Monday, December 11, 2006

This is Fred




This is Fred's story.

I love history and scars are part of our history - but some more so than others.



Part of my parents’ story is written on my stomach. Their first child was born in 1945 after their work, lives and marriage were much disrupted in occupied Holland. Their next trauma was my pyloric stenosis (projectile vomiting) and surgery at just 10 days. Small wonder perhaps that they could never bring themselves to tell me about those days, let alone explain the mystery pattern on my body.



A small but significant part of my story is also embedded in this scar. I believe my parents’ reticence and my own shy and introspective nature worked together with this mark of my individuality to deepen some of my internal struggles over the years. In recent years, the Web has thankfully done much to break down my trauma over being uniquely and abnormally “different”.



My scar also reflects the advance of surgery. Before a simple surgical remedy was published in 1912, pyloric stenosis used to kill almost all affected infants. My scar is a life line. But since 1945, surgical technique has shown great progress, as incisions are made more carefully or eliminated by the laparoscope, and as wounds are stitched internally.

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