WTF? (What The Frax...) - My Fraxel experience

Fraxel. It's not a new concept. It's actually been around for about a decade. So why had I never heard of it until about 3 months ago? (If you have ethnic skin, read the last paragraph first).

I've always tried to take care of my skin ever since I saw pictures of a supermodel whose hands and skin around her neck and decolletage were crepey and had a lot of sun damage. She was still unbelievably gorgeous, don't get me wrong. But it made me question the poor choices I had made in my earlier years, sans sunblock, under the hot hot rays of decades of summers on the beaches of Australia's beautiful west coast. I'm now in my mid 40s but the damage had been done. 

There was a dark sun spot about 1cm in diameter on the top of my cheekbone, some freckles (which once upon a time may have been described as "a cute smattering of freckles along the tops of my cheeks and nose") which were now definitely not cute and not restricted to those areas of my face. They had now seemed to spread and looked more like I had eaten toast without using my hands leaving crumbs scattered all over my face (and that's coming from my very kind mum).

Regular facial treatments with glycolic peels and salicylic acid applied directly on The Dark Spot helped with fading these sun-errors. But it's like renovating a house one room at a time - after you've done one room and seen how gorgeous and fresh it is, it's hard to look at the rest of the house with anything but "a humph". 

Over a couple of months The Dark Spot changed and the edges of it became raised so I booked myself in to see my GP to check it out. She looked at it and thought it was something called "solar keratosis" which can be pre-cancerous so she treated it with a gentle hit of liquid nitrogen. It took a lot of it away but the "humph factor" lingered. While The Dark Spot was getting a lot of love, the rest of my face wasn't. 

Enter Fraxel. My beauty therapist had had it done and the skin on her face is glowy, dewy, plump, stunning.. and she's in her mid 40s but with skin like a 20 year old. Sure she also looks after her skin with a fantastic regime of Class A products. But the Fraxel just takes it another level. 

Excited by the promise of Fraxel, I booked myself in for a consultation with a clinic which only employs doctors to use the machines. Normally I am the sort of person who researches things to the nth degree, particularly if it concerns the use of LASERS... on my face...near my eyes! But delirious with the idea of Fraxel I didn't really do much research and relied on the testimony of my beauty therapist's skin and a 20 minute consultation with the doctor who was going to do the procedure.

I submitted my request for annual leave for the Friday that I was going to have it done; apparently there is a term for this called "Fraxel Fridays" because you have the weekend to hide and heal. 

So what is Fraxel? On the website of the clinic I went to it says "the Fraxel Repair laser removes tiny portions of the epidermis and or dermis, which results in the regeneration of fresh new healthy-looking skin."

This description makes Fraxel sound very tolerable. At the consultation, the doctor (who also had wonderful skin) explained that some numbing gel would be applied to my face (that should have been red flag #1) and that there would be some downtime anywhere from a week to a month (that should have been red flag #2). When I say red flag, I just mean that I probably should have looked into it a bit more. However, vanity steamrolled over the logical part of my brain and I was booked in for my procedure two days later. 

I turned up for my appointment, washed my face and had the numbing gel applied. It takes about an hour for the face to go numb. It's like being at the dentist after you've had a filling and you can't close your lips properly when they ask you to rinse. 

Then I lay on the bed and my doctor gave me some happy gas. If it's being offered by a qualified professional, who am I to say no to it? The entire process goes through "4 passes" meaning that the laser goes over your skin 4 times. At this stage, all I can say is that I will never ever think of roast chicken skin in the same way again. 

Then my doctor brought me to another room for some targeted treatment on The Dark Spot and some of the more defined spots beneath my eyes and around my face. None of it really hurt that much but yes, there were a couple of spots where I flinched. Remember when you were a kid and you were dared to put your tongue on a 9V battery? 

It was all done in about 40 minutes and I could drive home. I wasn't feeling too bad, bearing in mind that the numbing cream was still active. We actually had guests over for dinner that night and it was only about 3 hours later that the redness started to appear, like a mild windburn. 

