To celebrate the start of the football season, I’m volunteering to take one for the team — no, for all teams, major and minor — by coming clean about my doping. Throughout the fall and winter of 2009, I gave myself daily shots of somatropin, the manufactured form of human growth hormone, or H.G.H., which is believed to build muscle and rev up the recovery time from injuries. Hence the drug’s allure to professional athletes. In my case, I had a torn ankle tendon that required surgery, and at 48, I began to wonder whether my post-op rebound might benefit from the supposed boost of H.G.H. juice?
“It’s worth a try,” confirmed my doctor, an anti-aging specialist. “H.G.H. should also help you lose weight, and you’ll love the way it will make your skin look younger.”
Did I hear that right? Weight loss and younger skin? Could H.G.H. be my double dream come true?
As a compulsive pursuer of youth, an always unattainable and therefore delusional quest, I have chased all manner of facial-rejuvenating and appearance-enhancing agents, from a cornucopia of creams to chemical peels to wrinkle-erasing and skin-plumping injections to aesthetic laser treatments and even a surgical procedure or two. I go so far as to establish first-name relationships with plastic surgeons and dermatologists, their private cellphone numbers the only ones I keep on my auto-dial.
This is not unusual for sufferers of Dorian Gray Syndrome, a little-known psychological disorder first identified in 2000 by a cabal of staff shrinks at Germany’s Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen. The doctors appropriated Oscar Wilde’s novel to describe patients exhibiting an obsessive preoccupation with physical attractiveness and eternal youth, and a narcissistic fixation with “lifestyle drugs” (medications for hair restoration, weight loss and the like) as well as cosmetic procedures and products. The doctors were describing me.
But last winter, I found myself in the grip of more than just vanity. I was also battling hypothyroidism, an endocrine upheaval, throwing my metabolism into slo-mo and saddling me with symptoms like weight gain, exhaustion, irregularity, dry skin, lateral eyebrow loss (weird but true) and more. When it first struck, I inexplicably started to swell, bursting out of my clothes, my bloated thighs splitting the inner seams of my best Chloé trousers. By the spring, I had reached the stage where three strangers — a manicurist, a doorman and a hairdresser — all asked the just-chloroform-me-now question “When are you due?”
Read the rest of the story on the NY Times website...
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