The Scars we Bear: They are the body's storyteller of our strengths and frailties

By KIMBER WILLIAMS
The Register-Guard

A road map of our lives, we look to them as a diary of the flesh. A bit of healing that we carry forward as a reminder of where we've been.

One glance can transport us to an exact moment in time.

The slip of a paring knife, a chain saw, a sneaker on the basketball court. The triumphant sign of lifesaving surgery: a zipper that restores a heart, a half-moon badge of breast-cancer courage. A moment of carelessness. A moment of war's consequences. A moment of Caesarean birth.

A scar is a metaphor for change. They shape our features; they, in turn, are shaped by our lives.

Mostly, they are profoundly human. A common biological denominator.

Physical proof of our strength, our frailty, our ability to endure.

The Destiny

John Forse, 51

Lifelong Surfer/Construction Worker

IT WAS THE KIND of morning surfers dream of. Clear, blue-sky April day, just off Gleneden Beach. Tall, glassy waves. Only a few people to share it with.

Legs dangling from either side of his new longboard, John Forse barely noticed the slight boil of turbulence in the water about 20 feet away. He was too absorbed with his own good fortune.

In a heartbeat, Forse felt a hot clamp grip his right thigh.

That fast, he was rolling downward - 5 or 6 feet beneath the ocean's surface in a curtain of foam and bubbles, beating madly at whatever was there.

"I think my mind was playing tricks on me, protecting me, not accepting what was happening," Forse said. "There had been seals out earlier. I remember thinking, 'What is this seal doing to me?' "

It was no seal.

Popping to the surface, Forse found his surfboard bobbing to one side, a huge, gray mass hovering near the other. The telltale dorsal stood a good 2 feet high. He could see neither head nor tail, only a back that was a good 4 feet across.

There was no escaping it. Shark. Big shark.

"Plenty of room for me in there," he chuckled, recalling his scattered thoughts.

Even in the confusion, Forse knew they were somehow connected, he and this shark. He could feel something tug his leg. He tried to release the cord that bound his foot to his surfboard. No luck.

"The cord was in his mouth and on my foot," he recalled. "I started beating on his back with my fist. It was like hitting an elephant."

Suddenly, the shark dove, dragging Forse and his board with it. "I'm trying to get my bearings and all I can see is this stream of bubbles go by," he said. "At that point, I thought, 'That's it.' What I felt wasn't panic, but a quiet resignation: I'm dead."

"I just kept hoping the waves would push me in, but when you need them, they're never around," he said, laughing and shaking his head. "I got to my board and just started booking toward shore."

Friends came running, rushed him to North Lincoln Hospital in Lincoln City. In time, there were herds of media and satellite trucks. Forse was running on a survivor's adrenaline high. "It was just a blast," he said. "I'm a show-off anyway. Never got enough attention as a kid. Frankly, I loved it."

As medical crews pulled off a tattered wetsuit, assessing the wounds, Forse demanded that a friend videotape it. "I make surf videos for commercial use," he explained. "It's classic stuff. This goes into my next video."

Of course, there are scars.

Deep dimpled toothmarks, each 4 to 5 inches long that curve along the top of his right thigh, hip and buttock. The strange reminder of being tasted by a shark.

Fifty stitches. Forse counts himself as lucky.

"He got me on the outside of the thigh, no major veins and arteries. Mostly muscle."

It was only after coming home from the hospital, off the meds, that the real impact hit. "For about 10 minutes I just started crying. Broke down all at once," he said. "Then it was over."

People ask to see the scars all the time. Forse is the kind of guy who doesn't mind showing them. He lives to surf. A shark attack? Part of the landscape of risk that you navigate.

"Surfing is my life, my health, as close to church as I can get, to where you totally feel a part of something," he said. "Relationships are secondary, jobs are incidental, only a means to maintaining your lifestyle."

Besides, scars are nothing new. Force is a virtual gallery of scars. His skin holds a library of stories.

Three back surgeries. Front teeth knocked out on a pipeline job. He points out the slight curvature of his left calf. Polio, he explains. "Had a brace until I was 10."

Toes on his right foot sheared off in a lawn mower accident. For a long time he had joked - prophetically, it seems - about how it happened, teasing with people for years that he'd lost the toes to a shark.

Strange, he now admits.

In some ways, Forse believes, meeting that shark was his destiny.

"I look back on my whole life and can see that it was predetermined," he said, nodding slowly.