By the next morning I was red and the redness amped up over the next 24 hours till it was like the sort of sunburn you get from watching a Test cricket session in the outer for a whole day without a hat on. The sort of sunburn where you think, "holy shit, why didn't I bring a hat?" type of sunburn. It's uncomfortable, it's hot and my skin was throbbing. Panadol, ibuprofen and wrapped ice packs helped. 

[Spoiler alert: The next few paragraphs do not try to hide anything. And I wish that I had read this in someone else's blog/story/post before I had my fraxel done.] I will not lie. The next 3 days were uncomfortable while the skin started healing. At times the pain was so distracting that I could not really think very clearly. Proof of this is that when I looked at some spreadsheets I was working on for work, I had to redo them all the next day. Gah! 

Sleeping was uncomfortable. There was such a thick layer of paw paw cream on my face that I didn't want to sleep on my side for fear of my skin sticking to the pillow case and ripping off the crusty skin that was forming over the tender pink skin below.  The second night I could not sleep at all as the itchiness from the healing felt like tiny bugs were crawling all over my face. Gross? Yup.

My skin kept darkening. I could have won an Academy Award for Best Makeup for a Horror Film. I had my Fraxel done on a Friday but on Sunday I sheepishly texted my boss:

"I am too embarrassed to ask but could I please WFH for the rest of the week. I look like the lovechild of 😡"

By Day 3 I was seriously dubious about my decision-making process, or lack of! I texted the doctor some photos and some concerns that I had and she was great and told me that I could come in to the clinic to have some healing light treatment or I could also use a mixture of 1 tablespoon vinegar in a glass of water and use a make up pad to dab (not wipe!) my skin. I didn't want to leave the house (it's not quite Halloween yet) so I used the vinegar solution. Soothing bliss. 

Day 4 my crusty skin started shedding so now my skin looked like a snake skin. It doesn't shed in sheets. It sheds in bits and scales. When I applied paw paw cream it did a lot of the sloughing off of the old skin. I had to be so gentle because the skin was still so tender but the paw paw ointment is miraculous in how it removes the dead skin and moisturises and heals and soothes and cleanses. #miracleinatubefor$3 

There is a reason that you never see pictures of people who have had fraxel done other than the Before and After pictures. I have pictures of my face every day through this process. God love my husband and son who were very kind with their lack of comments. 

In this time of COVID and online meetings, I had to excuse myself for not being on camera because I'd had a procedure done to my face and I was hideous. There was no need to put people off their lunch. I was just being considerate.

Day 5 and I am still applying a thick layer of paw paw cream all over my face but most of the old skin is gone and I was brave enough to venture outside for the first time. With SPF 50 and a BIG Cancer Council hat on my head off I went to the chemist to buy more paw paw cream, antihistamine to deal with the itchy skin and QV moisturiser. Plus we had run out of coffee and that's just as crucial. There is still a lot of redness around my mouth and beneath my eyes and on my cheeks where the extra laser treatment was done. It looks like a VERY bad case eczema.  

When my skin is done healing I'll post the Before and After pictures. And I'll decide then whether it was worth it all. 

Now, here is a note for ethnic skin and THIS is what I really wish I knew before I did the Fraxel. Apparently it is different treating ethnic skin. I have asian skin. Ethnic skin reacts differently to Fraxel because the skin darkens a lot more post-treatment due to the extra pigmentation in our skin. If you didn't know I'd just had Fraxel, you'd think I'd had third degree burns. So make sure you find someone who knows how to treat ethnic skin. I probably would have chosen a less aggressive Fraxel treatment (yep, there are different levels of Fraxel you can have done.)

The Kit

Before you head off for Fraxel, make sure you have this kit ready and anything else the practitioner may give you. 

• A big hat that is going to provide enough shade that will cover your WHOLE face
• SPF 30 with zinc oxide at a minimum
• Paw paw ointment
• Vinegar 
• Cotton pads
• A few pillow cases that you won't mind getting stained from the paw paw cream and so that you can wash every day to keep any chance of infection away
• Panadol, ibuprofen, antihistamine
• Ice pack - wrap a cloth around it before applying to your face
• At least 5 days where you don't need to head out your home

Low sugar banana bread

I'm ALWAYS on the hunt for a quick, easy, healthy banana bread recipe. I want a bread, not a cake, which means that it's something that's less sweet, toast-able, able to be smothered in butter, or spread over with a bit of ricotta and a drizzle of honey or maple syrup.

