Scars
So many of us, in fact I’d wager most of us carry scars around. Physical and emotional. This is quite an obvious observation, but I believe still worth exploring. Especially given the scarring of our country, society and the world in the age of Trump and the ongoing trauma of COVID-19, post Trump.
I’d like to share my scars. In hopes the stories which caused them will resonate and connect with others. Because as I’ve learned in perhaps a harder way than many, that is literally all that life should be about. Connection.
Scar One: Left Arm
Scar One: Left Arm broken freshman year of high school
When I was a super dorky freshman in high school, I got hit by a car. No, not the perhaps glamorous or cool way one might imagine. It happened within 500 feet of my house. At dusk.
“A small sea of milk, bike parts and little Cheeto boats floated down Nantucket Rd. as I gazed around in a daze of shock, my arm twitching uncontrollably.”
I was on my ten speed, just coming back from a run to the local market in Newton Highlands. We lived on a dead end street. Appropriately named Wood End Rd. It was paved right up until about the very last section which was mostly gravel and dirt and literally ended at the front of my parents house. It was after school and nether my parents or younger sister were home yet. I was the prototypical ’80’s latchkey kid.
I was carrying a brown paper bag with a half gallon of milk and a bag of Cheetos in my left hand and steering my bike with my right, lazily pedaling up the street. My neighbor and schoolmate Martha’s grandfather Frank had just pulled out of his driveway and was driving up the road towards me. And assuming he saw me and that he was looking like he was going to continue up the road, I steered my bike to his right as we both approached the first intersection of Nantucket Road on my right.
Here’s a map to give a sense of why this happened.
It’s not difficult to guess that of course he hadn’t seen me and upon realizing that it was too late to change direction I screamed, clamping down as hard as I could on the one handbrake I could and within seconds hit my left arm on the corner of his right passenger door where it met the windshield, tumbled across the windshield and landed in a heap on the road in front of his car. A small sea of milk, bike parts and little Cheeto boats floated down Nantucket Rd. as I gazed around in a daze of shock, my arm twitching uncontrollably.
I barely remember it, but my classmate and another neighbor, Lara (and friend to this day) one door down from Frank and his lovely wife Trudy (who spent years driving a bunch of us neighborhood kids to school - such a sweet couple!) heard my scream, came running out and she and Frank helped me back to my house.
As it turned out my dad came back early from work, took me to see a doctor who assessed that my arm had broken, cleanly about 2/3rds down from my shoulder. But the doctor said he couldn’t do much until I’d seen a specialist and had me go home with a sling, pain meds and an admonition to sleep propped upright with a pillow under my sling to prevent it from slipping.
By the time we managed to see a specialist at Children’s Hospital in Boston, my damn arm had already started to knit back together at the point the lower part of the broken bone had slipped up along side the upper part, all out of alignment. I wasn’t aware of this at the time, but my parents told me they’d considered a malpractice suit against the first doctor who saw me, but didn’t pursue it for whatever reason.
So, it was surgery for me. A metal plate was screwed into place to secure the two halves together, but to do so and get to the bones they had to make a rather large incision, detach my pectoral muscle from its insertion point, then reattach everything. 8 months later I went in to have the metal plate removed and I still have it.
During the first stay in the hospital I both met a cute girl who I ended up having a silly teenaged awkward date with once we were both out and a hilarious interlude when my two best friends Mike and Flint happened to be visiting me when ML Carr the infamous “cheerleader” of the then magical Celtics was visiting Children’s Hospital and arrived in my room.
He asked us all of our names at one point and for some reason, Flint answered nervously “ummm… Robert Smith” (this was before any of us had heard of The Cure) and when Mike and I immediately outed him saying “what the hell…? that’s not your name Flint?!” ML, graciously backed out of the room like, okay you little weirdos.
In the aftermath of the accident, I had to wear another sling to school for at least six months and then had to do physical therapy to compensate for muscle atrophy. After the the second surgery I had to do more or less the same thing, but it wasn’t as bad.
During the tail end of sophomore year, my friends and I, many of them a year behind me had started to dabble in smoking the easily available and pretty terrible, seedy, brown, Columbian/Mexican pot whenever we could get our hands on it. It may sound shallow and trite, but this was all a part of a kind of awakening we were all starting to to have about our weird society that as Fiona Apple would put it in the ’90’s that “everything is bullshit”.
Most of us were into throwback music, The Grateful Dead figured large in our lives along with all the other usual suspects of the time and musicians of the ’60s and ’70s. We all ended up having a ball going to Dead shows and experimenting with LSD, etc. Rather typical of so many of our Gen X brethren I imagine.
This was also the time when I began fucking off in school and was forced to go see the school psychologist, Dr. Joe, who was a really great guy. I’ve talked about this at more length here.