As a kid growing up around Santa Cruz, he remembers seeing sharks outside the surf line - then floating out with a friend on an air mattress to lob rocks at them. "Didn't know what the hell we were thinking," he mused.

There was always, Forse explains, this fascination. This feeling.

He looks at his gnawed longboard with the radius bite, his torn wetsuit. He knows.

The Constant

Bayla Ostrach, 18

Student/Labor Field Organizer

HER GAZE is unrelenting, a challenge. Smart brown eyes bore straight ahead through tiny, trendy glasses. Your own gaze is diverted, first to the gleaming nub of a "chin pin" nestled beneath her lower lip, then to the tiny strand of pierced earrings - a dozen among two ears - riding low and tight against her lobes.

The scar is one of the last things you really see. Now a faint sickle, it barely traces the apple of one cheek, easily mistaken for a deep dimple when she smiles. One more contour on an interesting young face.

But Bayla sees it as one of life's constants.

"I look back at pictures now of a 3- or 4-year-old with a big, big scar bisecting her cheek and it doesn't phase me," she said, shrugging. "Once I had that, nothing really bothered me."

For a while, her scar and her hair were unwavering markers of her identity, two things she counted on growing up. "For 12 years I never cut my hair and I never wanted my scar to go away. Then one day before my 17th birthday, I just knew: I was going to shave my head."

She saved that hair. But in some ways, it was a final act of liberation. "Hair, jewelry ..." she explained. "Nothing else seems permanent like my face scar."

Even now, she is amazed at how much she remembers of the day she acquired it, visiting an uncle in Palo Alto: the house, the kitchen, the door that led into the garage, where the dogs slept.

Kneeling before the old, deaf sheepdog, her face so close. She must have startled him. "I'm sure he didn't hear me," she recalled. "He just jumped up and latched onto my face. I never blamed him."

The small face, the big jaw. She can remember a wet flap of skin hanging down, touching her neck. "I could hear myself screaming and didn't know it was me," she remembers.

When you're in shock, small details become large. Paper towels against her face. Lying in her mother's lap across the back seat of an uncle's car. Worrying about blood on the upholstery.

She awoke as the doctor was tying stitches, hands sliding past her eyes. "All these little blue cellophane bows on my face," she laughed. "It forever reminded me of a club sandwich."

But after the initial trauma, the impact faded. "In school, it wasn't the biggest thing they bugged me about - paled in comparison to other things," she said. "By third or fourth grade, I began telling the story of it, having a little fun with it."

It wasn't so easy for her parents. "They were extremely upset, always said when I got older if I wanted plastic surgery ..." she explained, voice trailing indifferently.

"But I never mentioned it. To me, the photos taken of me before my scar look really weird, strange. People would say, 'Too bad about the scar, it ruined your looks.' But for me it was like, 'Hey, this is like a CONSTANT in my life. This is ME.' "

On the streets of Eugene, it might be easy to misinterpret. Multiple piercings. Leather jacket. Punk jewelry. You wouldn't know that Bayla Ostrach sought an early GED to do political and labor field work, to take college-level classes.

In truth, every day she chooses a visual volume to express, depending upon "who I'm going to see, how much I want to tone it down."

"Sometimes I don't like to feel I'm being looked at. But every once in a while, it is a defiant feeling. When I have my skateboard or obvious jewelry, that's when I'm more inclined to say, 'Yeah, deal with it ...' "

Then she smiles.

The Plan

Ray Livingston, 24

Former UO Decathlete/Downtown Mall Guide

SOME ARE SHEER silliness, trophies of a rambunctious kid: rock fights and tumbles and getting into childhood jams that he winces to recall.

Others are the high price of being a decathlete: spikes and hurdles and the hard landings of the long jump pit.

And sometimes, the scars merge, effortlessly tumbling one into the other, like the stories he spins about them.

Behold the elongated, upside-down comma of a scar that runs down Ray Livingston's left calf.

The circular body of the comma? "There was a rope we tied to the top of a metal barn. We'd slide down the roof and grab for the rope just before we went over the edge," he recalled. "Once I missed that rope a little and kept going, probably fell 10 or 15 feet, but my leg hit the top of a metal fence post."

The long, curling tail of the comma. Now that takes him back to his freshman year of high school in Gresham. His first honest-to-goodness athletically acquired scar. "First time I started pole vaulting I slashed a spike along my calf," he nodded.

Looking at the odd assortment, "you have to laugh," Livingston said. "For me, my scars often remind me of mistakes, silly little things that I did when I wasn't thinking too far ahead."

