More Battle Scars
Yesterday, I talked about physical scars that people can see—ones that are external. Today, I want to talk about physical scars that are not visible—internal scars.
I’m not talking about emotional scars, or spiritual scars—those are a subject for another day. I’m talking about actual physical injuries that have left a lingering problem—stiffness from scar tissue, pain and weakness, or even deformities. Again, each of them has a deeper meaning for me.
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The first is my left arm. Yes. The whole arm. I have put my left arm through a lot over the years—but two instances stand out.
I broke my left arm spectacularly at the age of eight, by falling eight feet onto the hard-packed dirt of the school playground. Not-quite-four-foot tall girl skinning the cat on a bar eight feet off the ground and losing her grip at the nadir of the flip. Yep. Broke that arm beautifully. It healed well, but I can tell you when the weather’s going to be cold and damp.
And then there was the belly-flop. And I don’t mean into a pool. When my older son was three years old, we went to the local park to play, taking his tricycle along. He was doing great until he strayed too close to the steep drop-off on the west side of the park. The trike started down the hill, and my son was heading straight for a huge oak tree at the bottom. He was screaming in terror. I ran after him.
When you are running down a steep hill, you have to lean back against the pull of gravity. If you don’t lean back far enough, you will fall forward. I forgot that I was no longer 18 and 100 pounds, and I didn’t lean back far enough. I flopped right down on my face and skidded fifty or sixty feet down the hill, scraping an amazing amount of skin off the front of my body. Because I was reaching for my son, my left arm was extended in front of me when I fell. (I managed to get to my feet, and caught up with my son in time to snatch him off the trike by the back of his shirt just three inches before he struck that tree. My son was safe, but the trike wasn’t so lucky.)
So when I fell and skidded down the hill, I wrenched my shoulder badly, and did something—not sure what—to my wrist. I didn’t have insurance at the time, so no doctor for me. And though it hurt abominably for months, it did finally seem to heal and I regained normal function in both shoulder and wrist. Most of the time. Sometimes, that shoulder goes stiff and moving it causes excruciating pain. But it usually lasts only a few days and then goes away. Same thing with the wrist. It’s usually fine and pain-free. But every so often, it starts to hurt, and when it’s hurting, I can’t lift anything or grip anything with my left hand. I usually just put a rigid brace on it for a week or so, and it resolves itself.
The intermittent pain in my left shoulder and wrist remind me that just because there has been healing does not necessarily mean that there is no longer pain. And that pain may not be constant … it may come and go depending on circumstances beyond the injured person’s control.
And every time the injuries act up again, I am reminded of the sacrifices that parents willingly make to protect their children. I didn’t stop to think that if I ran after my son, I might get hurt. I didn’t stop to think that I might not be able to grab him in time. My entire focus was on getting him off of that trike before it crashed. When I fell, I didn’t pay attention to the blood and pain. The single thought in my mind was “save my son!” It might have been a prayer. I have a Father who ignored His own pain and suffered dreadfully in His desire to save me. I like to think that, in that small moment, I gained a better understanding of His sufferings.
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There’s a knot on one of the bones in my right wrist. On the playground at my elementary school, we had a set of parallel bars and a balance beam that were set perpendicular to one another. The beam was about six inches off the ground, and the bars were only about three feet high. So they seemed pretty safe. My friends and I loved to either run full tilt or cartwheel down the beam, land on the beam in a roundoff, and then leap from the beam to the parallel bars, swing under the near bar, and flip our knees up over the far bar so that we ended hanging upside down. As you can imagine, this maneuver required careful judging of speed and split-second timing. I was quite good at it.
But one day I took an extra step back on the beam, hoping I could throw two cartwheels before my roundoff and leap. Mistake. I missed the parallel bars by an inch, and crashed to the ground. I hit the ground so hard that I passed out. (Good thing they were not any higher or further off the ground!) I also injured my right wrist. At the time, we thought it was just sprained, and the doctors splinted it firmly, but did not put a cast on it. But I now believe that I broke one of the small bones in my wrist, because there is a hard, bony knot on that wristbone—you can’t see it when my wrist is at rest, but when I grip something tightly, it looks as if there were a marble stuck under my skin.
That hard, bony knot reminds me that when I think I have identified a problem and the solution to it, I need to be sure to look deeper, just in case the problem is more complicated than it seemed. A problem can disguise itself, and lurk just out of sight until the right movement reveals the ugly remnants of a neglected or improperly treated wound.
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I believe that all scars—internal or external, visible or invisible—can teach us something important. Whether it’s the mistake that caused the initial injury, or the aftereffects of the wound and its healing, there are lessons in all of the small marks, deformities, and pains that we suffer. We just have to know where to look.