Essay on My life

Submitted By Szadron
Words: 435
Pages: 2

The speaker was a proud father. (1) To illustrate his comments about a piece of art that celebrated the wonders of modern medicine (and which he had just donated to a local hospital), he told a story about his adopted Asian daughter. He described her as a beautiful, happy child in whom he took much delight. Her life, he told the audience, had been improved dramatically by the miracle of modern medicine. When she joined her new Caucasian family, her eyes, like those of many people of Asian descent, lacked a fold in the upper eyelid, and that lack was problematic--in his view--because it made her eyes small and sleepy and caused them to shut completely when she smiled. A plastic surgeon himself, he knew she did not need to endure this hardship, so he arranged for her to have surgery to reshape her eyes. The procedure, he explained, was minimally invasive and maximally effective. His beautiful daughter now has big round eyes that stay open and shine even when she smiles.

The case may or may not be unusual in the United States. While surgery to widen the eyes of children, even newborns, is reportedly common in Taiwan, Japan, and Korea, no statistics are available on its use in children in the United States. The Web site of the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery reports that "Asian eye surgery," or blepharoplasty, is the most common procedure elected by Asian Americans, and the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery reports that more than 230,000 such procedures were performed in 2005, but since no report breaks that number down by the patient's age and ethnicity or even mentions surgeries