So, wether or not I carry emotional scars from that whole experience, it certainly left an impression on me. At the least it was my first inkling that the illusion of control over our lives was just that.
It was decades and much later in life that the rest of my physical scars occurred. Along the way of course, there were plenty of emotional scars from interpersonal relationships. Both those that failed and those that have been maintained in lifelong friendships. And sadly, unconsciously and inconsiderately, I’ve inflicted them as much as I’ve received them. As have most of us in one way or another, if we’re truly honest with ourselves.
Scar Two
After a string of failed romantic relationships in the years after my first divorce from my daughter’s mom Kelly in 2009 and while attempting to date vs being a serial monogamist as was my M.O. using Match.com, in 2016 I threw out my back, twice, once on either side. And it turned out that it was ultimately because I had cancer which I’ve talked about here.
I met some very lovely people using Match, one person in particular who I’ve been in intermittent touch with to this day. And who, if I’d been braver perhaps I’d still be with. Who’s to say really? It’s a long story, but I’d ended up seeing my now second ex-wife Deb for a few years, but had broken up with her to pursue dating others. I felt at the time that we weren’t super compatible and I wanted to at least try dating other people since I’d never really done that before. I’d only ever somehow gotten involved with people one at a time, having never been able and still not able to focus on more than one person. I’m a hopeless romantic that way I suppose.
The person I felt most compatible with at the time who I did end up seeing the most was Beth, a lovely person who I connected with about so much. Someone who it unfortunately turned out wasn’t even fully aware that she was an alcoholic and since I’d “seen that movie and knew how it ended” with a person I’d lived with and even blindly partied with the entire time, I ended up keeping Beth at arms length, despite our strong connection. Even going so far as to be the cliché, typical idiot who falteringly replied when she she told me she loved me “I… think I love you too”. Lame. Non-committal. A scar. Inflicted. Thoughtlessly.
“I have a vague recollection that one day I gave my poor daughter and her stepsister Violet a half hour lecture about why they needed to hang up their towels and bathmat. Yeah, I was out of my mind much of the time. Cancer treatment is hell.”
Then cancer struck and at first it wasn’t clear I was going to make it. The whole time I was dating others I also kept carrying a torch for Deb. We’d remained friends and in my darkest hour it was she who took me to the ER and she who stayed with me and told me, “I don’t care about anything, or who else you’ve been seeing, I want to be here for you and help you. I love you” and I loved her too. And she did help me, immensely. Immeasurably. And we got married and it was beautiful and lovely and fraught with trauma and panic. Her three kids were already my daughter’s step siblings. My daughters mom Kelly had remarried to Deb’s ex husband back in 2010 or so.
That’s a longer story, but suffice to say it’s small town.
We all moved in together and it was wonderful, but ultra challenging, especially when I was on decahedron, a powerful steroid, which kills cancer and is actually used to help treat COVID patients, but also makes you a crazed, babbling idiot unable to control your racing thoughts or the compulsion to share them. I have a vague recollection that one day I gave my poor daughter and her stepsister Violet a half hour lecture about why they needed to hang up their towels and bathmat. Yeah, I was out of my mind much of the time. Cancer treatment is hell.
At one point things got so bad between Deb and I that Lola, my daughter decided she’d be better off emotionally living with her mom full time. That killed me, but I understood and respected her rather remarkably mature, 13yr old decision.
Scars. Plenty for everyone in our household.
Cather scars
The next physical scar was made the same day Deb took me to the ER at the admonition of my doctor who called to tell me my bloodwork confirmed I had pneumonia and I was terribly anemic. Within a few hours of arriving at the Kaiser hospital in Terra Linda, CA they’d had a crack team of women doctors come in from San Francisco to put in an emergency main line catheter to my heart in my chest just below my right clavicle. And in the same procedure they had me help them flip myself over so they could get a bone marrow biopsy. I was awake the whole time on the twilight mix of verced and fentanyl, so I remember chatting with the team and joking how we all looked like Smurfs wearing those funny blue surgery bonnets. It was a fascinating experience honestly. Luckily I’m not a squeamish person!
The catheter was a way to start giving me dialysis because it turned out that my multiple myeloma had already damaged my kidneys to the point that they were only functioning at about 5%. Which is why I’d been feeling so run down and looked so jaundiced. Deb had noticed and gotten angry at me for not getting blood work done and then I got pneumonia and the blood work showed she was right to be concerned, but by then it was too late to save my kidneys.
Scar Three
I was lucky enough to receive a autologous bone marrow transplant at Stanford and at one point my existing chest catheter got infected so because I needed dialysis while I was there for almost three weeks during my BMT they gave me another right next to it, hence it’s really a twofer scar there. That whole Stanford experience was a trip unto itself and though this isn’t a scar, I thought I’d include the video I took the day they infused my own cleaned up blood plasma back into me. The nurse who set it up blew my mind by telling me you could actually see the white blood cells in the IV tube and if you look closely you’ll see them too!
