Only three things are for sure in this world: death, taxes, and scars.
It’s with consideration of time, not conditions, that you gain scars. Unless you’ve been raised in a bubble or you’ve got freakish healing powers like Wolverine.
Regardless, the common person has a few to show off, maybe among beers with friends, like in that scene in Jaws.
So, like the typical unlucky person who fumbles over everything in the dark, I’ve got some scars all over my body. But nothing compared to it.
The scar.
I have a scar along my chin, just over an inch in length, which I got it just over 8 years ago. In the meantime, it’s faded significantly since then. But people still notice it, how could you not? Only one person has ever asked me what happened without me leading into it, and I feel blessed to this day that it’s at least in a location where I don’t have to explain often what happened.
Having a scar is a funny thing, because they’re definitely a part of you, but so many people treat them like they define you. Tina Fey recounts in Bossypants how she could gauge people on what type of person they were depending on what they said about the rather-prominent scar on her cheek. I don’t think my scar defines me at all; it’s actually something I completely forget about unless I catch a glimpse of my chin in a mirror.
Scars seem to bring people together because they’re, essentially, a mark left from a story that escalated to extremes. No one typically gets a scar from making a cup of coffee in the kitchen, but weirder things have happened.
You’re probably dying to know… how did I get my scar?
Short version: I fainted in woodworks class in the 8th grade.
Long version: It was the morning was May 16, 2006 if I remember right. It was distinctly different from others. Math isn’t my strong suit, but to my surprise I was given 80% on the quiz that morning! I remember thinking, “Wow! This is my day! Nothing will go wrong!”
Moving onto the next class. We do rotations of art electives in our 8th grade to decide for the upcoming years what we want to take. So I was in my 8th grade Woodworks trial class that day, and it must have been one of the early days of the trial because our teacher gathered us around the sanding machine to teach us how to use it before letting us go crazy with the piggybanks we were constructing.
He went on into this story about a student who had gone there likely a few years prior… what was his name? Ok, let’s call him Kyle. Because I don’t remember if he even named this student, but Kyle seems fitting.
Kyle was in Woodworks, and naturally gravitated towards making a mini skateboard, because that was the craze back then for teenage boys. (Do you realize how much I’ve aged myself by mentioning that? Are mini skateboards even a thing anymore? Someone call their nephew and ask right now.)
So this kid Kyle had the block of wood at his disposal. But a chuck of wood doesn’t make a good mini skateboard, unless it’s stick thin. So he decided to sand it.
From the sounds of it, he sanded away, and everything was going swimmingly. Eventually, he would have a sick new toy to play with while ignoring his teachers.
Until.
The block slipped out from under Kyle’s fingers, and his fingers slid against the sanding machine.
In all of my 14 years of life up until that point, I didn’t really think I was squeamish. My father is a hunter and I mean, I don’t like blood but it doesn’t bother me. But hearing someone describe an gory scene is much worse. This was the start of my problem.
He went on to describe how a friend of Kyle’s had come up to him and told him that ‘something happened’. The teacher walked over to the Kyle’s desk to find his face had turned white.
In a very lovely description, the teacher told us how Kyle had sanded his fingertips right off! He could see his bones! Writers, take notes! That’s some good imagery for you!
So we’re still standing there gathered, watching our teacher theatrically describe this event. The moral of the story was to treat the machine with the respect something that can rip your fingertips off deserves, and to let the teacher know if an accident occurs.
I felt this churning in my stomach, and simultaneously I started to feel weaker. I’d never felt anything like this, what exactly is happening? My friend was standing to my left. I leaned over to her and whispered, “I don’t feel so good.”
That was the last thing I remembered, before waking up on the floor.
Waking up after all of this was very strange because I’ve never been out like that. I came out of this dream-like state asking a million different questions: Why am I on the ground? Why is everyone looking at me? Why did I just spit my teeth out?
My teacher and the first-aid attendant told me I fainted and I was just so confused. I started sobbing because I had no idea what was going on, why I didn’t remember fainting, and if this was even real because I didn’t feel any pain.
Inevitably, my mother received a call from the school about the fact that I was “involved in an accident in woodworking class.”
It’s important to note here that any mother’s first thing to think is “My child is missing a finger!” with that wording. My dad (yes, the hunter.) lost two of his toes in a workplace accident back in 1990. You could say she’s accustomed to phone calls about missing digits.
In this situation, my mom doesn’t even miss a beat and thinks upon receiving this phone call, “Jesus Christ, she’s just like her father.”
So mom was around and came to pick me up to bring me to the hospital, since I guess it wasn’t too pressing, but I did need stitches. A cut made by the impact of your mandible on the concrete ground would produce a hefty wound, I suppose.
We waited in ER for what felt like hours, with vending machine food that I could hardly eat because my freshly cracked teeth weren’t having it. It was an insane day and at the end of it, it took 14 stitches to sew my chin back up and two temporary caps on my teeth to fix the damage.
When I came back to school the next day, the 8th grade boys were teasing me about how I had hair on my chin before they did, in reference to the ugly stitches protruding from my face. That was the first day I learned that teenage boys can be the worst, and I hold that belief to this day.
I also missed a French test due to fainting in woodworks class, so my teacher just gave me a A on it and let us watch movies.
It’s easily the biggest thing to happen to me, so I feel lucky it was only 14 stitches in my chin and some missing teeth.
And if this incident were to define me? I’d define myself by the sense of pride I had when the teacher told me he used me as an example for a new rule in his class: If you feel sick, go sit down.