Strange topic, I know. How many of you grew up with a scar(s)? I’m talking from early childhood–elementary school or earlier. Especially girls, and especially visible scars. How did you get your scar? How did other kids react? How did it affect you? Does it still as an adult?
I was bitten by a dog when I was 2. He basically ate half of my upper lip. Torn right off. These are actually my earliest memories… going to the hospital, etc.
They didn’t have the lip to reattach, so they made do with what they had and just pulled some of the skin from outside and some of the skin from inside and sewed it together.
It was bright red at first, and the redness progressively faded to “skin color” year by year. It’s only vaguely pinker than my other skin now (I’m 31). It has gotten less noticable with age, but it’s still something that people notice right away when they meet me.
Growing up as a girl with a scar on your face is hard. Even as late as high school I was called names like “Scarface” and had people say rude things to me… two I remember specifically:
“Did your face get caught in a blender? ha ha ha!”
“Did you get run over by a lawnmower on your way to school? Har har har!”
My scar was one of the big reasons I never thought I was pretty and even at 31 it makes me sad if I think about it. Most of the time I don’t think about it, though… unless I’m putting makeup on or something–I have to “fake it” with lipstick on that side.
It’s not so bad anymore. For one thing, my face is bigger–it seemed to take up more space when I was little. It not being red helps, too. It is much more sensitive to pain than the rest of my face, which seems strange to me–shouldn’t scar tissue be less sensitive? Anyway, here is a picture of how it looks these days: http://fathom.org/opalcat/cam/opalscar.jpg
I have a scar that is very much like yours. I was born with a cleft lip, and it was fixed within a couple days. I don’t even think about it, and most people (at least that I know of ) don’t notice it or aren’t rude enough to say anything about it. It looks like a Z under my nose to my lip. No biggie.
well, let’s see. when i was four my brother tripped me and i hit my head on the edge of a trampoline and got 21 stitches in my forehead. luckily for me, the scar is right on the hairline, so it’s not too noticible.
however, i do have birthmarks. there’s one on my nose and one on my chin. these days (i’m 18 now) they just look like little scars from childhood or something…the one on my nose is hardly noticible now, and the one on my chin still has a bit of shape to it, it’s most visible when i smile. but when i was a baby, they were big and three-dimensional and bright red. throughout the years, they have slowly shrunk while turning pink, purple, and eventually back to skin color. i used to get teased all the time, all the way up to high school. i was definitely self-conscious of it, especially when i was younger. but yeah, kids can be very cruel. now people notice it, but they just think i hurt myself when i was younger and ask what happened to my chin, sometimes right away, sometimes not for a long time after they meet me. some people never notice.
I had a big ol’ mole on my left cheek. It got hella hairy too. Got a lot of teasing about that, but I learned how to simply roll my eyes and get on with it. In the end, by the time I reached teenagerhood it didn’t bother me one jot. It was a bit like Cyrano de Bergerac – “you pick on my nose? Is that the best you can do?”
When I was 16, I went to a new doctor who took one look and said, “aha, we can remove that.” I actually said no – it’s part of me and I’m happy with that. But then he quoted me statistics on these things becoming cancerous and I changed my mind.
So then I had a big scar on my left cheek instead. And it’s still there. 99.9999% of the time, I don’t even remember its existence.
I have a mole on my nose that I’m going to have removed.
I also got… well not teased, teasing implies playful. I went to a very small, very conservative religious school for elementary school. My family was the only democratic one in the whole school, I think. I was raised with liberal views. The other kids weren’t. Even before I knew what that all meant, the differences were apparent. Instead of “cowboys and indians” or “cops and robbers” the kids on the playground had a game called “kill the commie” that involved chasing me around throwing rocks.
On my second birthday I was playing outside with my little birthday party friends. I climed up onto a car bumper that had been in an accident and was bent with the edge facing up. Jumping on it I slipped and the bumper cut right into my face. It hit my nose first, then my cheeks, missing each eye by a fraction. The scars on my cheeks are pretty much only noticable to me. The scar on my nose is noticable but only if you’re really close.
I don’t know if this counts as a scar but you know how babies seem to have an extra joint/fold by their elbows? Well I still have the marks from when my arms were folded all weird
I had various surgeries as a young young child, so I grew up with a long scar from below my neck down to my abdomen. So my entire front area is a jumble of long deep scars from open heart surgery and other stuff (one of those surgeries resulted in them cutting off my bellybutton; they never replaced it so I grew up with no bellybutton either). I used to be embarassed about it when I was little, but now I hardly think about it. In fact, I’m rather proud of all my scars.
I was in a car accident when I was nine. I have a couple of scars where my chin hit the dash. I don’t remember being teased too much about it. I think I was teased more about the black eye at the time.
I also have a birthmark along my left jaw line that people commented on more than the scar. It looks a bit like a dirty spot and when I was young kids would say I didn’t wash. That was pretty much over with by the time I was out of elementary school though.
I have a scar on my left shoulder and another on my right pectoral. Both are from university accidents involving medieval weaponry, so I can’t rightly say that i grew up with them.