I also need something that's TASTY and that's where my test panel  comes in - a hungry, 9 year old, starving after school.

So here's the recipe. The other great thing about this is that it's so easy, no prior baking skills required. 

Banana bread (low sugar) 

This recipe has 14 carb exchanges. 

Ingredients

1 cup mashed banana (approx 2 large or 3 med bananas)

1/4 cup sugar

2 eggs lightly beaten

50 ml light olive oil

1/4 cup (60ml) milk

200g self raising flour (or 100g wholemeal, 100g SRF)

1 tsp baking powder (optional)

2 tsp cinnamon

Method

1 Preheat oven to 180*C. Grease loaf pan and line with baking paper.

2 Combine banana and sugar in a bowl. Stir in egg, oil and milk. Add remaining ingredients. Stir until just combined. Do not overwork or it becomes a bit gluggy.

3 Pour into the lined tin. Spread so it's even. [Tip: Give the loaf pan a few sharp taps on the benchtop so the mixture settles evenly.] 

4 Bake uncovered about 1hr (keep your nose out to smell when it's done. I often find mine is done in about 50 mins in my oven)

5  Stand bread 5 mins then turn onto wire rack. Turn bread top-side to cool.

And now the curveball - a diagnosis from out of nowhere

My last post was about fastballs. This post is about the curveball. At this rate, I'm going to become an expert at baseball... or certainly baseball analogies! This may be helpful with our pending move to the US.


Callum was admitted to hospital over the weekend. He had been 'off' for a few days and I just knew that something wasn't right by the third day when he was the colour of ash and was curled into a ball on the bathroom floor, intermittently clinging to the toilet bowl. As life would have it, Marcus had had his work send off the night before so he was a little worse for wear and I wasn't certain if the hospital would end up admitting both son and father. So I left the father at home to fend for himself.

It turns out that Callum has type 1 diabetes. In this past week our lives have been overturned as we recover from the shock of this diagnosis. There is no history on either side, there were no symptoms other than that he'd been drinking lots of water and peeing a lot, and in hindsight, he'd lost a lot of weight. But it had been Christmas and he'd been mucking around non-stop with his cousins and friends. Callum will be dependent on insulin for the rest of his life, until someone can find a cure for it. 

I am a basket case. It breaks my heart that my little boy has to face this. No 9 year old should be dealing with their mortality. 

Callum is the champion. He is extraordinary. 

He is a super, resilient kid. 

The great thing is that he can still eat whatever he wants but he has to time when he eats it and how much of it he eats. He can still go to birthday parties and eat sausage rolls and cake. He can still keep doing all the sport that he wants. He can still become a Supreme Court Judge or play soccer for Liverpool. It's all a matter of management and for him to learn how to manage it himself. Already he is doing his own blood glucose tests. 

School hasn't started yet and Marcus is still around for a few weeks as he continues to wait for his visa to get the US. Little blessings that I'm happy to take at the moment. 

I'm not going to spruik. But here is the link to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation jdrf.org.

HUGE SHOUTS OUTS TO:

• Box Hill Hospital Paediatric ED team particularly Dr Archie and Nurse Bon who managed to unravel my garble and pick up on the T1D.
  
• the ICU and DACS teams at Monash Children's Hospital - Meagan, Renata, Tracy and Jacky and all the other extremely calm nurses who helped me hold my shit together in the first 72 hours

Fastballs, What-ifs and Laura Ingalls Wilder

I haven't written a post for a while, but not because life has been dull. The reality is that life threw us a fastball. It wasn't unexpected - we'd been training for days, years, for this moment. I've been trying to catch my breath ever since. 

On a spontaneous, long weekend in Hong Kong a couple of years ago, Marcus and I relived the days of B.C. (before Callum). Trawling through the windy, hilly streets of Lan Kwai Fong with one of our best friends (who is an expat but knows Honkers like he knows smoking is bad for you) we realised in a cocktail whirlwind that an overseas stint was what our next move in life was going to be. I even started looking at job opportunities and international schools in HK. 

