Monday: Doctor, we have to quit meeting like this!

Through the pain and the morphine, my humor still came to my rescue as I looked up at my doctor in the emergency room where I had again returned damaged and distraught.


It has just been a few days since I had been taking a friend for a ride in my new car when another driver ran us off the road. As we careened off the street barely missing a tree we smashed head long into a house that was not ready to get out of the way. My face crashed into the steering wheel and I felt instant and excruciating pain. Time slowed down and it was like I was also an observer as well as a participant in these moments of intensity. I remember seeing the police officer picking up a blood soaked notebook and placing it on the gurney with me. I thought that was strange but later I realized how important it was.


In the emergency room every one was busy taking care of me but not really talking to me. I remember darkness and then I was again floating over the scene again an observer as they placed a shunt inside my mouth to drain the fluids building up in my face. I was later sent home where my mother was to nurse and care for me.


She knew how looking at my ugliness would bother me so she had covered up the mirror in my bedroom with a towel. I just lie in my bed and realized that life as I had known it was over. I was used to being beautiful. I was used to people looking at me in admiration and not in horror. As the nurses at the hospital advised mother applied cold compresses to my face. They did not seem to help. I would reach over and take another morphine pill thinking that maybe it would help the pain go away. It did not. It just helped me detach a bit from it. And I could not cry out. I could only hurt.


I smelled the strangest smell. It was sweet and sickening. It smelled like I imagined death and purification would smell. I reached up and felt my face. I could feel this oozing damp wetness coming from a hole in my face. I passed out and the next thing I knew I was in the hospital looking up again at my doctor.


The shunt in my face had closed up because the nurse had given mother the wrong directions on care. I had developed gangrene in my face and it had burst open. That was the smell that had nauseated me and filled me with fear. That was the pain that would not stop. This time I was admitted to the hospital. As I lie there in delirium I could hear and see the dead walking through the building. I felt the person in the next room die and leave his body. I was living in a place that was supposed to bring hope and all I could feel was pain, desperation and death.


When I returned home my face was bandaged and I looked for the entire world like some kind of mummy.


I could not believe it. I had never learned to drive until about six weeks ago. I had finally bought my first car and the first payment was not due until about 3 weeks after my accident. Some crazy thought about how if you get thrown off a horse you have to get back on kept going through my head. So I went out to my rental car and took a drive.


While with bravado I wore by bandages as a badge of courage, I was devastated. All vanity was washed away by the blood that had covered the accident. I was no longer beautiful. In fact, I was scarred and ugly. What is funny I had always taken my looks for granted. My mother often warned me of the shallowness of vanity. Well now I realized that beauty truly was only skin deep but ugliness went all the way to the bone – my jaw bone.


About three months later, I had plastic surgery but I looked different. To this day I feel marked by this moment and I will often put my hand up to my scar and feel the time when I went from being lovely to being disfigured. As I age, the plastic surgery starts to sag and I can feel the ugliness trying to return and I wonder isn’t it enough to be scarred by and accident and now my youth is disfigured by time. Logic laughs at my insane obsession with my loss but the reality shows every time I look in the mirror. While my life and experiences have taught me compassion for others, sometimes, when I am tired and I look at my disfigurement it is hard to have compassion for me.