How a Cancer Survivor Learned to Stop Hiding His Surgical Scars

Learning to Be Comfortable in My Own Skin as a Cancer Survivor

When I was 12 years old, I had a major surgery to remove a tumor about the size of an orange, which was discovered in my right shoulder. It was a very frightening experience for me, and the doctor wasn’t sure I’d have the use of my right arm after removing the tumor. It was wrapped around the brachial plexus nerve in my shoulder and was a very complicated surgery. After a year of grueling physical therapy, I did regain the use of my arm.

The months before the surgery were some of the most frightening of my life, though I tried my best to hide that fear from my parents, who were already frightened enough for all of us. I was 12 years old, and I had a tumor the size of an orange growing in my shoulder. I didn’t fully understand what that meant, but I understood that it must’ve been very serious from the way the adults spoke in hushed voices and from the way my mother’s eyes sometimes filled with tears when she thought I wasn’t looking.

The surgery took several hours. I remember waking up in a hospital room to find my arm bound tightly to my chest and a nurse explaining to me in a calm, matter-of-fact voice that the operation went as well as could be hoped, but that we would need to wait and see. Wait and see. Those words have a particular quality for a 12-year-old who doesn’t yet have the philosophical tools to be patient with uncertainty. I lay in that hospital bed and made bargains with God. I promised to be better, kinder, more grateful, if I could just have the use of my arm.

The physical therapy that followed was, in its own way, as difficult as the surgery. I would go three times a week to a rehabilitation center where a therapist named Richard — a broad-shouldered man with enormous hands and a surprisingly gentle touch — would work my shoulder through its range of motion. It hurt. I won’t pretend otherwise. Some days I came home and cried from the pain and frustration. But Richard was patient. He told me that healing is not linear. He told me there would be days when it seemed like we were going backward, and that those days were actually an important part of the process. I didn’t entirely believe him. But I kept going back.

By the end of that year, I could raise my arm above my head, throw a ball and write with a pen. The arm that the doctors feared might be permanently compromised had come back, not entirely to what it was before, but close enough that an ordinary observer would never know anything had happened. I learned something important from that experience, though it would take me decades to fully understand it. I learned that the body has a drive toward healing that is almost fierce in its determination. I learned that what looks like damage is sometimes also the beginning of repair.

However, I was left with something that, to me, was a major problem. I had a scar, 13 inches in length, from the upper part of my arm stretching all the way across the center of my chest. This scar affected my entire self-image, and it caused me to dislike my body. As a result, I never wore short-sleeve shirts or T-shirts in the summer like other children. When my family went to the beach, I never played in the water with other children.

A scar is a strange thing. Medically, it is a triumph — it is the evidence that the wound has closed, that the body has done its work. But psychologically, at least for a young person acutely aware of how I appeared to my peers, the scar felt like a mark of difference that would never go away. I traced that scar with my fingertips in private moments, trying — but failing — to make my peace with it. I watched my friends move easily through the world in their T-shirts and shorts, and I felt a grief for which I had no name — a grief for a simplicity I had lost, or perhaps had never had.

The years of avoiding mirrors. The years of wearing long sleeves in the heat of August. The elaborate strategies I developed to change clothes quickly and privately in gym class, so I would never be caught with my shirt off. These things took a toll that was invisible to everyone around me. From the outside, I appeared to be a relatively normal kid: I had friends, I did well in school, I was active in my church. But there was always a part of me that was managing something — always a small, watchful part of my attention devoted to making sure no one saw what I was hiding.

Three years later, at age 15, I had an osteochondroma removed from my left leg just below my knee. Because of the scar from that surgery, I never wore short pants after I recovered. I always felt embarrassed about my scars. I was ashamed of them. They held me in an emotional prison. It wasn’t until I was 60 years old that I began to wear short-sleeve shirts, T-shirts and shorts.

The osteochondroma was a benign bony growth — not life-threatening, but painful and limiting. The surgery was simpler than the first, but the recovery was, in some ways, more complicated for me emotionally. Because now, I had two scars. Now, the evidence of what my body had been through was written in two places, and I felt that there was nowhere on my body that was uncompromised, nowhere that was simply normal and unremarkable.

Looking back, I can see that my shame about my scars was closely tied to a belief, common among adolescents but by no means limited to them, that the body is supposed to be perfect — or at least that imperfection is something to be hidden and ashamed of. This belief is reinforced constantly by our culture. Magazines, movies and advertisements present images of bodies that are smooth, symmetrical and unmarked. There is very little room in the dominant visual culture for the evidence of survival. And so those of us who carry that evidence learn, often very young, that we are supposed to manage it — to minimize it, to make it invisible, to apologize for it.

It took me until I was 60 years old to stop apologizing. To put on a short-sleeve shirt on a warm summer day and walk out into the world and simply be there, scar visible, arm swinging freely. The first time I did it, I felt almost dizzy with relief from a weight I didn’t know I was carrying. I’d been holding my breath for decades, and I didn’t know it until I finally exhaled.

It took all that time for me to accept my scars and be comfortable in my own skin. Now, if someone sees the scars and asks me about them, I no longer feel ashamed to tell them about my surgeries.

This is the third installment in Chester Freeman’s Driftwood series. Catch up on the earlier parts.

• Part 1: Echoes of the Battle: Navigating Post Cancer Trauma
• Part 2: A Gift From the Sea

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