The one on my forhead is a different matter. It’s a two-inch long vertical scar that’s right in the centre of my forehead like some of weird religious symbol. I got it when I was about 9, and I remember running around in the playground at school at slipping on some wet leaves and headbutting the edge of a metal fire-escape. I don’t remember if I got stitches, but I do remember a lot of blood.
I’ve always been strangely proud of my scar, and no-one’s ever teased me about it. Most of the other kids actually thought it looked pretty cool, and my Dad was always going on about how I now had a “number one” on my head to prove I was the first-born child…
Oh and like Rabid Child I have scars on my torso. They came in adulthood though and no one but my mother and husband have ever seen them, so no comments there.
When I was an infant of seven weeks’ age I had abdominal surgery. They sewed me up with tiny little stitches but as I got bigger, so did the scars the stitches left. I have a line of four strange little puckered scars on my abdomen that look like old stab wounds. Of course most people never see them, but on those occasions when they do–at poolside, for instance–my scars are a source of great evil fun. When someone asks about the scars, I tell them:
“When I was seven years old, I spent the summer on my grandpa’s farm. My cousins and I were in the barn taking turns jumping out of the loft into a pile of hay–but we didn’t know that someone had left a pitchfork in the hay, and its tines were pointing straight up–”
I’ve never been able to finish this creative tale because the listener always BEGS me to stop here. I love doing this!
I have a scar on my knee from a rollerblading accident when I was around 13. I tore up my hand, knee, face, wrists and elbows from that fall, but the knee was the worst one and the only one that is really visible anymore.
I was never teased about it - in fact, most people want to touch it. While prodding it, they always ask whether I can feel any sensation, and are always a little surprised when I tell them that I can. It’s not a particularly attractive scar, so I don’t like to wear short skirts. Swimsuits aren’t a problem, but above-the-knee skirts tend to highlight the scar.
Here is a picture of it. If my knee looks a little funny, it’s because I have it straightened out, and it’s a bird’s eye view. When my knee is bent the tissue isn’t raised so much and it doesn’t look as cool.
My daughter was a preemie so they kept her in the hospital until she reached four pounds. In that time they noticed a growth in her belly, which turned out to be an ovarian cyst. So she got part of her ovary taken out which only left a little scar (3 inches).
Then we brought her home for one day and she got something called pyloric stenosis, which is where the outer layer of stomach muscle locks closed thus not allowing any food into the stomach.
Luckily they were able to use the same incision.
As she grew though, the scar did too. She’s 8 now and really doesn’t feel self conscious about it yet. (It’s probably 8 inches in length now) The good part is that a shirt covers it and that it’s horizontal so it’s not all that noticeable when she’s in a bathing suit.
I think the trials of it all make her such a confident strong person anyway.
I have several, a few of which are visible when I’m normally clothed, including one on my face. I really cannot remember anybody ever commenting on them; but then, it’s not like I’m Dorian Gray or anything.
I have one on my chin, from an adventure at age 4 in which I apparently decided that climbing up onto stacked chairs to change a record album was a good idea. The chairs came unstacked, and I went splat onto my chin.
After some adventures in the ER, it was stitched up, and I apparently managed to tear out the stitches once. The scar is near the point of my chin, but underneath, so it’s not very noticeable anymore. Believe me, there was plenty of other stuff to tease the shortest, least coordinated, most introverted and bookwormy kid in the class about.
I’ve since acquired some much more noticeable ones, mostly on my left leg…long story. Those are much more visible, and I am sometimes self-conscious about them, particularly the large dent in the front of my shin where I had a rod drilled directly into the tibia for 6 months to anchor the frame that was holding the rest of my leg together, and a few holes around my ankle where the pins went all the way through and out the other side. That was no fun, believe me.
I was involved in a bicycle-automobile accident when I was nine. I was the one of the bicycle. The end result of it all was that I got a lot of scars. I have about eight small circular scars on my left thigh and lower leg from the pins used when I was in traction. I have a six-inch long scar down the front of my lower leg from an operation and a compound fracture. I have a four-inch long scar on my right lower back from a bone graft. I have several inch long scars on my head from where my head impacted with the street.
Over time, the pin scars on my leg have faded with time. The big one my leg has gotten a more skin-tone hue as well, but it will always be noticeable. A small scar on my forehead is the only visible evidence of my head trauma from the accident (the rest can only be seen if I get a really short haircut). The scar on my back is still there, but it’s mostly obscured by the top of my pants.
I was never teased about my scars. I guess the kids just thought it was bad enough missing half a year being in the hospital or at home in a body cast. However, that didn’t stop them from picking on me because of my weight, for being smart, for being a Star Trek fan before it was cool, and other things that elementary/junior high kids can find to poke fun at you with.
The only time I felt self-conscious of my scars was a couple years ago when a couple friends talked me into shaving my hair really short. I wasn’t too happy that all my head scars were now very visible. One of my friend’s said, “It’s okay. You look like a badass.”
