You’re So Vein

There I was at the gym, grunting my way through a set of curls—the temple requires basic upkeep, you know—when something I saw in the mirror distracted me. No, it wasn’t a guy excavating a mean spandex wedge while adjusting the spaghetti straps on his ’beater, although the beaterus spandexicus species is indigenous to my gym’s meatosystem. There, in my left leg, was a bulging vein that was so big I wondered if I might have to get it its own membership. Being an amateur hypochondriac, I concluded that I was on the verge of having an embolism, and so immediately made an appointment with my doctor to find out what an embolism is, and whether it involves big disgusting leg veins.

When I showed my doc the grotesque vessel, he nonchalantly told me that all I had was a run-of-the-mill varicose vein. He didn’t seem too worried about it, which made one of us. You see, I’ve always associated varicose veins with old ladies. A varicose vein isn’t exactly the hot accessory for a happy-go-lucky young buck like myself. I envisioned myself wearing shorts in the summer, my varicose vein throbbing away in all its blue glory. What if I were playing Golden Tee at a bar or throwing a Frisbee in the park and people kept saying things like, “I hope I’m still that active at his age.”

“How can I get rid of this thing?” I asked my doctor. “The varicose vein bus showed up at this stop about 30 years too early.”

“Well, it’s harmless, but if it’s bothering you, the procedure to get rid of it is quite simple: We make an incision and rip out the entire vein.”

Whoa, doc. Back up. Maybe you haven’t been reading your New England Journal of Medicine, but these days many surgeries can be performed noninvasively using tiny cameras inside your body. The entire human genome has been mapped. Your vision can be fixed with frickin’ lasers. And the treatment for varicose veins is to rip them out? I’d imagined a tiny robot going in my vein, painlessly deflating it with a laser, then dissolving into my bloodstream when it was done. This de-veining procedure sounded like it was straight out of the age of medicine where the treatment for a migraine was to saw off the top of your head and pour arsenic on your brain.

Also, I’m no doctor, but don’t you need veins? I’m pale enough as it is. All I want is people saying, “Gee, Ez, your left leg is looking mighty pallid these days,” and me having to reply, “That’s because I had all my veins removed.”

So I decided I was stuck with it, just me and My Cousin Veiny, BFF. But then I got an e-mail from my friend Braxton mentioning that he was laid up because he just had a bunch of veins removed from one of his legs. Now the case was open again. If Braxton “Hard as a Baby’s Fingernails” Williams could do it, so could I, maybe. I asked him to tell me exactly how bad this ordeal was and what it entailed. “Basically I took a week off from work,” he said. “You get all drugged up and limp around a lot. I’d say the only drawback, aside from the fact that surgery is generally something to avoid, is that you feel like a little bitch when you tell hot chicks you have varicose veins. If I had a dime for every time a person I wanted to sleep with told me she thought only old ladies got varicose veins, I’d be one rich pimp.”

Hmmm. Well, my secret’s already out, so that’s not a problem. And you get drugs, which is nice. But what about the social implications? “Tomorrow I’m going to re-enter the social scene like Ron Jeremy,” Braxton wrote. “Straight up, I’m gonna be lacin’ undergrads with wads of dubs and hittin’ that tang when they see the mill in my grill. But seriously (as if I wasn’t dead serious about that last comment), I plan on playing up my limp big-time. Sympathy makeout? Yes, please.”

That made me feel better. If everyone with varicose veins had Braxton’s attitude, there’d be a Jessica Simpson song about them playing on TRL right now (or perhaps more accurately, a Ludacris song on 106 & Park). See, youth is more mental than physical. I shouldn’t let a superficial sign of age influence how I act—thus, I’m going to keep my varicose vein and refuse to let it bother me. Besides, Doris and Ethel in my bridge club think it’s hot. ∂