Like the scar on his knee from walking into a chain saw before the blade stopped. Or the scar on his right arm from falling into a table while wrestling with a college buddy. "The table won," he recalled, grinning.

Most of the time, he doesn't even think about them. Most of the time.

A few of the scars are different.

One is small, almost never seen. A 2-inch surgical incision on his back.

More than a scar, it was a turning point. A bend in the road, a change in the plan.

As a prep athlete, Livingston dabbled in it all. Wrestling. Football. But by his senior year, he was determined to focus on track and field.

It paid off.

State champion in long jump and pole vault. His first decathlon. U.S. Junior Nationals. Junior Pan-American games. "All of the sudden it came together," he said.

"I'd always said I was going to get a full scholarship to the University of Oregon. Now I had my goal."

If Ray Livingston is anything, he is resolute. A planner, he'll tell you.

He figured his collegiate athletic career would unfold this way: Study up the first year. Improve the next year. Then explode - just like high school.

"It pretty much happened my junior year," he recalled. "I started coming out of my shell."

All-American. Second in the Pac-10. PRs all over the place. His senior year was setting up to be phenomenal.

That was the plan. This was the reality: Early in his senior season, while practicing for hurdles, his right foot went numb. When it didn't go away, he began to worry.

The diagnosis: a herniated disk in his back. And it was too late to redshirt that year.

"It could have been anything, you know," Livingston said. "Long jumping into hard sand. All the drills ...

"I'm out there training four hours a day, six to seven days a week. Who knows at what point it happened? What triggered it? I had to deal with it."

It is the story of so many athletes. A career pumped to heroic proportions, suddenly stalled - even when the will to compete still burns hot.

"To this point, I was defined by track and field. To be faced with not being able to do it ... was one of the hardest things I've ever done. Who am I? What do I do now? I hadn't given much thought to what I wanted after track and field. Suddenly I was contemplating it all. It could be the end of the line ...."

It was a hard year. He lost nearly a month of meets.

Compounded with personal letdowns, "I almost became anti-social," he admits. "I kept my head up, didn't show much. Basically, everything I wanted to do was in jeopardy."

By season's end, Livingston was on his way back. He looked strong coming into the 1996 NCAA championships and was expected to give favored decathlete Chad Smith of Tennessee a run for his money.

Early on, Smith pulled a hamstring. It was Livingston's chance.

He will never forget it. Never.

"You can not imagine how it feels to have every single person in Hayward Field clapping for you in the high jump," Livingston said. "The sound of clapping echoing back and forth from stand to stand ... it remains my most inspiring track and field experience."

A PR in the 400 put him at the top. Good discus, hurdles, decent javelin and pole vault. Then the finale: the 1500. Cramps bit into his right hamstring, wouldn't ease until 10 minutes after the race was over. In one event, Livingston tumbled from first to fourth in the decathlon.

He had back surgery. It helped. Returned that fall to post-collegiate competition. Then he knew.

"I wasn't having fun," he said. "I was ready to move on, work toward what I wanted to do with my life."

Hard decision? "I contemplated it for months. But I wanted to make sure I knew what I wanted to do."

Ray Livingston reconsidered his plan, began the application process to become a Eugene police officer, a long-held goal. That's how he wound up as a Downtown Mall Guide. A police lieutenant recommended that he try it as a taste of what police work would be like.

"Essentially, you learn how to effectively handle a situation without the authority, the tools or the respect a lot of police officers have," he explained. "Your best weapons are your mouth and your mind."

On the mall, most people don't see his track and field scars, wouldn't recognize him.

Though occasionally, mall kids will ask about the scars on his triceps - twin Omega symbols deliberately branded there with a heated coat hanger. Sometimes he tries to explain, but doesn't expect they'll grasp the depth of it.

As a member of Omega Psi Phi, Inc., an off-campus black fraternity, "it's not something you HAVE to do," he said. "But to me, it has significance, stands for a lifetime commitment, leadership. It was something I chose."

As with so many of his scars, Ray Livingston can trace the curve of the Omega sign, tell you its story:

"I got my brand my sophomore year after the Pepsi Invitational, directly after the meet," he recalls. "The worst part is actually right before it touches you. You can feel the heat, your hairs curl back. But you have to stay still or you'll really mess it up."

Ray Livingston's brands are very clean, very neat. You know he didn't flinch.

"Most people don't understand," he admits. "I don't think about it every day, but I'll see them and it brings up memories, things I went through with my frat brothers.

