Scars

   I had brain surgery when I was about five days old. Brain surgery of different kinds is quite a common occurrence these days and London is one of the best places in the world for it.
   I had my brain surgery, however, in 1953. I try not to think about this too much, having delicate surgery like that back in the early fifties. The possible outcome of the surgery was guarded enough that my parents thought it necessary to make sure I was at least baptized beforehand.
   The reason for the surgery, as I understand, was that there was a fear that I was hydrocephalic. This fear was unfounded. As my Dad was so fond of saying, "They went in there and found nothing!" There are pictures of me when I was just a few months old and the healing areas on either side of my head were still visible. They actually kind of looked like devil horns.
   Of course, there were scars.

   I have a dim recollection of being able to see these scars when I was young and had a brush cut. I remember the marks but I really didn't connect them with anything, it wasn't until I was an adult and had been told the whole story that I made the connection between the scars and the surgery. At some point, though, my hair got longer and the scars were more or less forgotten.
  Now, they are back. My hair has receded over the years to the point where the scars are clearly visible. They have grown with me over the years as well. They are much longer now than when I was a little boy.
   Thankfully, I am at that point in my life where their presence on my head does not bother me, they are certainly nothing to be ashamed of. No one has even ever mentioned them to me (although they might look a little more closely now, I imagine) and I myself have to look pretty closely just to see where they begin and end.


Not THE bird bath...but you should run AROUND them!

   My other favourite scar is the one on  my right leg. It's about ten inches long, shaped like an elongated "s" and, this far removed from the initial incident, is almost impossible to see. When I was a teenager, my friends and I were playing football in a friend's backyard. We were using his neighbours' back yards as end zones and when I went running through one of them to catch a pass I ran into a plastic birdbath. The birdbath shattered and one of its jagged edges ran up the inside of my leg. It was a deep enough gash to leave a scar but not deep enough for stitches and was a topic of conversation for a few months, as it healed. After the injury, I went back to the neighbour's house and retrieved the shattered top of it, with permission, and hung it on the wall of my bedroom, kind of a trophy I guess.

A surgical clip in some one's brain

    Back to the brain surgery for a minute. Only about five or six years ago, I had a CT scan on my head. My family doctor called me at home one evening a day or two after this, much concern in his voice. He asked me if I'd forgotten to tell him anything about my medical history. I told him I didn't think so and he then went on to tell me that the CT scan had clearly showed a metallic surgical clip still embedded in my head! It then clicked on me about the surgery I'd had as a baby, something I hadn't even thought of mentioning to my GP. I couldn't quite understand his big concern but then he said that if I ever had a MRI done on my head for any reason, I'd be in big trouble, given that a strong magnetic force would be interacting with the metal already in my head. I have filed this one away, believe me.
   So this is my little story about scars. These are physical scars and are simply a part of you, the same way your eyes might be blue or your hair could be brown. Generally, there is little we can do about them and however much they might bother you, you can rest assured they bother the important people in your life that much less or not at all. Revel in their uniqueness and then revel in your own.