Knee Scars

I’ve had ACL surgery once already, years ago. It was also from a soccer injury. I asked the kids to draw a picture of that knee now so you could see the scar: the big colourful one that makes my knee look like a centipede crawling on a 2 by 4 is Sophie’s and is not an exact rendering of my leg, but pretty close. Hannah’s is smaller and more detailed, and she has insinuated that not only do I have cankles, but also numerous rainbow and flower tattoos on my leg. I don’t. (Well, the cankles, maybe.) I bet she’d probably have drawn a unicorn on there if she had time. I didn’t want to put an actual photo of my leg up there. I don’t know if you can handle seeing it.

The reason my knee looks so gross is that it got infected. After the surgery, the doctor ignored my calls asking for more painkillers. For ten days. (It had to be re-operated on. This is why the scar is worse than other ACL scars.) He admitted later he should have listened to me, but said that doctors have to account for the ‘wimp factor’ and he thought I was just being cranky. He also offered to pay for plastic surgery to make it look nicer, but said that he didn’t think I seemed like I “was the type of girl who cared about stuff like that.” It took me a long time to realize how insulting a comment like that was.

It’s less than two weeks now til I get my other knee done. I wonder what the scar will look like? They’ve changed the operation in the last 13 years so it will probably be different. Maybe I’ll do something like what my mother in law did after her hip replacement – she got a tattoo nearby the scar. She was 68 at the time, I believe, and she said “I’m tired of people asking about my scar at the pool. Now they say ‘What’s that?!’” Her tattoo is of cherry blossoms. I think it’s so cool she had it done at that age. The only thing is that she says it hurt more than childbirth, and I am getting really bloody tired of having pain anywhere around my knees.

If I get one, mine will not be flowers or rainbows or unicorns. I kind of like what Becks has done. Look closely...