When I was 8 years old, we were on vacation in Puerto Rico. It was the day after Christmas, and I was swimming by myself in the ocean. I had just turned around to walk back to the beach when I was grabbed on the leg by a shark, pulled under the water, shaken, and released. Not quite realizing what had happened I stood back up, and just walked out of the water. My leg felt....kinda weird, maybe almost frozen, and I bent over to touch it, touched my own bone, looked down, saw the all blood, stood up again and just screamed. I was scooped up by a lifeguard, tourniqueted by the towel guy and rushed to the emergency room- a whole other story in itself.
The good news is that, many many stitches (in layers) and 8 hours later I emerged, in one piece, with a leg that would be perfectly fine for the rest of my life. I had to sit in a wheelchair for the rest of the vacation, but was walking again within a couple of weeks. By the time I got back to school, noone would have suspected a thing. The only souvenier of the incident I was left with is the seven inch scar on my leg. At first the scar was red and it didn't bother me that much because us kids still wore knee socks.
The summer I was 9 buffalo shoes, the big tan platform kind, came into vogue and at first I tried to wear them with my knee socks. I was the only one still wearing her knee socks, I was a fashion disaster. My mom encouraged me to take the socks off, and I finally admitted to her that I was self conscious about the scar, which had probably faded to pink by then. She told me that if I just ignored the scar she would take me to a plastic surgeon when I was 16 and have something done about it.
That one comment, with it's promise of resolution was enough to get me past my self consciousness, into my buffalo shoes, and make me forget about the scar ever since. Eventually the scar faded all the way to skin color, and it became something that doesn't enter my consciousness. I never even thought about seeing someone to have something done to it. It had become a "no issue". When I shave my legs, I hardly notice it all. Once I got so tan it looked like a white lightning strike, but that wasn't disturbing. The only time I find myself thinking about it is when I want to tell a really good story, and then the story is usually about getting bitten by a shark and not about the scar it left.
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