Scarred

Last week a young man came into the surgery clinic complaining of severe abdominal pain. His pain was crushingly bad. He had been nauseous and was vomiting, and his belly pain would come and go with the sharpness of a knife. It actually reminded him of the time he got stabbed last summer.

At that time he came into us as a trauma victim. The knife had passed through his abdominal wall and torn a hole in his small intestine. He was taken immediately to the OR, where that segment of bowel was resected and the remaining portions reconnected. He would walk out of the hospital with a rather long scan down his belly, but other than that he was good as new.

Except that, as I tried to explain to him, his body hadn’t forgotten that little incident. The scar he still sees on his abdomen – although it’s somewhat faded – was the result of us cutting his skin. But the same scarring process was going on inside him. The area where his attackers knife passed and where our scalpels would follow was an inflamed, wounded mess, and his body was trying to scar it out. Unfortunately this is not without consequence. The scars form long bands – called adhesions – ad they can wrap around your intestines, causing life-threatening intestinal obstruction. Can you imagine? A healing process gone horribly wrong.

The next time you see me, look closely at my face, and see if you can see the scar from the scalpel. It will have faded by then – hopefully – but realize that it’s really nothing more than a representation for the scarring that is ongoing within me. And even as the outward version is improving, it’s impossible to tell what’s really going on inside. Perhaps it’s nothing. Then again, perhaps one day I’ll be so buckled over in pain that I’ll need surgery. Here’s hoping.