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My worst is an 8-inch jobber on the side of my leg. I got it -- seriously -- shaving. And it got infected. It's mostly healed over now, but it was really ugly for a while.
I have a big V-shaped scar on my left shin, about 5 inches across and pretty thick. Ripped it open when I was 12, first time seeing a real human bone. Needless to say, I freaked. Spent the summer in stiches and hobbling around in pain.
Not worst or biggest, but certainly strangest: I have a long thin scar on the back of my right calf and I have no idea where it came from. I was just lying in bed and shifted position and all of a sudden the back of my leg started to sting. I couldn't find anything sharp or pointy that had somehow sneaked under my bed clothes. It's starting to fade now.
Worst would have to be a vaccination scar on my left arm. I got it when I was six, because of a move to Singapore that meant me being subjected to a series of inoculations against all sorts of tropical diseases. It was the first and certainly most painful of the lot by far, not to mention the uglyist during the healing process (which was a long period of scabby, puss-y, foamy fun). I'm still afraid of needles to this day because of it. The weird thing is that I remember being totally fine with the pain when I was getting it, but I certainly put up a hell of a fight when I needed an injection since then. Hell, the only reason I don't start wailing and crying when I get shots now is because I don't want the nurses to think me some kind of womanchild. I'm throwing a tantrum on the inside though.
I think everyone has seen my largest and worst scar, but if not.... There's also one on the small of my back that I only show people who get naked with me. I have a lot of scars on my upper arms that have been covered over with tattoos. I carved FUCK THIS into my chest when I was 13, and it scarred over pretty well, but I think they've faded, since I only used a razor.
I am fortunate that I heal really well and don't seem to generate much scar tissue, given the high number of injuries I have had, ranging from an axe blow to the head (yes, with the sharp side) to setting myself on fire to being stabbed during a fight over a girl.
The worst scar I have is not very impressive, just a scar down my right knee which I opened up on a newly-cut (ie sharp-edged) transom door in a boat I was building. It doesn't look like much now, but it rocked the doctor's receptionist back in her seat when she wanted to know if I really needed to see the doctor without an appointment - I took away the cloth I was holding over it and the whole side of my knee fell open.
Apart from that, I have a huge number of more minor scars, mainly on my hands. The worst are the emotional ones and you will never see those.
Fall down stairs. Raise arm to protect face from shattered glass stein. 4 severed tendons, luckily, no severed (major) nerves. Got stitched up beside, 16-20 odd hours later.
Vaccination scars - it's always a strange feeling seeing someone with a smallpox scar. The theory/practice behind vaccination has advanced quite a ways in the last, hell, ten years much less the last 20 much less back in WWI or WWII.
The "next thing" (although, likely not a $$$ making thing) is to design inexpensive vaccination cocktails with the appropriate adjuvants and lyophylize it all (freeze dry) and make it deliverable through a sticky patch that can survive years at ambient temperatures and humidity. Stick the patch on an exposed part of skin, peel off a day later - viola, a primed adaptive immune system ready to protect against exposure to the vaccinated-against microorganism.
In the past it used to be attenuated (for example, live virus - but one that only killed cows but not humans) virus or heat-killed virus. Problem was; dead virus (or bacteria) by itself wasn't (necessarily) terribly good at invoking an immune response. The only reason that early early early vaccines worked was because they were FUCKING dirty - it's the dirtyness (evolutionarily conserved bits of viruses/bacteria) that made it so the immune system was able to recognize the vaccine as;
Duh, hey... these thingers are baaaad. See again? Kill!!!11!one!!1
The additional problem was that it was sometimes too dirty (or the live virus had some activity in humans) so there was excessive inflammation and other nasty pus/pain/lesion/ugliness-inducing actions. Not "dirty" enough, no protection. Nowadays, there's a reasonable understanding (or at least, practical understanding) of how adjuvants work so scarification is typically a thing of the past.
