Ironically, I was one of the EMTs on call that night at college. It had been a frustrating day, and now I had work due but couldn’t focus on it. My on-again, off-again boyfriend had decided that he would rather date Sylvia, who was thinner and prettier than me. Sad and angry, I decided to go get a snack from the vending machine downstairs.
I remember the first time I saw the long, scraggly line on top of my forearm. “It looks great,” I lied. The dermatology resident sat across from me, having just uncovered the wound left by his first surgery. As we both stared at it, I was remembering the roomful of people who’d surrounded my gurney, scrutinizing every move he made as he excised my skin cancer. I had felt sorry for him at the time. It was too big an audience for his first excision. So I was determined to be kind now.
Now, whenever I trace my finger over my forehead scar, I time travel three thousand miles away—not to Dr. G’s small-town office or even to that dirt road where I split a part of my forehead open.
I hadn’t seen you since I told you of your breast cancer. Because you didn’t want to live with the threat of a recurrence, you decided to go for the big surgery, a double mastectomy. We talked a bit about that experience, how you coped during the surgery and recovery, how supportive your husband was, how you felt ready to move on.
March 29, 1955, two months before my twentieth birthday, began with sunshine and cloudless skies, and we opened the window of our sorority-house room to let in the gentle spring breeze. Walking to the University of Texas campus that morning was a joy. As I breathed in the scents of spring, I had no inkling that before the day was over, my life would change.
You can’t see it, the way it’s tucked under a fold of skin, but I can’t forget that it’s there. I see it whenever I look in the mirror at my shoulder-length hair and remember—despite my best efforts not to—the months when large bald spots dotted the crown of my head.
My physical scars are minimal, and I know the history of each and every one.
Moving across the ice in jerky strokes, I find myself face down on the rink, the bone of my chin bursting through the skin from inside out. Mrs. Morrissey, the birthday girl’s mother, cups her hands under my chin. Blood fills this makeshift vessel and overflows onto the smooth, white ice. I have to leave before it’s time for cake because my first stitches take precedence.
As a fan of mysteries, I often read about or watch television shows in which the deceased, found in the woods or water, can only be identified through dental records since no scars mark their bodies. I jokingly remind my children that should I go missing, my body will be easy to identify.
Dear readers,
My physical scars are hardly worth mentioning. I have a scar on my back where a surgeon removed a lipoma–a fatty lump the size of a golf ball–twenty years ago. On my abdomen, I have a few smaller, more recent scars from laparoscopic prostate surgery.
I’m lucky. The scars don’t bother me. Hardly anyone notices them. And if I’m wearing a bathing suit, the appearance of a scar on a man suggests something heroic–a wound inflicted in battle–rather than a sign of vulnerability or an imperfection that detracts from physical beauty.
Others aren’t so fortunate.
“Hello?” I answered the yellow phone with its coiled cord dangling from the kitchen wall. To my surprise, my doctor was calling ME, a seventh grader, with results of my blood tests. (Mono.) I still recall my shock that a doctor – practically a celebrity! – would call my home. Shouldn’t his staff be calling?
It was a lump in my groin, discovered in the shower, that brought me to the doctor’s office. “Likely a hernia,” he said. “Let’s schedule surgery.” He seemed calm and unworried, and I expected the best.
When the phone rang several days post-surgery, he said, “I’m sorry to tell you it’s cancer: non-Hodgkins lymphoma.” I dropped the phone on the floor and started to scream—not scream but howl. I was 37 and had two young girls. His words pierced me as if I were on a firing line. Am I going to die? stampeded through my brain.
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