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.
Editor’s Note: This piece was awarded an honorable mention in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
I have always been different. As a nurse I was a late bloomer, though I’d always felt passionately drawn to the profession.
I was born to nurse. This was evident even when I was a young child; I bathed my grandmother’s amputated leg while the other kids played in the yard. Although I had planned to go to nursing school after graduation, I took a seventeen-year detour and ultimately entered as a nontraditional student.
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.
The Walking Wounded Read More »
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.
April More Voices: Scars Read More »
“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’s 3:00 am. Deep in the bowels of the hospital, bright fluorescent lights softly buzz overhead in the windowless snack bar, where a row of vending machines give off a low hum.
Don, my sixteen-year-old patient, and I sit huddled in orange plastic chairs at a tiny Formica table. He is ranting, and I am listening. Neither of us can sleep. Don is awake because he is mad at the world, and I’m awake because I’m the pediatric resident on call.
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.
When the Doctor Lacks Compassion Read More »
My father exhibited some goofy language errors during a phone conversation, substituting sound-alike words two to three times over a ten-minute period. I called my brother, and we made a seventy-minute drive to take him to the emergency room. The resident physician suspected a stroke, and Dad went for an MRI. Stroke seemed like a pipedream as his symptoms were not clear. The MRI came back, and the resident back-pedaled as the new findings looked more like tumor than stroke. I confirmed what part of the brain was involved, his risk for seizure, and the follow-up treatment plan.
In the springtime, a zombie showed up,
breaking down our door and biting me.
Friends and neighbors asked questions,
not daring to come near,
leaving flowers, candles, baked goods
on our crooked stoop.
Editor’s Note: This piece was awarded an honorable mention in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
In the summer between second and third grade, when I was eight, I first realized that it was safer for me to hide my surgical scars.
I had two huge scars starting at my hip joints and running halfway down my outer thighs. They were “Dr. Frankenstein” scars, with obvious cross-hatches that couldn’t be missed when I wore shorts or bathing suits.
That summer, my scars brought odd looks and comments from both children and adults.
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