The Truth is in the Scars

Being the walking disaster I am, it is only natural that my body is littered with scars. They run the gamut from mundane (like the three small dots on my right thigh from scalding hot grease), to silly (the two-inch line on my right forearm from a wire coat hanger, which totally explains why Joan Crawford thought they were evil), and finally, to the serious (the two-inch long scar just above my left butt cheek where I had a good-sized lypoma removed from where it clung to my sciatic nerve).

Some of my scars are pretty obvious; others, fortunately, lurk just out of sight on my pale skin. If I were to tan, though, you would be able to see the patchwork quilt that is my body.

As I have funny falling down stories, I also have funny scar stories, though some are one and the same.

So, for your reading, and not to mention Schadenfreude, pleasure, I present Scar Stories.

• On the bottom of each foot, I have inch-long diagonal scars from incidents spaced exactly one month apart. The first came as I waded through a creek barefoot and cut myself on a wickedly sharp tree branch. The entire hobble home, I repeated, “Crap, crap, crap, crap….”

  Exactly one month later, I stepped off my porch, again barefoot, and right onto a glass bottle my brother had just dropped.You’d have thought I would have learned my lesson about wearing shoes the first time, but how else would I have broken two of my toes about 5 times each?

• My right wrist has a bizarre little nub of a scar about two centimeters long where I punctured my wrist.

  Yes, you read that right, I punctured my wrist.

  How does one puncture her wrist, you ask? Well, if you’re goofing around hanging upside down off the side of your dad’s El Camino and accidentally smack your wrist down around a rusted, jagged part of wheel well, odds are, you’ll puncture your wrist.

• My right index finger sports a v-shaped scar at its base. That scar reminds me that you never get in the middle of a dog fight. Not even if you’re trying to shut the door to keep them from running outside, because you could accidentally put your hand through the window…like I did.
• My face sports several scars, the most obvious of which is the giant one in the middle of my head that looks like I tried to create my own bhindi. At the tender age of five, when I brought home the chicken pox and thus infected my entire family, I was told that I could scratch at any of the scabs…except the giant one in the middle of my forehead.

  Well, I didn’t actually scratch it. The couch did. I just happened to move my head up and down repeatedly against the cushion trying to quell the mad itch that was driving me insane.

• About an inch above my chicken pox scar, running at a diagonal slash is where I had a run-in with a shingle. Those things look all flimsy, even when they’re flying at your face like an errant frisbee, but they are incredibly heavy. And when they hit your head after being tossed like a frisbee, they really, really, really hurt!
• My left ring finger has a faint scar between the second knuckle and the base of my finger from where I nearly ripped my finger off. I had always heard that turquoise gem stones were bad luck. And after the day my turquoise ring got caught on a chain-link fence and sliced my finger in half, I believe it. The worst part was trying to get the ring off my rapidly swelling and bleeding finger. Man, that hurt.

  I still have the ring if you ever want to see how damaged it was in the process.

• Just a couple inches below my ring finger scar, an inch-long scar runs parallel with my life line. That one came about when I was about six and my brother, his friends and I decided we wanted to built a fort out of scrap lumber. Too bad I wasn’t looking at what I was touching and found the one nail that had not been removed from the 2″ x 4″.
• The outside of my right thumb has a backward checkmark that runs alongside my thumbnail. This lovely scar is there more due to repetition than anything. You see, I have this bad habit of cutting myself whenever I cut tomatoes. It started when I was six and has followed me throughout my life. It doesn’t happen every time, but it does happen often enough to give me such a cool scar. Yeah, you’d think I’d know how to cut tomatoes now that I’m 30 years old…but you’d also think that I’d know by now how to walk up a flight of steps without falling up them.
• My final scar is awesome, because it’s THE MYSTERY SCAR.

  How is it a mystery? Well, for starters, I have no idea how I got it. Seriously.

  It’s a bizarre half-circle of spots that runs on my left side from just above my hip bone to my rib cage. The best way I can describe it is to use the phrase I coined as a child when telling others about it: it looks like I was bitten by a gremlin. Really, it looks like a half-circle of teeth marks. It’s quite cool, really.It’s one of those scars that only pops up when I tan. And while people say tan fat looks better than white fat, I’d rather show no fat at all, so the odds of seeing it are like the odds of having lunch with Nessie, Bigfoot and an alien. Sorry, y’all.

Only time will tell what other scars I manage to accumulate. For now, I’ll just continue to refrain from being exposed to sunlight for prolonged periods of time in order to minimize the appearance of just how badly battered my poor body truly is.