Here we have my face. More specifically, the barely noticable (in the picture) pock mark a little bit above my eyebrow, exactly parallel to the dark part of my eyeball. This is from when I was four and had the chicken pox. We flew to Missouri (why? because we're crazy!), and my mother put a giant floppy hat on me so the stewardesses wouldn't notice and eject the plague-ridden four year old from the plane. I don't remember having the pox, but I do remember the flight. It didn't occur to my four year old mind that the plane landed in a different place than it took off from. I thought we simply went on an hours-long joyride through the sky for fun, and came back to the same airport.
This scar comes from not too long after the pox, maybe around five or six years old. We lived on a cul-de-sac, close to the opening, and down towards the other end was a single man with an immaculate lawn. He owned a spazzy little dog, a basenji named Bordeaux. Bordeaux was always chained up in the front yard, and when I would ride by on my big wheel, his owner would step on the chain to keep him from chasing after me down the sidewalk. One day, as I rode by, I decided that I could get by without waiting for my neighbor to step on the chain. I was wrong.
One of the neighbor ladies saw the attack, and swooped me up and carried my bleeding self to my house where my mother laid me on the floor by the front door and wrapped my arm in a towel. When we got to the hospital, I was pretty tired and cranky (and hurting). All I remember about getting the stitches is that the doctor kept calling me "Punkin" which annoyed me a little. But he was piecing my body back together, so I really had no room to complain.
Ah, the obligatory appendectomy. Mine happened when I was ten. I was sick for a week, and we thought I just had the flu or something. Once my mom realized that my whining was really too much just for the flu, we went to urgent care. They didn't know what it was. They sent us to the hospital. They thought they might know, but to make sure we should go to the other hospital. Cue the drive across town in the middle of the stinking night, moaning child lying across the back seat, writhing in agony. Finally, like ten hours after we initially went to seek medical help, they found out what it was. It was appendicitis. Or rather, it had been appendicitis until a few days before, when it turned into a ruptured appendix. For the longest time, nobody could tell what was wrong with me, then suddenly I'm sitting in the hallway and some tech comes up to us and tells us he's there to get me ready for surgery. Let me tell you, I wasn't happy about that. However, I was very happy after the surgery when I was introduced to the pediatric ward's rolling nintendo machine.
You'll have to use your imagination for this one, because you can't actually see a scar here. What you can see, roughly, is my eye. Sometime between late middle school years and early high school years, I had a picnic with my family in the park that adjoins the high school. One of my favorite things to do in parks, to this day, is to swing on the swings, and I did that happily during that picnic. A few days? weeks? after that evening, I noticed that there was a little brown spot on my eye that wasn't going away, that I couldn't wash off, that didn't feel like some dirt stuck on my eyeball. I watched it for a few days and when it continued in not disappearing, we again went to urgent care. They tried washing it out a few times, then referred me to an opthamologist who told me a tiny shard of metal had gotten into my eye and rusted there. We figured it must've come from the swings, then moved to the more important matter: how to get rid of it? It proved to be a most interesting experience, as the doctor got a tiny little drill and some blue eyedrops out, and proceded to grind away part of my eye. It is incredibly hard to sit still and not blink when a man is right up in your face, grinding away your eye with a drill. It didn't hurt, but it definately wasn't my idea of a fun way to spend the day. I did get to wear an eyepatch to church, though, which made up for the whole ordeal.
2 comments:
You were 3 when the dog bit you, and that is a weird post.
I have to say, I find abdominal scars hot.
Well, I'd have to. Otherwise I'd just be another self-loathing cracker.
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