I couldn't have been more than six or seven and Coke still came in little glass bottles and our basement had a cement floor and camel crickets in the dark, damp corners. The washer and the dryer were down there and I was helping Mom do laundry. I'd brought all the clothes downstairs and she and I had sorted them and stacked the loads of laundry in big plastic baskets. The cats were all over the place. We laughed at the kittens nosing through the dirty socks and soiled towels. Mom said I did a good job, and she gave me a Coke from the little fridge Dad kept downstairs full of Miller beer and Coca-Cola.
I ran toward the stairs to go back to my room and the bottle slipped from my grasp and then there was a crash and a fizzy dark stain was spreading across the cement floor and I thought maybe camel crickets like Coke and they'll all come running hopping hurrying toward this unexpected treat so I kneeled down to start cleaning up and damn near took my kneecap off with a curving shard of Coke bottle.
I don't remember it hurting. I remember little red dots appearing on a newly pink section of knee. I remember kneeling in fascination, watching the dots well up and run together and then it was just a big bloody hurt and do camel crickets have a taste for human blood? Mom must have heard me scream, then, because she was there and a towel still warm with the snuffles of Siamese kittens was wrapped over my wound and I was borne upstairs wailing to the iodine and hydrogen peroxide and I learned to always look before you kneel in broken glass, if you are small, and wearing shorts, and you are afraid the crickets will get you.
I'm forty now, and I still have a small scar on my right knee. It's about an inch long and shaped like an upside-down teardrop. We moved out of that house when I was fourteen, and I took a Polaroid picture of a bloodstain on the concrete floor of the basement. On the bottom of it I wrote, "I HATE CRICKETS."
About 20 years ago when I was an active drunk, I had an accident where I cut off my right index finger (I was staggering back from the bar with two pints of later - both for me - tripped and the one in the left hand smashed into the one in the right). It was packed in an ice bucket and I was taken to hospital, knew nothing about it until I came to next day with my arm strapped up and my finger sewn back on.
Now I have a zigzag scar along the finger. In cold weather, the finger goes blue and the scar is white. Freaks people out, lol.
The coolest bit about the whole thing came about 2 weeks after the surgery. To reattach the tendons etc the surgeons have to peel back all the skin on the hand. New skin grows underneath and then the old skin kind of peels away, like a lizard shedding its skin. So I had this complete glove of my own shed skin. I kept it for a while but it dried up and flaked away.
My worst are the two scars from my broken leg (they count as a single scar since they originated in the same injury). I had a plate and 5 small screws on my fibula, and one long screw to hold my tibia back together. They're surgery scars, though, so they are nice and thin and clean.
I do have a nice ugly one right below my knee where the bolt sticking out of the swingset tore me open. 50 stitches for that one.
Kidney surgery when I was 11. There's maybe a 4-inch scar just above the mons veneris going horizontally across the median line, and two small, oval-shaped scars, an inch or two equidistant above and below that. Those two smaller scars are for where they put the tubes in to drain my kidneys of urine while the ureters and the valve leading from the kidneys to the ureters healed.
The lower scar for the tube hole is mostly covered over with hair, but the upper scar makes it look like I have two belly buttons. I also suspect that the reason why I will always have a belly even if I ever started to lose weight there is the scar tissue that must have built up there. I remember having such a complex about having an "almost" flat stomach as a teen.
I've got a set, from when I crashed my motorcycle into a deer. I slid far enough on the pavement to burn through the shoulder of my leather jacket, so I have some burn scars. The front of my knee was scraped off and the dye from my black jeans is permanently forced into the skin, almost like a tattoo. Since I shattered my collarbone, I have scars from the surgery to rebuild it. That's just a line along the bone. But I also have a scar where the stainless steel rod was inserted from the back. It actually wore a hole in my skin before I had it taken out. There are no scars from the broken ribs, but I do know when it's going to rain.
