Now, if you thought I was dumb for cutting on myself, heh, this time I was REALLY stupid and didn’t get it treated. It took a good two months to heal with self-treatment (cleaned out 2x daily w/ soap and water), and didn’t heal up quite right. It hurts in cold/wet weather.

Everything else? Either surgical, or the result of me obsessive-compulsively scratching holes in myself during mosquito season.

My favorite scar, however, is ~3/4″ wide and 10″ long, and starts just below my right knee, curving slightly along my outer calf. People assume there is a suitably dramatic story to go with it, but the truth is: I just wasn’t looking where I was going.

My parents were re-doing a house they’d just purchased and, as part of the process, were replacing the forced-air heating system. My son, his fiancee, and I were dropping off some sheets of plywood when I forgot there was an uncovered floor vent in the living room, and dropped right in. While most of the duct work had been removed, the flashing around the edges hadn’t. It scored my leg clear down to the muscle (and ruined a perfectly good pair of jeans).

My son, who is a corrections officer, passed out. His fiancee used what may have been an entire roll of Bounty paper towels (the only absorbent material available in the gutted house) to stop the seemingly gallons of blood pouring out of me before rousing my son from his faint and driving me to the ER.

Because the flashing had carved a nice big groove out of my leg instead of simply cutting it, it couldn’t be sutured into a pretty line, but instead had to be coated in ointment, covered in gauze, and left to fill in on its own. (Which it did, eventually.)

Only it was a tad more complicated than that. See, before I sat on it, I kicked it out of the ground. The spike that held it into the ground was thus pointed upwards when I went down. It put a 1.5″ laceration that went almost two inches into my left buttock. There is still an indentation there.

To make it even better, there was serious confusion on the part of the EMS team, because one of the kids who was with us passed out three times because of all the blood (there was a *lot* of blood). The folks in the office (we were playing outside the clubhouse of the trailerpark where one of my friends lived) took me into another room, in the hopes of Matt not passing out anymore. I was fine with one of my friends holding a towel tight against the wound, so the ladies in the office were focused on Matt.

And as an aside, I won my EMTs drinks on the other EMTs they dispatched with, as mine was the strangest call for that week (this included the confusion with them trying to take care of Matt first).

Oh, yeah, and she was phobic of blood.

She handled it admirably, though – got me sitting down and holding a towel to my hand with constant pressure while calming my sister enough to get her to tell my parents’ phone number. There was no calming me at the time – being six and having the first heavily bleeding injury of my life, I was certain with the terror of a small child that I was dying, so I was completely irrational. We soaked through three dish towels waiting for my parents to come (which took about 5 minutes – they only lived two streets away). At the hospital, the doc didn’t want to make a bad day worse for me and chose to close it with butterfly strips instead of freezing it for stiches.

When all’s said and done, what do I have? A teeny little 1cm scar on my finger, with no visible evidence of how dramatic the injury looked when fresh and bleeding.

My most dramatic-looking scar is one that goes the full length of my right foot. It’s also the one with the silliest cause: a cat scratch. No infection, cleaned out right away, but it left a big long scar the full length of my foot for some reason. Then there’s the scar on my forehead from smashing my head off a desk and not washing it out because I was in a rush and getting cellulitis as a result. Not dramatic, but a bit of a piss-off because I knew better.

Lets see…I’ve got a scar on my cheek from a hot welding rod. I set it down on the edge of my workbench and caught the end with my elbow when I flipped my mask up. Made the rod flip right up into my face. Kinda like the rake to the face in the cartoons.

Then there’s the scar over my eye from where my brother hit me with a golf club. 7 iron, and it split my eyebrow vertically and took 10 stitches to close.

Those are the two most impressive, at least, even if they aren’t the most visible.

So what’s your most interesting scar or scar story?

Well, the old one is from when I was running laps during track practice and the discus toss went a bit off course and caught me in the shin. Hard to find that one now, more than 40 years later, but at the time I got some interesting comments about sweats with one white leg and one red one.

The most recent one is pretty freaking obvious, though, and ties into the X-Ray I use as an avatar. Yup, that’s me.

And just in case anyone doesn’t know: when you do rude things to your bod like Stephanie did to that poor toe, it’s time for RICE:

* Rest: let Ben do the walking
* Ice: cooling it off makes for less swelling. Not so cold it hurts, thanks, and take the ice off when it gets uncomfortable. Keep it cold for at least 24 hours.
* Compression: Or not; depends on the injury. If you do compress, always check that the distal circulation, movement, and sensation are OK on a regular basis.
* Elevation: Keep the injured part above heart level; lower blood pressure also reduces swelling.

Less swelling means more comfort and faster healing.

Only one I an think of was when I was 12 this stupid dog was chasing me through me and my neighbor’s yard (or whatever you’d call that cement area with one tree behind that apartment). Tore my jeans pretty bad crawling underneath an old chain link fence. Wasn’t until I got home that I noticed I had two parallel gashes going down my leg where I’d torn my jeans. Don’t remember feeling them but I remember being able to put a good bit of my pinkie in one. Damn things would pus so bad every morning I’d have to peel my sheet off them.