Marcus and I are not known as fence-sitters. We jump in with both feet. We'd had the What-if discussion. What-if you were offered a job in Hong Kong. What-if we took off and had a sabbatical for 6 months. What-if we had taken that chance when we were given it. And so, when the fastball was thrown - a call from head office to work in the mighty land of the Stars and Stripes - striking out/hitting a foul ball/bunting were not options. The only option was to hit it out of the park. 

We're moving to Wisconsin. Land of cheese, beers and Harley Davidson, Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley. Home to the Packers, the Bucks and the Brewers. Milwaukee will be home for the next couple of years. And it certainly will be different. But isn't that what you want out of an expat experience? We've found a cute ranch house to rent with an attached garage. (I see this as an Essential. You're not going to find me shovelling snow off my driveway to get the car out.) Callum will get the yellow school bus. We will deal with the snow and the cold, rationing Vegemite and Tim Tams...and Trump. Maybe I'll even get a snow plow licence. 

Sure it'd be nice to say that we're moving to NYC or Chicago or San Fran. But there is plenty to do in WI and some beautiful camping spots we are ready to try out. A quick sledding session in local Wirth Park with other families. Breakfast at the Original Pancake House on a Sunday. We aren't moving to some random settlement in the midwest wilderness. This is where Laura Ingalls Wilder was born. Tell me honestly who didn't love a bit of 'Little House on the Prairie'? 

I'm packing and organising and making lists of lists of lists. Each passing day gets struck off the calendar. More drop offs are made to the Salvation Army. Appliances are being redistributed to refugee families. Goodbyes have been said.  

To quote Laura Ingalls Wilder - Home is the nicest word there is. We will come home one day, but for now, our next adventure is about to begin.

Choose your adventure in Kitulgala

Kitulgala

Kitulgala is a tiny town in the hills of Sri Lanka, about an hour east of Colombo (on a good day). Here begins your adventure! They say that when the monsoons arrive, the river is so full that only the very brave (read: insane) and the very skilled kayakers head out. We are neither insane nor very skilled, but we like to think that we possess a sense of adventure. Even our 8 year old was up for it. 

When we were planning our trip to Sri Lanka, there were obvious itinerary points - Colombo, the cultural triangle, a wildlife park, the beaches, the vast tea estates. But in honesty, these places were nudged aside to make room for a few days in Kitulgala. 

Your adventure starts in getting to Kitulgala alone. It is no mean feat. It is a long, windy, skinny road which hugs the mountain side, where you face head-on challenges from buses that have complete disdain and disregard for anything smaller than it. Call me chicken, but my sense of daring does not extend to taking on a hurtling bus on a mountain road.  

After a fair bit of research (if participating in a potentially extreme sport, I wanted to make sure that we weren't doing it with a bunch of inexperienced cowboys), I found Borderlands. Borderlands is a schmick setup by a Canadian guy who has hired and trained local people to run whitewater activities, canyoning, hikes and the campsite. When I say campsite, it's more like glamping. 

Open fronted riverfront cabins

View from cabin

So, off we went, with a group of 5 Swedish post-university students, who we have stayed in touch with - that's the sort of place Borderlands is - the people you meet here are all like-minded intrepid travellers looking for some fun adventure. Everyone is happy, everyone gets along. For a few days, we could be the only people on the planet. 

While Marcus went with the rest of the group to do the upper section of the river, we were dropped off at the start of the lower section because Callum was too young to do the upper rapids. The fact that they had strict guidelines for our safety was very reassuring.

Upper section video

But he wasn't too young to do a bit of canyoning. If you had told me that I would be jumping off a 12 foot rock face into water that is glossy black because it's so deep I would have told you you were nuts. "Look out into that beautiful scenery ahead of you. Now 1...2...3....", the guide's calm voice lulled me into a confidence that I would never have thought I possessed. I fall through the air and pindrop into the water and I'm 1000% sure that I squawked. As everyone is laughing, they're also applauding. It is a great feeling! 

Canyoning video

We slide and jump, slide and jump and eventually make it back to the bottom where we are offered hot cups of tea with cubes of jaggery. It is heaven. Back into the rafts we go for the last part of the river down to camp. 

Rarely are there moments in life where wonder, accomplishment and camaraderie meet but when they do, they're unforgettable. 

