Will it leave a scar?

I am grateful that my body has braved almost every degradation cancer has thrown its way, but after months on steroids to control radiation-induced brain swelling (a “swelled head,” as it were), I have become a stranger to myself. I am as large and unwieldy as the balloon-twisted Michelin man. I have a fatty “buffalo hump” on the back of my neck; my t-shirts are strangling me. My full-moon face, the classic steroid “look,” has erased the defining edges of many of my features: Chubby chipmunk cheeks slough into a triple-mogul chin; my mouth has disappeared behind a hanging wrinkle. Bald spots punctuate my mangey crew cut, but my cheeks are covered with a fast-growing downy fuzz. Every morning I encounter this Ogre in the mirror (Shriek! Shrek!) as if I have been bewitched each night.

This transformation was not immediate. In the bathroom drawers are the lipsticks, lotions, blushes and brushes I once used to paint-by-numbers a face I recognized. There was a familiar outline to be filled in. But as the weeks went by, my face expanded into a sea of puff pastry. My eyes, constantly tearing, have receded behind swollen lids. My vision is blurry. On bad days, I look contagious; on good days, sad and sick. A chance reflection in a storefront window revealed a face not at all my own. Hand to glass, I stared back at this stranger, my profoundly surreal body double.

I would like to say that I eventually adjusted to my condition. Just another bump on the Road of Many Bumps, and this bump merely a blow to my vanity. Of course, it is off-putting when acquaintances do a double take as they try and sometimes fail to recognize me. Friends and family offer murmurs of reassurance, but too much reassurance frequently confirms one’s doubts. Strangers look and look away, and sometimes look back again, their gaze as invasive as their upbringing is bad. In line for a movie many years ago, I turned towards the man standing behind me just as he turned from talking to his friends towards me. The right side of his face, which had been hidden from me, was burned down to the bone. All I can hope 30-years later is that I smiled and didn’t look away, but the evidence—personal, literary, cinematic—is against such a generous response. We look away. From every Joker, and from every Hollywood villain from Scarface to Scar whose psychic wound manifests as physical difference.[*] More inspirational stories —Mask, Wonder— encourage us to turn back. To go beyond the superficial and skin-deep and face the world with whatever face we’ve got. Yet every time I see my reflection, I pause in head-shaking disbelief and search for signs of recognition. Who am I without my face?

There is no more intimate record of the self than the story of one’s scars. Mine is a road map of mishaps: Youthful rough housing, the clumsiness of middle age, kitchen accidents, paper cuts, tipsy revels, sober stupidity, the daily assault of sharp edges, the predictability of paper cuts. On my right wrist there is a scar about the size of a nickel from spilling sugar syrup on it while making flan. My dinner guests and I watched in drunken fascination as the sugar, hot as lava, burned an impressive hole.

That scar is still quite conspicuous. As are many of the scars from childhood. Tilting back on a barstool in my grandparent’s beach house (I was repeatedly warned against this, but I was 11), I finally fell over. Two large shards of wood left two jagged holes in my right calf. Blood and globs of yellow fat spilled out of the deep cuts. The clinic “down the shore” sewed me up. Frankenstein’s seamstress could have done a better job. Ditto my largest scar from the colon resection in 2015 to remove the original lump of cancer. It is 6-inches-long and extends from belly button to bikini line. While rooting around in my intestines, my surgeon was happy to discover many inches of “redundant” colon that made fitting everything back together as easy as a DIY plumbing project. Large staples held together a wide incision. The end result looks like train tracks across my stomach. This was no cosmetic fix. This was a durable repair, well-spackled and meant to last. It came with a 5-year (limited) warranty.

When I got my first and probably only tattoo last year, I didn’t think of it as part of “my story,” even though it was etched on my body with a deliberateness lacking from other chapters of this narrative. It is a “commemorative” tattoo, as most tattoos are. They mark a milestone, achievement, event or a person. Mine celebrates an accomplishment: The 5-year survival rate for stage 4 colon cancer is 14% and I had made it into this elite and exhausted group. While a tattoo’s permanence makes its message seem fixed, and there is some expectation that it will always represent us, commemorative tattoos honor the past. When the needle leaves the skin what remains is a memory.

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[*] The British Film Institute, working with the charity Changing Faces and its campaign #IAmNotYourVillain, has stopped funding films that equate a “visible difference,” like a scar or a burn, with villainy.