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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2 comments:
1. Well, I have a traechaeotomy scar from when I had pneumonia at five. This one has the most dramatic story.
The doctor called from the hospital to say they had decided they needed to do this. My mother said, I am just finishing cooking dinner, we'll eat quickly and we'll be right down. The doctor said, "I mean NOW, Mrs. Z." By this time my father already had the car running (you had to push it to start it, it was very old and was started with a button, not a key, but the button wasn't working; fortunately we lived on an incline so you could push-start it pretty fast).
They did it with a local anaesthetic so I can remember it well. The doctors were very intent.
Once they had stabbed my throat with a mini-knife (I thought it was a second injection and did not realize until a few minutes later that this was the entire operation), I started to cough, which made the blood bubble.
I thought I was screwing up, you should be neat with blood, and tried not to cough, but the doctors said no, cough more, this is great, it means it is working. I thought this was a really odd attitude - why have all those bubbles when you can have just a neat little stream, coloring, as it were, within the outlines - but I said OK, fine, I'll cough some more if you like it.
Each child in my class drew me a picture. The nurses were mean but the candy stripers were pretty, with long hair, and they let me eat gingerbread while refusing gravy-covered meat. When I went home I had to eat yogurt, the doctor said, to repopulate the intestinal flora which the penicillin would have killed. We had never heard of yogurt before and were impressed to find it right in our regular supermarket. It was tangier in those days than it is now, and my parents especially found it to be a very strange substance.
That is my only really interesting scar.
2. I have a few acne scars on my back which I cannot see but which can be seen easily by massage people or anyone else who is concentrating. Nobody took this acne seriously although it was awful and for years I killed it with sea water and swimming pool water. It got worse in Louisiana where I did not have so much sea water or swimming pool water easily available, and I had given up even mentioning it to doctors. One saw it and said spontaneously, that looks like it hurts! I said of course it does and she said, well you could put Retin-A on it, here is a prescription. It was gone in a week and never returned and I thought: 16 years of this and it could be permanently killed in a week, what do you know!
3. I had a huge scar on my finger from cutting myself inadvertently with scissors in high school - it was enormous and I figured permanent. It was very useful since I cannot tell left from right and it helped identify my left hand. Then one day it was gone.
4. Finally, I have a scar on my upper lip which looks like a wrinkle but is really a relic from a battle with my cat, R.I.P., she was trying to steal a piece of catfish which was on my fork right next to my mouth. We fought over it and then I went to the ER at Baton Rouge General because I was bleeding so much I thought I might need stitches. I got butterfly bandages and did not speak to my cat for three days, I was so mad. That was the last time I ever ate dinner on the sofa with a cat in the room - they can creep up and attack even if they are trained not to interrupt dinner when it is on a table!
Ben split open his forehead and got stitches, no problem. He did great when the pediatrician removed his stitches, but holy crap! One of the sutures was embedded in his skin, and the doctor had to poke and dig around for seemingly an eon to get that one out. She, too, was amazed at how cool and collected my kid was. He was about 5 at the time. That high pain tolerance really comes in handy.
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