"A time and a place," he said. "It puts you there."

The Kinship

Yulonda Evans, 53

Sandy Ragusa, 45

Jan Ryan, 42

Breast Cancer Survivors

THREE WOMEN, one common enemy. All confronted advanced forms of breast cancer. All chose different paths of treatment: a double mastectomy, a breast removed, a breast replaced with an implant.

Each bears scars, her own badge of survivorship.

Yulonda Evans was reaching for a newspaper the day the ball of her palm brushed against a lump.

Sandy Ragusa's cancer appeared first in lymph nodes tucked beneath an arm. They never did locate the primary tumor growing deep against her chest wall. Didn't even know where it was before surgery.

For Jan Ryan, a hard lump was revealed beneath a husband's touch.

Today, the scars they carry forward mean many different things.

Evans points to a tiny horizontal line across her chin. Traffic accident. Piece of a steering wheel. The slight furrow between her brow? Not a worry line, but where she accidentally split her face with a car door. These are the visibles, and they amuse her, this small, vivacious woman.

Then there is the less visible.

The soft line that curves across her rib cage where a breast once lay. "You know, I'd had a clean mammogram less than three months before. I did all the things you were supposed to do," recalled Evans, an R.N. by training who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1996 and has chosen surgery and an alternative path of treatment.

The first time she saw her surgical scar, she wept. But Evans quickly made peace with her new contour.

"I've never had a body image problem," she said. "Was super-duper thin for many, many years. I'd just gotten over not having meat on my bones, then I developed a problem with my immune system. I must have gained 76 pounds in two weeks; went from being too thin to obese in the same month.

"It prepared me. If anything ever really prepares you.

"Now the only time my physical scar really comes into play is this: To this day, I cannot undress in front of my middle biological child. It's not me, it's her."

The scar is one marker along a long road to survival. A relationship forever present.

"You go to sleep with it, you wake up with it," Evans said. "With a mastectomy, you can't take a shower without being reminded of it."

TO RAGUSA, a medical social worker, there was little deliberation.

"When I pressed the oncologist to know my odds, he said, 'Just know that statistics are a 35 percent chance of survival after five years,' " she recalled. "The body image thing? I was like, 'Cut it off. Cut off the other one too. Cut off my arm if you have to. I don't care.' "

There were farewell photos, time spent studying a pre-surgery silhouette in the mirror. Worrying.

At first, Ragusa was "so ashamed of having this I didn't tell anyone at work for about three weeks," she recalled. "The vulnerability was embarrassing."

"You somehow expect that people will know how you feel and will go there with you. But I frequently would see myself as in this cage or on the other side of a fence. You can see people, reach through the bars to touch them. But that's it. You are always alone."

After an implant and reconstructive surgery, there were chest spasms and pain and muscle weakness - frustrating for a rock climber and weight lifter who routinely ran 30 miles a week. "I wasn't used to having problems with my body, felt that it had totally let me down," she admitted.

Her remaining scars are slight, tucked mostly under an arm. A divot where they removed a lump and lymph nodes.

It took a long time, but today she views them with a measure of affection, these scars.

Seven years after a diagnosis, they've survived - the woman and her scars. There is victory in that.

But there are also days when the scars and the statistics are dark reminders of the unknown.

"It's not just the disease, it's everything you have to go through," Ragusa explained. "I've seen women clean of it for 15 years and it just comes back. You might be able to see the edge of the forest, feel a few shafts of sunlight, but you never feel clear of it."

ON HER 40TH birthday, Jan Ryan had both of her breasts removed. The grapefruit-sized tumor implanted beneath one breast had spread its cancer to 13 of her 20 lymph nodes. It was likely to move into her other breast as well. She chose a course of prevention and pragmatism.

"I'm an artist. Why would I want to be lopsided?" chuckled Ryan, a graphic artist known for her irreverent humor.

But there were other reasons.

Ryan is reminded of a friend who had a breast removed 15 years ago. Nearly every time she pulls up to a stoplight, a hand slips over to check her remaining breast. Always checking.

"I'm not going to go through life with that fear," Ryan explained.

The will to live is strong, the body resilient. Her scars often remind her of that.

"I'm loaded with scars; think of my body as a topographical map," Ryan said. "It's a journey through my life."

Hands rise to her cheeks. "Here, I was in a car accident in my 20s that rearranged my face. I was swinging in the fifth grade, fell and sheared the bone that fits in my shoulder socket. I've got scars from running into nails, falling off bikes, slipping with a razor blade while shaving my legs, four Ceasareans and a hysterectomy," she said.