I have a lot of small scars - but my most enduring one is from when I was four. I had tiptoed into the room my mother used to sew in, because I wanted to use her sewing scissors (VERY off limits, for they were extremely sharp). I was cutting up my paper and dropped the scissors. Tried to catch them and basically closed them on my knee. Big hunk of flesh flew out, and it bled and bled and I was too scared to yell for mum because I knew I'd be in trouble.
The majority of my other scars are from falling off the back of a truck that was traveling reasonably quickly (when I was 11 or so). Don't remember most of that day.
My sister and I were playing wheelbarrow in the basement when my hand hit a puddle and I went down on my chin. I got 18 stitches for that, but you have to look closely to see the scar. I also sliced the bejesus out of my middle finger when I pinched it between a pneumatic chair arm and the metal lip on the under side of my desk. 4 for that. And I got 8 when I sliced my knee open on a Stingray Fender my Dad grounded me for riding. And I had 7 from when I fell down the stairs at work.
Stupid stupid stupid tr33. I have a scar on my stomach from a drunken night. Myself, my buddy, and my ex wife were loaded and watching Sid and Nancy. He and I decide it would be bitchin' to carve our girlfriend's name into our chest with razor blades. But I had a lot of chest hair, so I went a little lower. Her name was Kim (shudder); the scar is from the "I."
I have a scar on my back that, while relatively small physically, is huge psychologically. At summer camp, we were doing one of those trust courses, and the task was to be blindfolded and have someone else lead you around. As I was crawling under a log, I asked my sighted partner if I was clearing it; she said yes, but was incorrect and I got the sharp remnants of a branch in the back. Needless to say, I have some trust issues.
I also have a scar from trying to rollerskate down stairs.
I have a three-inch scar and a one-inch scar on my belly from getting my appendix out when I was four years old. The three-inch one has dots on either side from the stitches. Two weeks in the hospital is an awfully long time when you're four.
Of course, my sister got her appendix out in high school, and by that time they had changed the surgery so that there isn't any scarring (they do that fancy schmancy go-through-the-belly-button-and-use-a-video-camera thing now, I think).
re: smallpox scars -- Strangely, my best friend has one and I don't, but she's 9 months younger than me. I guess they stopped doing them that year?
I got two scars just below my hairline from childhhod accidents, permanently droopy eyes from adolescent eye surgery, faded scar on the inside of my left arm from a darts accident, and of course my kidney surgery scar, which I tell everyone is an old war wound.
I scarred myself in the hospital just after I was born. I was born with long fingernails (my poor mother), and they didn't cover my hands, and I was waving them around in that way babies have, and cut my cheek open. You can still see the scar -- it's about 1/2 inch long. I kind of like it.
My sister used to have this awesome portable turntable. It said DISCO on it and had colored lights that blinked in time with the music. We would put on our K-Tel records and have dance parties. Well, one day, I got completely overtaken by the funk, tripped over my own feet and cracked my head on the radiator.
My mother had two standard answers for illness: take a nap and you'll feel better or soak it in warm water. I opted for the latter, drew a bath, leaned my head back and the water turned scarlet--like there had been an indoor shark attack. When they finally took me to the ER, I had a bad concussion and a gash requiring a partially shaved head and eight stitches. You can still feel the scar.
(I also have some faint scratches down my arms from my misguided teenage Sylvia Plath phase. They embarass me.)
As a teenager, I accidentally cut one of my thumbs down to the bone. Had the impact been slightly harder, I'd've probably lost the thing entirely. Now, I've got a scar from stitches that runs across the inside of the thumb.
I've also got some scars related to teenage self-injury, and quite a few related to bicycling (especially from when I rode trials without shin guards), among others.
I have a scar that runs horizontally across my entire forehead (sort of top-left to lower-right), but it's so inconspicuous that even friends I've had for a million years will finally notice it at some point and be amazed they never saw it before.