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8ydG8fs51Ac
Scar Four
Fistula Scars
After almost two years of dialysis using the main line, which made life challenging as it’s difficult to take showers without risk of infection, I was finally scheduled for fistula surgery. My vascular surgeon, Dr. Cardeneau found a suitable artery in my left arm just above my wrist to effectively rearrange and bring closer to the surface so that the dialysis techs could shove 14 gauge needles into my arm instead of using the catheter. I had to go back in after a few months for another surgery when the fistula hadn’t matured enough and Cardeneau and his team used a balloon to basically blow the vein up more and make it viable. Again I was on the twilight mixture of drugs, so I was awake and unfortunately able to feel much of the searing pain when they did their thing. Kind of like a hot poker inside your arm. Good times!
Scar Five and Six
I’ve written at length about how lucky I was to receive a kidney transplant from my great, lifelong friend Harry. And this largest scar is from that surgery at UCSF.
This is really a cluster of scars (in this last photo) from the laparoscopic hernia surgery I had to have during the summer of 2020 which coincided with my family moving my dad into my house with me for the two months it took for them to sell their property and get out of dodge to Europe. They literally moved him in the day after I got outpatient hernia surgery. He’d had Alzheimer’s for about 8yrs or so and was already in sharp decline having been bedridden for the last two years and his brief moments of what seemed like lucidity happening far less often.
Kidney transplant and hernia surgery scars
Many of my friends offered that perhaps it was a good opportunity to spend some quality time with my dad since he’d be making the trip to Europe with my family, but the painful truth is that his quality of life was effectively non-existent. Sure he ate and babbled when he was awake less and less, but is that quality of life? My mom thought so, but I believe that was just a rationalization given the extreme choice my family had made to abandon my daughter and I and go seek their utopian best life living in Italy, where they’ve now settled in Genoa.
Because as it turned out they all left on November 7th, 2020 and my dad passed away in Zurich on November 12th. My mom texted me to tell me and I had to ask that she call me and when she did we had it out about their entire crazy plan which resulted in her hanging up on me.
More scars.
Ultimately, perhaps the greatest scar was another I inflicted. I had an affair. A sloppy, mostly emotional one, but an affair nonetheless. Because everything was so tense during all of my treatment, because I was feeling misunderstood and wasn’t getting the love, acceptance and intimacy I craved, I started reaching out to Beth. There were texts. And phone calls. And we met for dinner once. And Deb read my texts. And I denied it. At first. As one does, when you’re cornered and guilty. And of all of my terrible decisions and thoughtlessness, it is this one I regret the most. Because no one deserves that. Neither Deb nor Beth. And especially Deb. Who was there for me, in her way.
And yes, she, my sister and my mom, all got on the bandwagon of essentially telling me I wasn’t healing from my ordeal right. Demanding I go see a psychiatrist once the existentialism of everything finally hit me in the months after my bone marrow therapy and I finally had time to reflect a bit and I was depressed. And in grief. Over all I’d lost. Over how fucked up my body is, now. Still, to this day. Over how I almost died. And I did. See a psychiatrist. Who told me I’d been through a LOT and to go get some talk therapy. And I did that too, but it seemed nothing I did was enough. And it wasn’t for Beth either. Deb and I broke up, but were forced to keep living together for financial reasons. And Beth and I made some flailing attempts at romance again, but that failed too.
For a while now I’ve vacillated back and forth between thinking everything has been my fault to believing I’ve just never been accepted, but I’m really not sure what actually happened. I have deep regrets. Mostly that I was selfish enough to believe I could finesse everything and that I hurt two people in the process. I got hurt as well, but I deserve it. And I don’t regret getting my second divorce. Deb is a wonderful person. Truly. But we weren’t working as a couple. Regardless of Beth and our pathetic affair.
As for Beth, I was so heartbroken that she rejected me that I sent her a very cutting email. In response she called me an asshole and told me to fuck off and I did. And I hadn’t spoken with her or seen her for two years until I inevitably ran into her at our local market. It’s a small town. And it was fine. She was with her daughter and I made her laugh. And I even resisted the urge to text her afterwards and say something like, “good to see you. I hope you don’t hate me.” or something like that. Is that progress? I don’t know. Maybe. But sometimes I think I just have so many layers of scars that despite my deeply romantic desire to be in a long term, loving relationship, that perhaps it won’t ever happen again. Because I’m terrified. Of making horrible choices again. Of breaking a heart or having mine broken.
Now here comes the obligatory, meaningful quote at the end.
“Scars of pleasure, scars of pain… atmospheric changes make them sensitive again”