"There's such an emotional connection to what it means. Not the breast, but the surviving. I'm darn proud of those scars. That may seem strange, but it's how I feel. It's why I refused to wear a wig (during chemotherapy), refused to hide it. I never felt ashamed. Never."

It is strange to have a slim, convex chest, she says. Curious to be able to count your ribs.

Unlike most of her life's scars, those from breast cancer are intimate. "They're a big reminder," she said. "I have to choose to show them to someone, to tell them or not. That can get emotional.

"But there's a special bond that I feel now whenever I hear of or find out someone has survived or is going through the breast cancer battle. I'm not afraid to hug, to get close.

"In some ways," she adds. "that's very liberating."

The Soldier

Frank Blair, 51

Commander, Disabled Veterans of America Post 24/Student

THE ANTI-TANK ROCKET caught the inside of his right thigh. One moment Frank Blair had turned to take a step, the next a cone-shaped charge designed to cut through a tank engine shot flames between his legs, flipping him airborne, upside down and backward.

"I remember very slowly seeing the horizon reversed," said Blair, recalling the Vietnam memory more than 30 years later. "Then you see the ground coming up and you're thinking, 'Jesus, this is really going to hurt when I hit.' "

That's the way it is when you're shot.

A moment of surreal observation. Hot metal explodes through the nervous system. The brain slows to grasp what the body already knows. "You don't realize what's happening," he said. "It feels like getting kicked. You don't feel a whole heck of a lot at first."

When he did meet the ground, Blair saw his own blood. "My first concern was a tourniquet," he remembers.

"We had a conscientious objector in our unit who would not carry a weapon. He ran through a mess of crap I wouldn't have even crawled through to get to me. Don't know how the guy made it alive. But that's the way he always was - if you yelled 'Medic!' he was there."

The year was 1967.

Wounded, he lay in a ditch along the Cambodian border - the Iron Triangle, they called it - helping direct an airstrike by radio. Waiting for more than an hour for a medical airlift during the heated buildup to the Tet Offensive.

Later, learning gangrene had set in. The doctors told him that they'd taken off better legs. Blair managed to keep his.

Skin grafts where the charge had chewed away his flesh and three months in the 249th General Hospital in Japan.

The second of three Purple Hearts.

Frank Blair is like a lot of military service veterans. He lives in the present, with an eye to lessons of the past.

He doesn't offer up much about his war wounds. Scars were simply an occupational hazard.

"Back then, no one gave a damn," Blair said. "I don't know. It was just that you're young, you think you're bulletproof; you find out you're not."

Now, the scars are part of a life that goes on. "It bothered me and it didn't. I used to hide them around people I didn't know. Maybe I'm too old to be bothered now," he mused. "They've been there so long I don't even think about them anymore. When you're 6-3 and weigh 300 pounds and wear a handlebar mustache, you get used to being looked at ...

"It's like, some people drive Cadillacs, some people drive Fords. My scars are basically who I am."

Counselors who work with war veterans say battle scars are a curious thing. No one veteran feels the same way. There are those who find physical scars the easy ones to deal with - you see the dimension of damage, understand the finite scope of it. The harder scars, they contend, are the emotional ones. Other veterans shun wearing a prosthesis - to do so would deny their experience. Some cover the scars, say they only remind them of deeper losses that are tough to grapple with. Many simply accept them.

As a part-time driver for Eugene's Veterans Administration clinic, Blair works with veterans. Through Disabled Veterans of America, he also does advocacy work for them, knows well the depth of their scars. He would never presume to tell their stories. He only knows his own.

Blair celebrated his 20th, 21st and 22nd birthdays in hospitals. His first Purple Heart came when his arm caught shrapnel from a booby-trapped grenade.

The final Purple Heart was earned in southern Vietnam's Mekong Delta. The bullet sliced across the back of one leg, hit the ground and spun back through the other. Though the wound opened daylight in his calf, the impact felt oddly "like having a 6-year-old come up and kick you in the legs," he remembers. "It just started adding up," said Blair, who took medical retirement from the Army after two 18-month tours of duty.

Today, attitudes have changed about scars. He doesn't think twice about showing the tight, telltale wrinkles of his skin graft in public. "Society is more receptive about disabilities," he contends.

Sometimes when he wears shorts around town, Frank Blair will see a stare, a glance. Catch the high pitch of a child's innocent question, a parent's hurried hushing.

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