Excised Heritage

A shift in another direction to what I hope will be a starting point to pull all my family stories together. My youngest son Sam and his recent experience was a catalyst in trying to find out more about my father's ancestors who had eluded me for so long.

       The Novocain had worn off in less than 10 minutes. Sam was beginning to feel every pull and slice of his skin being excised from behind his ear.  Less than 15 minutes before, his first sight was the syringe when he walked into the examining room. Well, I guess this is going to hurt, he said to himself.  The nurse was smiling as if this was an ordinary day, but to Sam, he was about to experience pain that he hoped would not have to be repeated. 

      Earlier the nursing attendant with short spiked hair and gapping teeth instructed him to lie flat on his stomach with his head turned to the side on the pillow. A cloth was placed over his head, and he was shrouded in a blue darkness unable to see what was taking place.  The small hole in the face cloth exposed his ear and every sound seemed to multiply tenfold.  He heard the door close with little more than a mumble from the attendant as she left the room. He was alone.

      He heard  the door open a few minutes later, but he was sure it had been a half an hour. The doctor’s soothing voice of mundane conversation starters did little to relax him, but he played along, answering the irrelevant questions. "So what do you do, Sam? I hear your Dad broke his ankle, just like I did. When are you getting married now? How about that new Broncos Quarterback.?  Do you think he has the right stuff?"

      The clattering on the surgical tray left little to the imagination and then the doctor said, you may feel a little prick but it won’t last long. Little does he know, Sam thought.  A little prick?  He had known a lot of those.  He had really hoped that this time the stupor would take hold, and this great numbing drug would work on him.  The syringe’s needle pierced  his earlobe, not unlike the initial piercing he had done many years before, but this time he could hear the liquid swishing around inside his earlobe as the cold burn entered his head with an evil rush under his skin.  Whatever it was that contradicted the expected reaction in his body, he was resistant to its power.  Novocain was useless after less than the time it took for the doctor to pick up his scalpel.  Sam’s hoping was useless, too.  Even though he didn’t feel this first slice under the keloid scar, the awakening nerve endings started to feel the exposure to the air, and they flashed instant messages to his brain that the violation to their existence was threatened. The throbbing continued as the scalpel was charting its course though the fleshy mass that had grown behind his ear to double the size of the lobe.

       Last year he had decided he could just whack it off himself as it just hung by a small flap of skin. It couldn’t be worse that the piercing itself. After numbing his earlobe with two cubes of ice, he snipped at the attached appendage, and it had easily fallen off. The bleeding was more excessive than any head wound he had ever seen, but with a pressure  bandage applied by Chrissy, it eventually stopped. No big deal and easily forgotten, until two months later, the tiny scar became a welt overnight and within 6 months, the fleshy lobe had morphed into a lump twice the original size of the one he thought he had killed. It looked like a cancerous tumor growing outside his body. There were to be no more self-healing chances, he had to see Doc Sims.

     To ward off the pain Sam talked to the doctor about what he was actually doing, trying to mask each stabbing pain but the evidence was accented in the pitch of his voice.

     “Say Doc, what makes these kinds of scars anyway? I’ve got lots of friends with piercing and tats that don’t do this.” Sam felt the suture needle enter one side and the cat-gut thread singing through the needle-made hole, and the needle hitting its mark on the other side of the wound to draw the skin together for its first stitch.

     “How many black friends do you have, Sam?"  

What kind of bigoted question is that, man?  “What’s that got to do with anything, Doc? The second suture began in making the second stitch.

     “Keloids are predominately an African-American syndrome.  After an initial trauma to the subdural layer of skin, as the body tries to heal itself, it seems to take on a super healing process and grows the scar faster and larger than necessary. “  Needle, screeching thread, tie off number three.

     Sam blinked back the pain induced tears under the blue shroud. “But why me then?”

    “Sam, America is a pretty good melting pot of all cultures and races. I’m sure there was probably a bit of color mixing all along its history. It’s quite probable that there is some black heritage running through your veins.  Ever talk to your folks about it?  “Dr. Sims finished with the 3^rd and 4^th stitches.

     "Not really, but it sure seems unlikely on my dad’s side. I’ve heard every cowboy, Irish, outlaw story at least a dozen times over.  But my mom has always been pretty quiet about her family. Both her parents died in their 50’s and she and dad had moved to Wyoming . I really only hear a little bit about her folks."

     Five more agonizing stitches later, Sam shook hands with the doctor and headed for home.  He tried to mask the pain from his throbbing earlobe by jacking up the rap on the radio to a deafening pitch.  All that did was to let the pain throb to the music as he tried to take in the information the doctor had just told him. Next stop, Mom's house.