Roy Exum
In the summer of my 16th year my family was at the beach vacationing when I took the car one morning and drove to nearby Charleston, S.C., going down by the Navy yard until I spied a tattoo parlor. I had a desire to get a tattoo of a pretty lady put on the bottom of my foot. No one would ever see it and I figured if I wiggled my toes just right she’d wiggle a little too.
“Mr. Tattoo” didn’t think it was nearly as funny as I did and promptly threw me out, which of course only spawned the next adventure. I used to do stuff like that a lot. So the tattoo attempt flashed back yesterday morning when I did something I’ve never done before. I stood in front of a full-length mirror, buck naked, and took stock of the body that has carried my soul for the last 64 years. What a vessel!
I don’t care who you pick, less than 1 percent of the population who is completely naked at age 64 still looks very racy, or sporty, in the nude. I started at my feet and, because I’ve worn prescription orthotics most of my life, they look okay. There is a long scar down the middle of both, where a doctor in Virginia harvested the tendons from my middle toes one time to keep my elbow working, and on the back of my Achilles tendon there is an ugly scar from where I misjudged a sharp step once during a getaway.
You can still see when some clumsy guy’s football cleat took a bite out of my ankle and there are a number of insignificant scars on my shins. I’ve still got bits of black cinders in one knee from running track and both of my knees have six-inch scars on each sides where doctors at Mayo Clinic also harvested tendons. Today my right knee now has about 60 cc’s of fluid that needs to be drained again from my torn meniscus.
My most impressive scar runs all the way from my left hip down the side to my knee. That 16-inch gash came when one enterprising medico stripped the lining of a big muscle to make a fake cartilage for my elbow, which didn’t work. In the middle of my legs is a vasectomy scar, although you can’t see it, which allowed me to “keep the ocean but lose the fish,” so to speak.
Both of my hip bones on either side are scarred from where doctors have borrowed bone to fuse other bones and the scar in the small of my back is a lot bigger than last year. You see, the cyst on my spine returned and we had to do some heavier work in late January. Doctor said he had never seen anything like it. Me neither.
There is a four-inch scar between my neck and right shoulder from a surgery in St. Louis where they released a nerve that was causing trouble. When they did, the surgeon accidentally banged another nerve that caused my right lung not to work for six months. (Nerves regenerate about one inch a month.) That was the time I woke up in the middle of surgery, too, and I was the only one who thought it was funny before they got me back in lala land.
On my neck is the scar from the scariest surgery. I had a big lump everybody thought was cancer but when the late Dr. Banks got it out, it was just a clogged-up gland of some kind. You can barely see the scars on my left hand. One Sunday morning I showed up at the breakfast table wearing a leather glove and, after causing raised eyebrows all around the table, was promptly taken to Erlanger where my broken hand was stitched up. (I took a motorcycle through a curve a little too hot on the way home around midnight. Darned gravels.)
My right arm is legendary and stars in a lot of medical books. Since June of 1990 it has endured 131 surgeries in seven different states, the last just in December when the osteomyelitis came back. I crushed it in a Jeep accident in 1971 and it got infected. Somewhere there is a picture of me on a slalom water ski three days after I finally got out of the hospital way back then.
My problem, all along, is that I am too eager to keep on living. Once I leave the hospital, the bandages, splints, and casts come off quickly and I seem to ruin whatever the doctors tried so hard to fix. By the time I finally got the message, the infections that my particular “osteo” breeds were well entrenched and are always ready to party. The doctors treat my “staph” with one drug and my “strep,” MRSA and other strains think its champagne. Infections are deadly.
So a lot of those 131 surgeries were “washouts,” where they take you back to the operating room and literally hose away the infectious slime, pack the wound with antibiotics, and wait until the next day to go again. One time at Mayo Clinic I had eight surgeries in 12 days so, as I stood there naked yesterday, I realized how lucky I am to even have it. It has more stripes (scars) than a tiger. It also has so many stories even I can’t remember them.
Today my right arm is mostly ornamental, about five inches shorter than my left arm. My fingers on my right hand work well but where my elbow used to be is today a void of nothing more than nerves, veins, and meat. I don’t worry about it – just roll up my right sleeve and type with my other hand. But, yes, the ordeal has been a great teacher; never complain because it doubles the power of the problem, and keep a sense of humor.
My face has been cut up a bunch. The funniest stitches I ever had came when I was a student at Ole Miss. I woke up one morning after a night of wilding at the fraternity house and there was a note safety-pinned to my tee-shirt: “Roy, get your stitches taken out next Thursday.” So I started feeling around, searching for the stitches and finally found them inside my bottom lip. I later was told a Tarzan stunt the evening before had gone awry. (I’ve always been a threat to take a dare.)
My lips? Lordy, I’ve had more stitches in my lips than I’ve been kissed. Same for my eyebrows – I can’t tell you how many times my brows had been shaved and sewn up. The Lord gave us eyebrows to cover up the scars. Boy, have I ever made use of that cosmetology.
My forehead is where I got my very first sutures. I was five years old and the men up on our farm were building a long white wooden fence. The boss showed me where the next vertical post was to be placed and I ran and got a little hand-held pickaxe. I got down on my knees and swung the pick end mightily, not noticing the guide wire.
The wire sprang the pick like a trampoline, the flat side bonging me in the head and the flat blade slicing through my leather hat leaving a five-stich gash. They took me to the doctor’s office above Robinson’s drug store in Dayton and I can vividly, to this day, remember my first sniff of ether. Got a pocket full of candy for enduring the tragedy but was told I couldn’t swim in the pool for two weeks. (The dogs and I would sneak off, skinny-dipping in the creek.)
Another time -- this is true -- I bit my tongue in two and had to have to sewn back together. Mom and Dad were out-of-town and I also vividly remember my “prize” when they got home was a box of bubble-gum cigars. You can also see where my elementary school crony Bradley Weeks once inadvertently buried his two front teeth in my skull.
Don’t misunderstand. I don’t like stitches but I can sure attract them. I have learned lessons from sutures, such as never pick up a squirrel that has just attempted “critter-cide” because a hurt animal can darn near take a little boy’s finger off.
So there I stood in full naked glory Thursday morning and I couldn’t find much skin, especially on the front side, that hasn’t endured a trauma or two. Lately a lot of my hair has fallen out, which I am assured will grow back when the mononucleosis goes away, and you can hardly see where Dr. Brezenski took that basil-cell deal out of my cheek this winter. I am supposed to get my cataract fixed next week.
For some odd reason, the moment I finished taking the first full-body inventory of my life, I envisioned what it would be like if, instead of all the scars, there was a tattoo of a mermaid, a hunting dog, a skull-and-crossbones, a Lolita or two, my children’s birthdays, and each name of all the girls I have loved?
As I pondered such a landscape, I reached and felt the knot of scar tissue in my left ear, a reminder of the time I got a brass ring put there so I’d look like a pirate. Wait, this was before anybody had pieced parts and, when I got to school, a coach looked at me and said, “Pirate! You look like a parrot.” So I quickly removed my newest feature, never to wear it again, but, you know, if all my scars were tattoos, I really would look exactly like a parrot today. Maybe even a peacock.
Just know this, if I was a car I’d have a passle of dents but I would not change a minute, an hour, or a day in the last 64 years that me and my body have spent on this earth. There is still a lot of living yet to be done, but yesterday morning it was plain to see we sure have called on needles and thread a lot.
royexum@aol.com