Scars

I have many scars on this fifty-five-year-old body. Some are good scars, like the escape hatch at the bottom of my droopy belly. My two children are helpers in that scar. If I did not have my c-section I would not have them. Some scars are just typical war wounds of life. There is a small half-moon scar on the inside of my right calf. I had a broken ankle in the fourth grade. The cast, a walking cast, itched profusely. While correcting math papers I stuck my marker down to scratch an itch. When I pulled the marker up, the top was gone. It was stuck down in my cast. I tried in vein to get it out with various household objects like a coat hanger and a fork, but to no avail. After walking around with it in my cast it eventually punctured a hole in my leg. I told no one out of fear of getting in trouble. It just prolonged the inevitable. I ended up on high octane antibiotics and I missed the swim party at the YMCA.

There is one scar that can haunt me even after the fourteen years of having it. It is this this scar that is still teaching me a lesson to this day. I had half of my thyroid taken out because my doctor thought I had cancer. The goiter we had been watching for years had changed and after a biopsy it became critical that it was removed.

I watched my grandmother, who I loved more than anything, die from cancer when I was nineteen; it left a mark on me. For the longest time I had been afraid of death. I was so terrified that I might die.

When I woke up in the recovery room after my surgery there were no happy nurses pushing see-through bassinets with thick bundles of blue or pink around. The maternity ward for the most part is happiness and joy. The recovery room for general surgery is a sad and scary place. There was a strange man next to my bed who was moaning and coughing. I felt very vulnerable and exposed. When they took me to my room, I had to share it with a different man for the first few hours. We shared a bathroom. After he was discharged the room was all mine. Instead of a female nurse wearing Snoopy scrubs to help me to the bathroom I had a male nurse covered head to toe in tattoos and wearing basic green scrubs. I wanted out of there and was willing to do just about anything to make it happen.

I had been home for a week when my surgeon had called to give me the news that I did not have cancer. It was then I had an epiphany. I had been spending too much time afraid I would die and not enough time living.

A woman in our church had the same procedure years before I had mine. She came up to me after my first service back from surgery.

“You should do what I do to hide that scar. I wear colorful scarfs.” She tugged at her bright pink paisley silk wrap.

“No thank you.” I said. “This scar needs to be looked at every day. It reminds me that I am alive.”