Battle Wounds

“On the girl's brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.” 
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

The above quote appeared on my Facebook timeline, posted by someone in the Phyllodes Tumour group of which I am a member. It resonated, especially as I am still struggling to settle into the changes wrought on me physically by the mastectomy. 

I have never really had an issue with scars, and I have plenty all over, some from normal childhood scrapes, others evidence of my fight against ill health. I don't even really remember which scar on my body came first or how old I was when I got it. It's not something I dwell on and I have never really looked into the mirror or looked at myself and seen them as flaws or imperfections, if anything I most times forget I have them till someone else points at them or notices them.

But then I had the mastectomy.

I can't even really explain why the M scars are different, they certainly aren't the first visible scars in that area of my body, but there is just something about them that sometimes makes me sad. Maybe it's that they are a constant reminder of the loss of a part of me, however imperfect and riddled with illness that part was, it was still me...born with me, grew with me...or maybe it's that I can't help but compare that fake part to the other still natural part, and though it may be perkier, though it may look slightly more perfect, there is still something quite unnatural about it all.

Whatever the case may be, I am still yet to see these particular scars as a part of me...to be ignored like the rest of me.

But the one thing I do see when I look at them is that come what may...I survived!