Wayfaring MD: Missionary Physician
I like to highlight the hilarious in medicine as I write about patients, medical school, residency, medical missions, and whatever else strikes my fancy. Oh yeah, and I like to use GIFs!
Disclaimer:
HIPAA is for reals, folks. All of my "patient stories" have been changed to protect patient privacy. I will change any or all identifiers, including age, location, race/ethnicity, sex, medical history, and quotes.
First Scar Stories Submission!
As I’ve been nothing short of a klutz my entire life, it’s fitting that my body is riddled with silly scars. Fortunately, most of the childhood “learning how to ride a bike” and “using a scooter with no hands” ones have healed to a fairly undetectable state.
The two most prominent ones are on my shins - a white scrape on the anterior surface of my right ankle and a brown diagonal stripe across my left shin.
The one on the left can be summed up by noting that carrying a bicycle on your shoulder and trying to climb up a set of 24” stairs after having spent the better portion of the afternoon indulging in adult beverages is, if not a recipe for disaster, at least one for a big scar.
The one on the right was sustained back in high school. Always eager to both help my father with yardwork and to learn new things, I was thrilled when he offered to teach me how to use a chainsaw. Mom wasn’t home at the time so he repeatedly stressed to me that I was neither allowed to tell her about this nor was I allowed to somehow injure myself. After helping him fell a large tree in our yard, he let me jump in and start cutting it into more manageable pieces for burning. The chainsaw went right through the peripheral branches like butter, but took a little more patience as I got closer to the trunk. To get a better angle on a particularly thick cut, I kept inching my way closer to the tree until suddenly -CRACK- the free chunk of log snapped off and the ragged half-cut edge scraped down the front of my ankle. It certainly didn’t hurt very much, but the profuse bleeding prompted my dad to cut my practice session short (no pun intended).
SCAR STORIES:
In this case, the story is better than the scar. When I was in Malaysia, I went out to lunch with friends one day. We all piled in one car — seven of us. While we were eating, a storm started. A man came to our table and told us we should move the car because it looked like a tree was going to fall on it. Our fearless driver said it was fine because we were about to leave anyway. So we all piled up in the car to leave.
I was the last to get in the car, and as the girl in front of me was scooting over to make room for me, I heard a loud crack. I looked up and saw a tree falling right on me. In a split second I had to decide whether to push my way into the car or run. In that millisecond I couldn’t tell whether it was the palm tree falling or the much larger oak tree beside it. I figured if it was the oak, it was going to crush the car and I better make a run for it.
So I ran about 20 feet in the rain and slipped on the wet asphalt and fell. Only the tip of a palm frond brushed my leg as the tree fell. When I skidded on the asphalt, a little piece of gravel lodged in my ankle and I still have a scar from it.
As I fell I heard the tree hit the car and one of the girls inside scream. I got up, brushed myself off, and walked toward the car. I couldn’t tell how much damage the tree did at first. But everyone inside was totally unscathed. The tree brought a power line and a street light down on the car with it, and it ripped the door almost completely off the car.
The folks inside the car were freaking out because they didn’t see me run. They thought I got hit by the tree or something. The girl who was scooting over to make room for me was probably the most traumatized by us all because the tree came down about a foot from her seat, right where I had been standing.
We saw a clinic across the street, so we walked over and got my leg all cleaned out and dressed. And everyone lived happily ever after.
SCAR STORIES
I’d like to start a series of posts from me and my followers called Scar Stories. Here’s how it works: you submit a picture and a story of a scar on your body that has an interesting story attached to it. Then I post it!
To start out, I’ll tell one of mine. This scar is very faint, but if you look right at my wrist you’ll see a faint tan line. When I was in high school I was baking some banana bread at home one weekend. I burned my wrist on the oven as I was getting the bread out. I went to run cold water over it, but my stepdad, who is very superstitious and believes every old wives’ tale ever made up, decided instead that he was going to “talk the fire out of it”.
He told me that his grandmother taught him some secret incantation or some crap that would make the pain leave a burn. He said it was very secret and usually passed down to the women in his family but his grandmother taught him too.
I rolled my eyes and told him that was dumb, bu he insisted, so I let him do it. He closed his eyes and mumbled some mumbo-jumbo under his breath, and then looked up at me hopefully.
My little sister was watching very attentively. He said, “see, doesn’t it feel better now?” And of course, my answer was “NO! Just let me put cold water on it!”
I’ve burned myself several times on the oven just as bad as that time, and yet that is the only one that left a scar.
