, who pays if something needs putting right in six months. Two places sent a brochure. One sent documents and let me put the awkward ones to the surgeon on a video call. I woke up in a large, serious hospital with a nurse at the end of my bed. I just didn’t pay Harley Street for it.
I’m not a nervous traveller exactly, but the furthest I’d been alone was Dublin. I don’t speak a word of Turkish. Someone was there when I came through arrivals. After that a clinic car for every journey: hotel, hospital, check-ups. That first week I looked a fright, and I never stood at the roadside working it out.
The operation frightened me less than the middle of the night: feeling sick, pressing a buzzer and not being able to explain. I was not going to put my name on a form I couldn’t read. The same woman who’d answered my first message stood with me while he marked my face up in front of the mirror. She went through the consent forms line by line, including the risk paragraphs, and when I stopped her on two of them she did it again without a sigh. Coming round, I heard my own name in a voice I recognised, telling me it had gone well.
Half of what I read said you fly out for one thing and come home owing more. I asked him myself whether I ought to be thinking about my eyes while I was there. He said no — one operation, one recovery, let it settle, talk in a year if you still want to. I flew home having had the operation I flew out for. The figure we’d agreed before I got on the plane was the figure.
The sting under my jaw in York
This nearly stopped me altogether. Me at home a fortnight later, one side looking angry, and a message sat on my phone with two grey ticks for ever.
It didn’t go like that. The same woman who’d answered my first message was still the person on WhatsApp months afterwards. Around week five I got a sharp sting under my jaw, enough to make me jump. I took photographs by the kitchen window and sent them at ten at night. She came back later that night, having shown the surgeon: a sting like that is the nerve endings coming back. A good sign, not a bad one.
She was also clear about what she wasn’t going to deal with over a phone. A temperature, redness spreading outwards, one side swelling quickly or going hard, pain getting worse — ring the GP or go to A&E here first, message her afterwards. Not instead of. Afterwards. I never had to. Knowing what I was watching for took half the fear out of being home.
The woman in Nottingham, day three
Before I paid anything I asked for a British woman who’d actually had this done with them. Not a quote next to a stock photograph. Someone I could ask embarrassing questions to.
They put me in touch with a woman in Nottingham who’d had hers fourteen months before mine. We were on the phone the best part of an hour. Days three and four are miserable and you lie there wondering what on earth you’ve done. You want button-up shirts, because you can’t be pulling jumpers over your head. Sleeping propped up on pillows is the worst of the first week. Then she said the sentence that made my mind up: “Nobody at work knew. They thought I’d been on holiday.”
That conversation is what got me to book. Not the photographs and not the price. A woman in Nottingham telling me the truth about day three.
It’s a year and a bit on now. I have a jawline again and my neck is my own. There are two pale lines in front of my ears that I can find if I go looking, and more hidden in my hair. I still look fifty-seven — a rested, well fifty-seven, roughly the woman I was at forty-two, and that’s all I ever wanted. Two nights in a hospital with nurses who checked on me, and people who answered when I was back in York. Worth more than the five years I wasted being too frightened to ask. For facelift Just Clinic Istanbul I wanted a person who still picked up. When I pass that shop window on Stonegate now, I recognise the woman keeping pace with me. She’s me.