I was at first-climbing age (3? 4?) and I climbed onto a chair and then onto a kitchen counter, and grabbed a big can of something from the cupboard shelf... at which point, of course I fell off the counter, and onto the can I brought down with me.
It was quite a traumatic scene at the hospital, where it took any number of nurses and staff to hold me down as the doctor stitched me up, for a long, long, long time. When he was through, my mother asked how many stitches, and he replied, "My dear lady, does a seamstress count her stitches?" At any rate, he did an absolutely amazing job, and I've always been grateful. I do, however, have leftover phobias from that, in that I totally can't stand my face being covered (by cloth, etc. - I go completely nutso), or being held down by force at all, even for tickling, "etc.".
These stories are great! LOL @ roller skating down the stairs. I fell out of a tree house once with a saw in my hand that would've done a lot more damage if it hadn't hit the front closure thingy on my bra. I never told my parents about that. It's amazing we live to adulthood.
Mrs Chewy has an awesome scar on her inner arm from a dew claw on a dog she was restraining. It's about 6".
Before I describe the scar on my right foot, I should tell you about my wisdom teeth, which were removed in my teens.
The dentist took sixteen seconds to remove all four of them. But the novocaine injections took twice as long and three times as many needles as usual.
It seems I process novocaine much faster than average. So they'd stick a few needles in my mouth, tap at my teeth and ask if I felt anything. "Yeeuch," I affirmed, again and again, until after the fifteenth or so needle had been plunged, and they could whack my teeth out with the special hammer and blunt chisel. Four seconds for each tooth; they were ready to go.
Skip to my mid-twenties, I was living in Israel, where a friend and I would typically play frisbee for a couple hours after work, before dinner, drinking, and happy oblivion. Dav, our big sad black mutt (a fighter who would stand up to a pack of a dozen dogs before I would wade in kicking to retrieve him; a fighter who eventually went crazy from pain and ostracism and menaced some neighborhood kids. We took him to the garbage tip, shot him, buried him, and wept) got a hold of our frisbee a few days before and had torn it, so it was all knackered and taped together, but it flew nonetheless.
Directive number one, though, was to keep the frisbee out of the pool, or the tape would soak and the frisbee wouldn't fly.
So when my buddy spun an errant toss that caught an edge and rolled straight for the pool, I was thinking one thing only: stop the frisbee. As it rolled across the concrete pool deck towards the lip and the water, I ran, stretched, reached my foot out, and kicked the frisbee clear onto the grass. Success!
Of course, the concrete blocks of the pool deck had settled unevenly over the years, and I also kicked the corner of one of them, tearing open my foot below my right big toe and sending blood flying.
I don't know if I need to describe the pain. Suffice to say, my right foot is squirming uncontrollably as I write this. I hummed as many marching band fight songs as I could, gritting my teeth almost to the cracking point until someone gave me a stick to bite.
They drove me to a doctor in town, a guy who had spent time as a combat medic, and was completely dismissive and nonchalant about my pain. He operated on his desk, my foot propped up on some books.
In my pain I forgot to mention my novocaine immunity, so they only used the standard amount. I got only three stitches.
The novocaine wore off completely after the first. You know how fine surgical thread is? It felt like burlap and the needle felt like a javelin, being tugged bit by bit through my flesh. I slammed the stick back into my mouth, chomped down, and my eyes almost rolled back in my head with pain.
My friends were in the room, hands on my shoulders, helping me through it all. As soon as they saw the pain, they left the room, and one of them vomited (how sweet of her!).
After all was said and done, I had a big area of scarring on the side of my foot between my instep and big toe, and a painkiller addiction that lasted for months.
I've had both my shoulders reconstructed due to accident-related damage. Each scar is about five inches long and runs from the front of each shoulder down into my armpits.
