Tomorrow night is the all-girl-writing-workshop-action-squad or the wine-and-pizza-review, depending on how motivated we all are. Lisa sent out an assignment for this week's meeting: Scars. Here's my scar story...don't read it if you're showing up tomorrow as you'll be bored and boo me off the leather couch.

The Scar that Keeps on Giving

Choosing just one scar on my body to wax nostalgic over is a pretty tall order. From the microscopic to the conspicuous, from the accidental to the surgical, I’m covered in them and, of course, they are all as inspiring to me as the Madeleine and the cup of tea were to Proust.
There’s the hole in my leg from when Anshuman mistook my knee for an ashtray in a dark bar. He didn’t mean it, right?
There’s the fat slug of a reminder of where a potentially cancerous birthmark once lived above my right hip. At least that procedure got me out of 7th grade PE for three weeks. This raised lump of tissue is made most memorable by the ironic fact that it was created by a cosmetic surgeon. Remind me not to visit him for any major facial restructuring.
Then of course there is the i-shaped scar on the top of my right hand, carved by the fingernail of Daniel Somethingorother, a fourteen year-old member of Bullard High School’s Christian Student Union. But I was asking for that one really. Drunk on the realization that I was considered “out-spoken” and “irreverent” by my peers, I approached Daniel Somethingorother and asked innocently, “In what position do you accept Christ?” I’m pretty sure that I must have picked that up from some of the Church of the Subgenus materials I was reading at the time, or I was just really precocious when it came to offending people. Either way, the effect was even better than I could have hoped for; a shouting match ensued and that little bitch actually scratched me with his nails when he came to the end of his patience. I wore the “i” scar with pride. I drew a “D” to the left of it and an “E” on the right of it with a Magic Marker, flaunting the battle scar in an empty attempt to reassure myself that Daniel Somethingorother was the villain of that situation, that he was the culturally insensitive one and not me. Did I mention that he was also wearing a JESUS RULES t-shirt?
The exterior scars do tell stories, but they are just fragmented anecdotes. My true disfiguring pride and joy is a scar that I have been working on my entire life, and it has in turn been working on me. I am in possession of a corporeal scar that portrays the over-arching thematic schema of my life. It is the leitmotif of my internal structure. It’s on my heart. I’m not trying to be melodramatic here or anything (even though I did have a great aunt whose death certificate supposedly says that she died of a "broken heart"), I’m just referring to my floppy valve. It’s a flap of skin -- a lingering sign of congenital damage hanging off the mitral valve.
A mitral valve, located between the heart's left atrium and left ventricle,
has two flaps. In the case of Mitral Valve Prolapse (MVP) the flaps are enlarged (or floppy, as my doctor said) and they don’t close properly when the heart pumps. Sometimes the flaps will get caught in the valve, causing blood to leak backward through the valve. That’s what causes the murmurs (or what feels like missed beats). It’s a relatively common disfigurement of the heart, especially in women, and it is not dangerous unless you allow lots of foreign bacteria into your blood stream. For a while I had to take antibiotics before I went to the dentist, but that seems to be out of fashion with the American Heart Association these days. It’s not life threatening under most conditions, just annoying as I tend to have murmurs with the presence of any stress, illness, or stimulants.
Another fun fact is that most people with MVP will experience Dysautonomia along with the murmurs. Dysautonomia is when the autonomic nervous system suddenly decides to send out a burst of signals to speed up all body processes…also known as a panic attack. Experts say that they don’t know why these two things occur together. It’s an Ouroboros (“snake head eating the head on the opposite side”) situation. Which came first, the stress or the panic? The panic or the stress? Am I crazy or just sick? Aha…herein lies the true question of my adult life and perhaps the key to my personality.
I consider my floppy valve to be my most representative scar because it’s the scar that keeps on giving. It’s the embarrassing blemish that nobody can see. It is the reason that I feel weak and feeble some days. It’s the reason why I take Calcium Channel Blockers like someone’s grandma. When a cigarette sears my knee, a surgeon sends my birthmark to a lab, or some Daniel Somethingorother gives me new scars, the floppy valve reverberates to remind me which one is really in charge of the ship.