Periodically I get cryptic texts from Skylar commanding me to come to the clinic, in which he is allegedly employed but hardly paid, for experiments.

Sometimes people will say things to me like "it must be so nice to have a dermatologist in your home!" And in theory, I do believe that is true. As in, I do believe some people have the blissful experience you are all envisioning.

For example, the constant access to exceptional free skincare products is certainly a reality with which many a spouse of a skin MD is keenly familiar. Once a year Skylar goes to a conference where a flexible woman with giant boobs and only a first name shoots tretinoin and botox at him out of a cannon for four straight days. I swear to Epidermis (the god of sunscreen) Skylar has, on more than one occasion, had to purchase an extra suitcase in order to get his newly-acquired bounty home.

You'd think I'd then spend the next year reaping the fruits of his passive labors. I've certainly earned the right (as I've told him using my Outside Voice so many times I sometimes accidentally answer the phone to friends with this speech). But this man then goes about giving away the entire supply to anyone he sees has a pulse, like a fairy spreading pixie dust.

In April he spent the better part of a Saturday morning forcing sunscreen samples onto marathon runners going past our house until he had completely depleted what started out a robust supply. When he came inside, he announced, "those people have no idea how incredibly expensive and nice that sunscreen is I just gave them."

"How lovely for them," I muttered as the 99 cent SPF negative 90 I had picked up in a gas station bathroom stall was actively turning my wedding ring green.

And so, when this man sends the cryptic text demanding I drive to his clinic so they can experiment on me, I just go. Because what if the experiment includes a drop of free moisturizer. Or hard drugs.

On one such occasion, not five days ago, no such thing awaited me. Instead, only this man and his colleagues in a small room with that one machine from Honey, I Shrunk the Kids aimed directly at a chair that, and I don't know whether I'm remembering this correctly, had actual straps.

I've seen Fire in the Sky. It ruined my childhood. I know what it looks like when extraterrestrials beam up the town crazy to stick lasers into their butt. Unfortunately, this was not that situation because the laser machine was pointed more at the head region of the medical chair.

I was provided a scientific explanation, of sorts, for what was about to happen at me without my consent. I couldn't repeat a word of it back to you. The gist I understood was that they were going to take a blowtorch connected by one very long copper wire to a nuclear power plant in Russia to completely remove my face and neck, which I've grown quite attached to in the 42 years I've owned it.

Why would they do such a thing?

"It will make you more beautiful, theoretically," Skylar informed me. "Well, not right away. You won't want to be seen by anyone at least until you're in your 50s."

Before I could even ask what that was supposed to mean, my neck was being melted off by a device so hot they measure it in Kelvin. So hot that when I looked it up later the listed temperature was just a math equation.

If you heard high-pitched screaming on Monday afternoon, that was me begging for death and divorce and in that specific order.

After 30 minutes of this torture, Skylar threw his tool down and announced "you are the worst patient I've ever had," which is quite the thing to say to someone onto which you just inflicted the sort of pain that would have caused me to give up state secrets I don't even know if only someone had asked.

A pamphlet then told me that over the next five days to five months, my face would slowly fall off my body. If everything goes according to plan, I'll grow a new one by retirement. And it probably won't have this almost imperceptible scar on the left side of my nose that I earned when I was fourteen and spent nearly a full afternoon squeezing a puberty amount of puss out of because I there was a middle school dance the next day and I wanted to look hot enough that Jonathan Taylor Thomas would ask me to do The Macarena with him if he happened to attend South Jordan Middle School's eighth grade prom.

The side-effect the pamphlet failed to flag for me was that for at least the next five days, my husband would pin me down every four hours to look at my every increasingly disturbing blemish and then coat me with products that have names so long and so Latin that if you say them out loud too many times you risk summoning the dead.

Also, did I tell you the part about how it's literally Summer Solstice and I'm not allowed to go out into the sun until America's 300th birthday? When I asked what would happen if I did go out into the sun, they gave me a copy of The Wizard of Oz and said "just fast forward to the penultimate Oz scene."

So here I sit, a man caked in Aquifer, as biological matter I personally grew periodically falls from my body, learning to beware of the cryptic texts. Learning that people pay for this sort of thing.

Learning that beauty is pain.

In theory.

~It Just Gets Stranger