August 2012

I stood naked on a wooden box in the meat-locker cold of the plastic surgery prep room, where two nurses watched as the surgeon marked my body with a black Sharpie.

He sat on a stool, eye level with my abdomen, leaning forward, drawing slowly. He paused, rolling the stool backward with his heels, and took in the surgical map of my front in its entirety.

I was freezing, and self-consciously I wondered if he had noticed my nipples, erect from the cold. If he had, he wasn’t showing it. Instead, he moved forward again and resumed the process of grabbing skin, charting lines, and scrutinizing the results. He took his time, but it was okay. I wanted him to go slowly. I wanted him to make sure the markings were perfectly placed.

In just minutes, he would be cutting those lines and “revising” the scar that ran the length of my torso—the scar made to save my life two years before.

Actually, there were more than ten scars all over my body from that night. Places where bones punctured skin and chest tubes inflated lungs. Where a seatbelt held me fast. Where crushed, sharp metal scored skin. Where an eight-inch plate braced a snapped humerus and a three-inch pin secured a fractured pelvis. Where wires and screws held a dislocated foot in place. Where IVs found the perfect veins to tap.

Some of the scars were short, some were long, some were hard to see—but almost all of them were vertical.

At right angles to a horizontal plane. Perpendicular. The same angle at which we collided when he ran that stop sign and into my car, T-boning it and me. My vertical scars, the places I was put back together, stitched back up.

And none of them compared to the disfiguring scar running the length of my abdomen. The scar I worried people could see through my clothing. The scar that hurt to the touch.

I hated this fucking scar.

“Should I try to save your belly button?” the surgeon asked, pulling the permanent marker away from my flesh and looking up just long enough to speak.

I was surprised by the option. No one would even consider it a navel as it was, smashed up and pushed away from its point of origin.

“No, it’s okay.”

Two years before, trauma doctors had not asked me what to save. They had not planned the carved path their knives would take, nor did they plot the route around my belly button. They were trying to save my life. They just cut.

“We had to have them do that,” my brother once said, pointing to my abdomen, “to be able to have you here now.”

That.

I could almost picture it. Me, unconscious and naked, blue paper medical drapes covering legs and arms, breasts and belly exposed. Me, flat on a stainless-steel table in a cold operating room, where white lights radiated and whispery instructions intensified. A quick surgical cut, the flash of blade piercing flesh, just above the sternum down, down, down around the umbilicus, down still farther to the pubis.

Done. That quick. A way to get inside.

Internal bleeding, lacerated organs, a ruptured spleen. My body left open for the bleeding to stop, the swelling to lessen. Closure of muscle tissue only, a wound vac in place until the outside could be surgically pulled together.

But I didn’t want that surgery, so the vacuum stayed in—for almost three months.

Maybe I should have gone back under the knife. Maybe it was my fault.

This monstrous scar, gaping, was still tender two years later. I thought about the accident every time I got dressed. I cried every time I saw myself naked.

Doctors assured me the wound would grow together on its own, but no one could tell me what it would look like. I imagined a normal, smooth surgical scar. Surely, I believed, since they had cut me straight, my belly would mend together that way, too.

I was wrong.

When the skin of my abdomen finally had closed three months later, a messy, uneven, and ugly scar ran its length: a ten-inch-long ribbon undulating from just above my ribcage to just above my pubic bone. Thick, new pink skin stretched wide like a yawn and bridged the fingertip-deep crevice to smooth the fault line of my abdomen’s landscape. The ruched tissue puckered in places and pulled in others, dividing my stomach, splitting subcutaneous fat, then narrowed to semi-thick closures at both ends.

Wow—such a poetic description, Aimee. And what bullshit.

The scar made me look as if I had another ass, but this one was in front. I still had my belly button, but it had been pushed to the side, forgotten. The entire area still hurt to the touch; the tissue of my abdomen had been bruised that deeply. My clothes even fit differently. I shopped for maternity tops—twelve years after my last child was born.

I fucking hated it.

The plastic surgeon drew huge circles on my flanks, what he called the areas of skin just under the ribs and above the waist, where he would also perform liposuction. Then he traced dotted vertical lines around the scar and my smashed-up navel, along with another line, horizontal this time, from hipbone to hipbone.

This was for the tummy tuck—another scar to add to the canvas.

After he finished with his magic marker, I stepped down from the box, turned, and looked in the mirror, avoiding his and the nurses’ eyes. I had never been completely naked in front of this many people before—at least not awake—and with each minute that passed in the cold, I became more embarrassed by my nudity. All of my flaws had been highlighted by a map of black ink stretching across the flesh of my abdomen, and somehow, I understood this strange picture. The skin around my scar would be cut away, the rest pulled together, smoothed tight, and stitched closed. The “disfigurement” a psychologist had once noted would be corrected, the excess fat and extra skin discarded.

“Okay,” the surgeon said, tucking the pen into his pocket and slapping the palms of his hands on his thighs. “It’s time! I’ll see you when you wake up.”

He stood up and smiled.

“You’ll be great, Aimee,” he reassured me, and I knew in that moment that he was the one who would be great, not me.

Nonetheless, it was time.

I

Alice: “How long is forever?”

White Rabbit: “Sometimes, just one second.”

~Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

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