Battle Scars
Like many people, I am covered with various nicks that are all but invisible unless you know what you’re looking for. My only real scar, the only one I’ve truly earned, is still, one year later, a pink line drawn in the sand across my lower abdomen, just below my bikini line. It’s faded a little in the middle and almost perfectly straight except on the left where my son kicked his way out of the womb, announcing to the world that he was a fighter. He was gray when he was born, a tiny bundle of baby that was brought to me for a kiss before being rushed away from me, the first time of many. I wasn’t surprised but that didn’t mean it hurt any less to watch him being taken away from me.
Halfway through my pregnancy, my son was diagnosed with a randomly occurring but potentially fatal heart defect. As my due date approached, it became more apparent that he would need a new heart to replace the broken one I’d given him. As I lay on the table in the operating room, after they’d taken him away from me, I waited on the table as I thought about the scars he would bear if he were strong enough to make it that far.
It occurs to me now that I had staples surrounding my scar but I never thought to count them. My skin hasn’t left me with any tick marks with which to count them now; all I’m left with is my scar but even that is fading, slowly but surely.
My son’s scars are fainter, albeit more numerous. His heart transplant at five-days-old left a long, slightly curved white line down his sternum but as he gets older, it gets a little smaller. His other scars, the divots in his flesh left by the chest tubes after surgery, are much more prominent. One of them, the bigger one, reminds me of how he kicked out his chest tube the first time his dad held him. We didn’t know until later that that tube had been propping open his right lung which then collapsed. My son survived, his lung was re-inflated, and now the mark on his chest is all that remains. Well, that and the memory. Our memory--not his.
It seems strange to see pictures of my son on the day he was born. His chest was smooth, unmarked by knives, but beneath it his heart swirled blood like a washing machine, unable to do what he, what I, desperately needed it to do. Now, a year later, a stronger, better heart beats underneath my son’s battle-worn skin. His scars are so much a part of him that I have trouble remembering those first few days when he chest was clear without the aid of a photo. His scars, my scar, every line is a reminder of how hard he fights. I’m not surprised though--I knew it from the first day when he kicked his way out. Scars are nothing when compared to what we get in return.