Many people are scarred. Like mine, each one has a story of its own to tell. I have multiple scars on my body. Some are from the accident and some are not. Some are a product of a sad story and some are a product of a hilarious story. I have one scar in particular that I hated and got angry at every time I looked in the mirror. It is a scar on the right side of my face that runs vertical across my cheek. Time has taught me to embrace what I now call my scar of courage. People always ask me about the scar on my face. It is the first thing that people see and it makes them curious. I can see it in their eyes when they are talking to me. They focus in on my scar and I can see them looking at it while they are talking to me. I do not get offended or feel weird when it happens. I am guilty of doing the same exact thing. In college I had a professor who had a long scar going across her neck. Every time I went to her class I found myself staring at her scar wondering what kind of story it could tell. I would go over scenarios in my head of what could have happened. It drove me crazy. I wanted to know. I never had the guts to ask. I figured she would tell the class if she wanted us to know.
Many people think that the scar on my face is from the accident. My body was broken and I sustained head injuries but I did not receive any cuts on my face that would have left scars. It was a mistake made by the hospital that gave me my scar. The nurses that checked on me throughout the day did not notice that the latex tape used to hold down my tubes were burning holes in my skin. How did they overlook it? Nobody will never know. My mom is the one that discovered it. She was my watchful eye.
10 days after the accident my mom noticed what looked like a very painful bubbling around the latex tape on my cheek. She yelled in a panic for the nurses to come look at it. The nurses immediately started to remove all of the tape from my body. Which was a lot of tape in a lot places. Each place they removed tape they noticed that it had eaten through my skin down to the muscle. I had developed an allergy to latex due to overexposure of the material. They had to call the burn unit in to clean the wounds twice a day.
It took 6 weeks for the wounds to close up. My mom was recommended to try Mederma to help combat the scarring. Laser treatment was kind of new back then and I was able to get two laser treatments as well. The scar tissue did break up a little and we did get good results. None the less my scars are still with me this day but they do not define who I am. They tell a story of my tribulations and triumphs.