Chris Clarke
inventories his scars and Orange has some
fairly dramatic stories about hers, although she underplays the scary factor. They got me thinking about my own scar stories. Like a lot of people, I have a few chicken pox scars on my face. I remember that all the kids got chicken pox at the same time, while we were living in El Paso, Texas; we were all under five, and the moms just threw us all together in our pajamas to ride it out for a few weeks. One of the Heygood boys scratched one on my cheek and I still have the little round pock. My acne scars are a reminder of high school shame. The less said about that, the better.
I have a small scar on the top of my right foot that I got when I did a cartwheel in the living room and crashed into something metal near the fireplace. A scar on my left shin is a souvenir of my first attempt to shave my legs. I still shudder at the memory of the sensation. I made sure to tell my daughter that cautionary tale, and insisted that if she wanted to shave, she should let me show her how to do it safely. I won't get into the should you shave or not thing, because frankly, if I tell her not to, she will probably want to do it even more, and I want her to do it safely.
I have a few other nicks and cuts on my hands, but the biggest scar is from my appendectomy at age 7-8? back in the days when they just sliced you open. Each hole from the stitches has its own little round scar. I never minded that scar--it had its story. I went into my parents' room and said "My tummy hurts" and threw up (on the floor! not even in the toilet!). My dad the doctor did the little tapping thing and figured out it was appendicitis right away (he knew!) and they were wheeling me into surgery within a few hours. I got to count backwards from 100 when they gave me the anaesthesia but I only remember getting as far as 96 (scary but exciting!)
If you know where to look, it's there, but the burn mark that covers most of the inside of my right arm from the coffee pot scald I got earlier this year is almost invisible now.
Our most dramatic recent scar story is from Blas's head surgery last year. He says the scars still hurt when he is tired, but otherwise he is fine. We continue to be amazed and thankful that this is the only consequence of that frightening event.
Now the scars I inventory are my daughter's. The scar on her lip is from the gash she got when she fell and hit her face on the zipper of her parka and the floor at the age of 14 months. That was the first. It was New Year's Day, and nobody I knew was in town. The only hospital ER available was Children's Hospital, and every sick child in town was there with us for the five hours we waited. I remember looking up at the full moon as I carried her in--it was only 6 PM, but night falls early in the north in winter. I had no food the whole time we were there, and I was ravenous, but she was still nursing and was surprisingly calm. She needed six stitches, and they took special care because they wanted the edges of her lip to match up. Of course the sedative they gave her didn't work, and a large male nurse had to hold her head still while I held down her body and she screamed because she couldn't understand why we were hurting her. You can still see the faint white mark on her beautiful face, but I don't think she remembers.
There were two more emergency room trips for stitches for the cuts on the bottom of her chin. One was the typical childhood fall off the slide at school that meant I got an emergency call at work to go pick her up and take her to the hospital: the reason I carry a cell phone. Another happened while we were in Spain. They are much more brusque in their dealings with anxious parents there, and I was not allowed to be with her while they stitched her up, but they did a great job. What was the hardest about those two situations was not the stitching itself but the removal of the stitches. It didn't hurt, but she did not want to let us do it.
Do you have a scar story?
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