(Apologies to water and canyoning enthusiasts who may be reading this, if I have used the incorrect terminology!)

discoverborderlands.com 

The impermanence of life

I have had an uncomfortably hectic few weeks. Work has been full on. I work with children and despite having routines for them and strategies to help them through their day, it all changes as quick as a matchstick flares - yesterday they wanted to crawl into my lap, today they want me banished to an entirely different universe. 

Hubby's been travelling again and when that happens all our household members tend to go a bit feral and my patience plummets as I try to manage. Hubby has travelled a lot this year and our family unit is constantly changing; reconnecting after absences; readjusting to each other again.

Winter has set in and out have come the thermal underwear, my snow shoes, gloves, scarves. I live in Melbourne. I love the cold, but I don't like being cold. Winter landed suddenly. One day the autumn leaves were tumbling down, the next day the trees were bare, branches stark against clear skies, frost underfoot on early morning dog walks. 

I've had too much news from friends of diagnoses of cancer. It's especially bad when kids are diagnosed. I take my health for granted. And I shouldn't.  

I went to my regular yoga class on the weekend. Yoga gives me a few hours a week to decompress, to breathe, to be the instructee rather than instructor. I love it. One of my teachers told us that we were going to be doing a class around mandalas, cycles and circular systems in our lives. She told us about some mandalas that are drawn with coloured sand in the temples in Tibet or India. They may take a week or sometimes a few months to create intricate patterns. Then when the mandala is finished, they open the temple doors and let the sand blow the mandala away. It's a reminder that life is impermanent; things in life are impermanent. We're all part of a bigger universe where life is never-ending.

It was an important lesson to hear. The more I try to hold onto something, the more I feel its loss. Let it be. Everything has its place in the universe. Breathe. 



For fantastic yoga and meditation classes in Melbourne try kozenyoga.com.au 

Tuk tuk riding 101

We arrived in Sri Lanka after a 15 hour journey at midnight (5.30am back home). The transit through immigration and customs was fluid and we had to laugh at the duty free stalls - one side was your customary perfumes, cigarettes, alcohol; the other side was all about white goods... because you just never know when you might need a 400-litre fridge when you're travelling around. 

I was super pleased with myself for arranging our hotel driver to meet us at the airport because it didn't look that there were any taxis available at that hour, and he knew exactly where our hotel was. In a city as big as Colombo there are literally hundreds of accommodation options. The USD30 we paid seemed like a small price to pay for the peace of mind, particularly a mind that was surviving on a few hours of sleep and the imminent jet lag.

In we piled into a Prius hatchback, 2 bags, a backpack, surfboard, 3 tired bodies. But that tiredness soon evaporated as we hit the empty streets and flew down the freeway towards Colombo. A few kilometres out of Colombo we hit a traffic jam - at 1.45am. What the??? People lined the streets, along with decorated elephants, parade floats and other vehicles. Our driver explained that it was a Buddhist festival. 

We reached the hotel and fell asleep promptly.

The next day we decided we would head into the Old Town and visit the Pettah Markets. Tuk tuks are ubiquitous and rule the roads, or in Colombo anyway. Our first venture in a tuk tuk was jointly terrifying and exhilarating. As we careened through the traffic in a little 2 stroke vehicle, I could not help thinking that it was like real life Mario Bros. At each red traffic light, they weaved and jostled for pole position before taking off in a chorus of straining gears. While I squealed in the back seat, the tuk tuk drivers traversed the roads fearlessly, judging gaps in traffic to the exact, death-defying millimetre. 

Most are metered. Those that aren't mean that you just need to check the price with the driver. And make sure you bring lots of small notes with you as the drivers don't have a lot of change. We did have a lovely driver who didn't even charge us to go around the block back to our hotel in the hottest midday heat. We insisted on paying him and gave him lots of isthuti (thanks). Such is the generosity of the Sri Lankan people. 

Tuk tuks are super cheap and a very efficient way to travel. Some of them even have roof racks and big boot spaces. We grabbed one of these to travel from Mirissa to Galle. A particularly wise decision when we easily weaved our way through traffic when we hit the traffic on the outskirts of Galle. One of the funnest ways to travel and very memorable.