Surgical Scar Quotes

An old drinking buddy of mine had come home from a two-week binge with a rose tattooed on his arm. Around the blossom was written Fuck ‘em all/and sleep till noon. His wife made him have it surgically removed, but she hated the scar even more. Every time he touched it, he grinned. Some years later she tried to remove the grin with a wine bottle, but she only knocked out a couple of teeth, which made the grin even more like a sneer. The part that I don’t understand, though, is that they are still married. He is still grinning and she is still hating it.

We were beginning to see that the medical profession, at the time still over 90 percent male, had transformed childbirth from a natural event into a surgical operation performed on an unconscious patient in what approximated a sterile environment. Routinely, the woman about to give birth was subjected to an enema, had her pubic hair shaved off, and was placed in the lithotomy position - on her back, with knees up and crotch spread wide open. As the baby began to emerge, the obstetrician performed an episiotomy, a surgical enlargement of the vaginal opening, which had to be stitched back together after birth. Each of these procedures came with a medical rationale: The enema was to prevent contamination with feces; the pubic hair was shaved because it might be unclean; the episiotomy was meant to ease the baby's exit. But each of these was also painful, both physically and otherwise, and some came with their own risks, Shaving produces small cuts and abrasions that are open to infection; episiotomy scars heal m ore slowly than natural tears and can make it difficult for the woman to walk or relieve herself for weeks afterward. The lithotomy position may be more congenial for the physician than kneeling before a sitting woman, but it impedes the baby's process through the birth canal and can lead to tailbone injuries in the mother.

Some of the pictures have knife slashes across the bodies. Along the ribs. Some of them neatly decapitate the head of the naked body with scratches. These exist alongside the genuine scars mentioned before, the appendix scar and other non-surgical. They reflect each other, the eye moves back and forth. The cuts add a three-dimensional quality to each work. Not just physically, though you can almost see the depth of the knife slashes, but also because you think of Bellocq wanting to enter the photographs, to leave his trace on the bodies. When this happened, being too much of a gentleman to make them pose holding or sucking his cock, the camera on a timer, when this happened he had to romance them later with a knife. You can see the care he took defiling the beauty he had forced in them was as precise and clean as his good hands which at night had developed the negatives, floating the sheets in the correct acids and watching the faces and breasts and pubic triangles and sofas emerge. The making and destroying coming from the same source, same lust, same surgery his brain was capable of.

words for doing harm. I have always remembered her counsel and followed it. My boil was surgically treated. A noticeable scar, left by the doctor’s incision, is present today. On my right forearm is a constant reminder of the power in man’s sheer word.

Towards closing time, he unbuttoned his cheap jacket and hoisted up his shirt. The scar was there, pale white and smooth against yellow, wrinkled skin. “And there is the man who was with me,” he said, as someone handed him another large whiskey, “Master MacMahon.” He lifted his glass to me with a shaking hand. I tried to remember the boy of that snowy March morning, wild, tearful eyes, a sob, hands pressed to a dark, spreading stain. I remembered him vividly, as I had held him against the huckster’s door, pale face and red, wet lips. But he was not the boaster who stood before me, whiskey wet upon his chin’s stubble. Only the scar joined them, surgical, unnaturally smooth, time’s umbilicus.

He felt each cold metal blade that sliced into his hideously scarred flesh to allow more tools to probe and stabilize his damaged internal organs. He squirmed as shattered bones were replaced by plastoid, and cringed as lasers grafted the new limbs into place. At some point, he overheard a surgical droid explaining to Palpatine that he would require a special helmet and backpack to cycle air in and out of his damaged lungs. Despite this damage, throughout the entire procedure, he never stopped screaming.

Microscopic analyses of tendon surgical patients show fraying of collagen fibers, weakened collagen cross-links, and scar tissue–like disruptions in the collagen matrix. Tendon repair cells are present, and inflammatory cells are typically absent

The things I read about cutters and cutting seem to trivialize it. Yet, hardly anyone does it past adolescence, and almost none of the cutting sessions end in suicide. To me that would indicate that it is a part of the coping toolset of a young person who would really like to live through something. And like surgical scars, it’s a marker: There was a sickness there, and someone endeavored to remove it.

Patients diagnosed with cancer and treated with our multisdisciplinary approaches are knocked down physically and emotionally, but they pick themselves up off the canvas and struggle on. They carry the reminders of the acute and chronic side effects from cytotoxic chemotheraly and radiation-induced skin and functional-organ changes. They endure the scars, complications and impairments imposed by the blades of surgical oncologists like me. Though sometimes they want to, they don't leave. They remain. They maintain. I respect the effort, the invincible spirit, and the patients, who don't give a damn about the odds or probabilities, they are going out swinging. We are tag-team partners in oncology, entering the ring to attack cancer with every move and method we know. Hell, I'll even throw a few chairs if it will help.

Next was Tyler, who startled me being a girl. She slunk in behind her mother, her dark curly hair down. Tyler was also 8 and had already tried to kill herself twice. The last time, the drain cleaner she had drunk had eaten away part of her esophagus. Now her throat bore an artificial tube and numerous red-rimmed surgical scars in ghoulish testimony to her skill.