Right before Thanksgiving, my power chair took an unexpected turn off a ledge in our driveway. I went flying into the sound of concrete thudding against my right side. Broken cheekbone. Area above eye split open. Mild brain blood bleed. Cuts and scratches all over my body. At the moment of impact lights flickered, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to survive.
Something I learned as a camp counselor is that striking up a conversation with a kid is like striking a match. With my camper Lily, I roamed around in the dark at first, grasping at Disney princesses, sports, books, best friends, and favorite animals. Then she said she was the fastest, faster than her older brother, and the sparks didn’t take long to fly. Soon we were flashing through the dining hall to the music room and then to archery and arts and crafts. I think if she had a motto, it would be “Why walk when you can run?” I lost every race, and, admittedly, not all of them on purpose.
I don’t know how to describe the first woman that I ever cut into. Any description that first comes to mind is purely factual, failing to capture the strange combination of sensations that passed over me. The sight of her raw, emaciated body and bony limbs. Her otherworldly smell. The vague feeling of disconnectedness that overtook me.
It is autumn in Melbourne. The nights are cool, but the late afternoon holds the glowing sun in the cup of its hand before it sinks behind the rippled sea. This is my favorite time of day—the hour or so before the sun sets, when I walk home under a golden canopy of giant plane trees and watch the sky prepare for night.
When I think of scars, my mind drifts back to my rotation in the Burn Unit as an intern in Mumbai, India. We were conducting trials on the use of a plant-based calendula gel on burn dressings. As an intern, I would attend to each patient throughout my entire twelve-hour shift. My patients were young women, some even younger than myself at the time, usually between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, all victims of burns.
Growing up in a small town as a high achieving oldest daughter, my understanding of scars was purely physical. Skinned knees, a few stitches, and a small crescent moon on my right forearm were my sole casualties.
When Mike had been sedated for a few days, I talked with his wife Sue, who shared that Mike would not have wanted to linger like this. Before being sedated, he told her that he hoped to pass within a day or two. It was troubling to Sue that he was lingering like this.
My chest tightens, then relaxes, as the tears roll down her face. She gradually bares her soul, revealing the events that led her to my exam room. She may have been born to a mother whose own experience with trauma stunted her ability to be a supportive parent. She may have suffered abuse at the hands of people who were supposed to be trustworthy. Or she may have experienced the loss early on of the primary person in her life who understood her.
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.
