Most people no longer recognize the patch I have in the center of my throat, down where my larynx meets my chest. It is a tracheotomy scar that must be getting lighter the longer I have it. When I was a kid, it was not uncommon for a perfect stranger would approach me in some store where I was buying sunflower seeds or Jolly Rancher apple sticks and ask, What happened there?
I had the tracheotomy at age 18 months after a respiratory virus turned to pneumonia. It was an emergency operation, part of my childhood mythology, the small Mexican doctor with wild hair who stabbed open the hole in my trachea so I wouldn’t die. She had a frantic look in her eye, her hair loose and Bride-of-Frankenstein-like, and she held the sharp instrument up in the air before bringing it down to pierce my throat.
That is the image that came out of those many times I heard my parents tell the story, it was the kind of story they would repeat to relatives and friends, even after we’d heard it for years, and in each telling I would embellish the imagery. Just like when they said that in the oxygen tent in the ICU, where I stayed for days afterward, my hair went from straight to curly, just like that and I can see it happening, in time lapse photography. Like the stocking feet of the Wicked Witch of the West curling and shrinking away under the house after Dorothy removes the ruby slippers, so goes my hair, forming into tiny ringlets all over my head.
It must be natural, I think, for a young kid to turn their childhood stories into morbid scenes, but what strikes me is how much those scenes have stuck with me through the years. I don’t replace them with more reasonable pictures, a modest Mexican woman with hair pulled back in a bun, a ride on the gurney into a stark but clean emergency room at the hospital. No, my scenes involve my parents watching on in horror as they see the doctor plunge the knife into my throat, or watching in awe as my hair springs up in a bouquet of curl all around my head, like an angel’s.
The scar on my knee came at an impressionable age, around 12 years old, and I fabricated a mythology around that one, too. I developed a huge crush on the orthopedic surgeon who did the procedure, my folks said he looked like a hippie, which made him all the more intriguing. Even though this seems unlikely, I clearly recall him coming to visit me after the operation, carrying the kind of Bell jar used for canning fruit, and inside was my white globular tumor floating in a yellowish liquid.
The scar from that procedure resembles a centipede crawling on the inside of my right knee, and once after a real centipede zipped across my leg while I was playing hide-and-seek in the coat closet, I decided to tell any kid who asked me how I got the scar on my knee that it was left there by a centipede that burned itself into my skin. That’s how centipedes bite, I told them, they sear themselves right into you.
Kids looked at me with respect after that, but my story fell apart once they began to ask all the questions that came with the idea of centipede-as-branding-iron. What happened to the centipede itself? It dried up and fell off, I said one time, and then another time, It dissolved right into the skin, see, you can still see parts of it here. Soon I became tired of the technicality of it all, I couldn’t keep the story going and over time I left behind the centipede and kept only the image of my long-haired doctor.
I have two puncture wounds on the outer bridge of my nose, close to my eyes, that our rooster Lindo gave me when he tried blinding me with his spurs. One time, at a luncheon in China, I sat next to a German man who had the exact same two puncture wounds near his eyes. All through lunch, I kept wanting to ask him if he, too, had been attacked by a rooster, but I couldn’t think of a way to broach the subject without coming off sounding like a whacked out American.
Now, in my mind, I am certain that the same thing that happened to me happened to him. Anything is possible.
-Related to Topic post WRITING TOPIC – SCARS and Guest practice, PRACTICE – SCARS – 15min by Louis Robertson
NOTE: Scars is a Writing Topic on red Ravine. Guest writer Louis Robertson was inspired to join QuoinMonkey and ybonesy in doing a Writing Practice on the topic.
[…] Postscript: This essay is based on a 15-minute Writing Practice in response to WRITING TOPIC – SCARS. The details that emerged from my Writing Practice were […]
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Ybonesy, your description of the Mexican doctora reminds me of Natalie’s paintings — wildly colorful in unexpected ways. But they didn’t make me laugh. That began with a chuckle at the centipede story. By the time I read about your not wanting to ask the German if he’d been attacked by a rooster, I was howling loud enough for Hubs to wonder what I was reading.
Who knew scars could be such fun? Well done!
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Thanks, Sharon. I’m so glad you got a kick out of it. I found some humor as I was writing, too, especially the German guy. (I don’t know if you saw but I turned this Writing Practice into a finished piece. I elaborated quite a bit on the rooster. I wanted to post both the raw and finished pieces to show how the WP is used to help start off the finished essay.)
You might notice in QM’s piece that she was hesitant to write on this topic, and I was right there with her. I was so worried that all sorts of emotional scar stuff would come out, and I just didn’t want to go there. But interestingly, the physical scars were actually a lot of fun to write about. They really are these mile markers on one’s body, that tell us so much about where we’ve been. And the fact that they are physical I think helps ground the writing in detail.
It is a good topic, as you know being as how you also tapped it, coincidentally right before we did. I now think I could write about scars several more times. I missed quite a few, in fact.
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ybonesy, I’m so glad you posted your Writing Practice and your finished piece built on the practice Centipede Dreams (LINk) Was fun to show on red Ravine how pieces move from Writing Practices to finished pieces. It’s true, I didn’t want to go into the emotional scar territory for a venue like the Internet. I remember Natalie talking about how some things are better kept private, that there are boundaries around what we might share in a wider context. The Internet is as Wide as it gets! So, I too, chose to keep the practice around physical scars, and emotional scars at the level of our country.
I think the emotional scar Writing Practices are better left to later weave into finished pieces, pieces that put them in a wider context than a 15 minute Writing Practice. The geography of physical scars are no less interesting to me. Because of all that emotional stuff underneath. You did a great job of capturing the horror of your parents. You made an important point though — the moment we get the scar sticks with us. Then we embellish it over the years. That becomes our personal mythology. And that of our families.
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Yeah, I think I’ll also save the emotional scars writing for my private notebook. Heck, I find it’s hard to write — period — about emotions. Too hard to capture details. We used to call that kind of writing “Deep Diary” whenever we went there in our writing group. I used to call it “deep diarrhea” 8) .
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