All from a car accident when I was 19... I was hit directly head on by a drunken little shit (while I was designated driver, no less!). My car was pretty old, and although I had shoulder belts, it predated airbags. And was the size of a matchbox car. You know how they say not to tense up in an accident? Well, if you do you end up with casts on both arms like me. Which sucks. But, in retrospect, crushing my head on the hard plastic steering wheel would have been worse.
Left arm: one on top, one on the side, each extending from my elbow a little past halfway to my wrist.
Right foot: L-shaped, on outer side. Starts an inch or so above my toes, goes around the ankle bone, and up my ankle.
Both knees: jagged, crossing the top mostly vertically. about 6" each.
Both legs:
1" or so, upper thighs, front. Little "dots" on either side from where staples were. Same on both sides, two of them, above the knee.
Left leg: Inch deep pit about 2.5" across. From where Mr. Femur decided to say hello!
I also have small stitch-scars just below my collarbone on the left from my central line, and more little scars on the left side of my face/chin, arms, and so on from glass than I can count. But I don't even notice those anymore.
I used to be really sensative about my scars. I don't really care anymore, though.
I'm 16, the only sober person at a kegger, late summer. I'm trying to corral some drunken friends away from the houses at the far end of the park we're in because:
1. I want to get laid, and my girlfriend at the time is with them, so them getting arrested is going to put a damper on my plans.
2. The keg, and therefore the fun, isn't near the houses.
The park is one of those long boring narrow sloping jobs with a couple of permanent BBQ grills cemented into place here and there. In the process of friend wrangling I find myself running down the hill as they're all drunkenly chanting. Suddenly I'm flying through the air ass over teakettle. I manage to land pretty well, continue my trot down the hill, and finally catch up with them. They all turn, take one look at me, and scream--in unison--"OMG what happened to your leg!?"
It's at this time that I become aware that my shoe feels warmer and wetter than it should. I look down to discover that I've managed to slice my leg, just above the knee, all the way down to the bone on one of those cemented in place BBQs. I can't feel much because the nerves there managed to get severed too, but one look at the mess that's my leg makes me pass out.
Somehow my drunken friends managed to muster enough wits to drag me to one of the houses they were terrorizing, leave me on the front lawn, find an acquaintance that happened to live nearby who hadn't been drunkenly revelling, get that person to drive me home.
My mother is a nurse and did triage in a hospital for several years. She takes one look at me, glares at the friends who by now are mostly sobered up, sits me down, returns with a new bottle of peroxide, cracks the cap and pours the whole thing into the wound.
In the emergency room I end up contracting tonsillitis. A dozen years later and the nerves still bug me. The scar is probably 3 inches long (horizontally right above my knee) by about 3/8 of an inch wide.
1.5 x 1/8 inch scar on my chin from accidently biking into the back of a parked car that was around the corner. I was bleeding profusely as I walked home. I didn't get stitches and the scar tissue healed rough; perhaps I had a mild concussion and wasn't thinking straight. Not my proudest moment, in any case.
I'm lucky in that my scars tend to fade after a while. Right now tho', I have two on one knee and one on the other from tripping and scraping them all to hell within a few days of each other. The only other fairly visible scars are two on my face (chin and nose) from acne.
You know how fine surgical thread is? It felt like burlap and the needle felt like a javelin, being tugged bit by bit through my flesh.
I have had stiches without pain medication before - whatever it was that the doctors used to use never worked on me and, in this case, I was having a wound in my knee (not the one I mentioned above) re-stitched after falling on it the same day the stitches came out and re-opening it. Didn't hurt that much. Maybe it would have if I was a sook ;-)
My soul is wrapped, in the fashion of a great roast beef, with a thick rope of a scar caused by my third grade realization that there are no Elysian Fields ailing bloodhounds go to and that, consequently, my grandfather was complicit in dog-icide.
I also have a scar on the inside of my nose caused by different (yet biting) dog.
The later was quite unexpected. The former, not so much. I always knew I'd be sold out by a family member.
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
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