Damage

Rummaging through folders on my computer, I came across this story that Michael wrote. He was always talking about how he thought scars were cool. I have a few of them from surgery that I will occasionally tell people I got them a different way. Usually a cool story about a bar fight or what not. Of course, I always end up telling them the lame truth; gallbladder surgery, birthmark removal. Michael's scars were from actually incidents and not medical. I give you Damage...

Damage

“I don’t want to die without any scars.” – Jack, Fight Club

I love my scars. They are personal, and differentiate me from anyone else far more than any tattoo or piercing ever could. Those marks of incorrect skin tell the story of someone that was damaged and repaired. Each one speaks of a time of pain and recovery.  Of an injury that was survived and which an individual lived to tell about. The gnarled and imperfect flesh speak volumes about someone who wasn’t willing to live the sheltered life…of someone willing to take the risks inherent in a life worth living. Sure, it does say you risked something and failed, but either way you took that chance.

Both of my knees had the skin ground off from a motorcycle wreck where I slid down the shoulder at 70 miles per hour. The same goes for my left forearm. I was fairly amazed at just how much skin was actually gone.  It’s mostly road rash, but after it heals, it has a strong tendency to look like a fine grade of chicken skin.  After sliding for a bit, I seem to remember thinking, “Ooh, this is getting kinda hot” and rolling over. The calculus book in my backpack did an excellent job of quite literally saving my ass by keeping it off the ground while I slid.  It still took out most of my elbows and ground up a lot of my upper back. Oh well, I guess this is the sort of thing you have to expect if you are going to ride a motorcycle for any length of time.  That said, it’s surreal like you can’t imagine, having a doctor set a piece of paper on your stomach to put bits of your skin on as he cuts them off. Follow that up with inflating your knee to the size of a grapefruit to ensure the joint hasn’t been penetrated. Healing up from that one was a bitch, and since it was my mother’s birthday, I felt really bad that she was scared I was dead.

The nail on the big toe of my left foot doesn’t quite grow right. This is because the bed underneath the nail, which it’s supposed to be anchored to, is seriously scarred.  I had bought an 87 Mazda RX7 and had it parked at the top of a friend’s driveway. I’d just bought the car that week, and was driving a friend to pick up parts for his car. The RX7 was idling at the top of the driveway while I had my foot on a boat trailer waiting for him to finish when I suddenly felt the boat trailer slam out from underneath me. My car’s emergency brake had failed, it rolled down the hill, and promptly crushed my foot between its bumper and the hitch on the trailer. I was probably lucky to have been wearing some kind of combat boots that probably saved my toe. In the end it sliced my toenail in half and took a pretty good chunk out of the skin underneath. You can’t quite imagine how amazingly sensitive that skin is. No amount of anesthetic seemed to do any good at blotting out having that skin stitched up. It was a while before I had any semblance of a toenail again. A couple years later and I found myself having a wisdom tooth removed. Afterwards at my mothers’ house, still doped up, a UPS guy came to drop off a computer. He slid it across the floor over my foot. Looking down, I noticed it was now sticking directly up from my toe at a ninety-degree angle. I couldn’t feel it anyways and was more amused than anything. The look on Mr. UPS’s face was pretty awesome though. With a lack of any idea of what else to do about the situation, I just got a pair of pliers and tore it off. I heart anesthetic and painkillers.

My right hand is missing a good chunk from the knuckle of my ring finger down to my palm, and up onto my little finger from a bicycle accident when I was little. One big jump off a curb, after which the wheel decided to go a different direction than the handlebars, left me sliding down the concrete driveway on my hand. Stitches might have been the correct move, but we decided on gauze and tape instead. It’s good now.

Right forearm – Roughly circular burn mark from allowing someone to hold a lighter up to it for around 10 seconds. This was a bar bet you can make with people that they will pull away before the flame can burn through a $20 bill. Money’s mostly cotton, so you’ll definitely burn a lot faster. I knew this, but was just curious how quickly it all would happen and what I could take. Not much apparently. It was only slightly red when I pulled away, so I didn’t think it was a big deal. Burns  don’t really work that way though. They look so innocent at first, and you think you’re fine, but then they bite you. The next day I had a hole in my arm roughly an inch in circumference.

I’m sure I have more that I can’t think of at the moment, but these are the ones that matter. They remind me of the risks I took, the mistakes I made, and many of my decisions whose results I would ignore.  For many people a scar is probably just a reminder of a time when they got hurt, with no meaning, but to me they show that I didn’t take the safe road all the time. Every once in a while I gave in to that urge of irresponsibility. Yeah, I’ve failed, or done stupid things, but every last bit of it was worth it.