Long road’s small scars

Some faces from the ER stayed with the doctor for a long time, and hers was one of them. For a face that had mixed it up with a big truck it looked pretty good. There were assorted bruises, a few scrapes, and a cut that would need stitches. The left ear, on the other hand, was in tough shape. The lobe was torn in half all the way down to the scalp, the rest of it was bruised and swollen, and there was blood everywhere. It looked like she had tried to have her ear pierced by a Rottweiler with poor vision and a bad temper.

Her day had been a good one until she got sideswiped by the 18-wheeler. When you are only 19, have just finished a great year at college, and have a boyfriend (probably the kind who makes your heart leap when he looks back over his shoulder at you every time he walks away), most days are good enough to make it look like nothing bad can ever happen.

She had been searching the car radio for just the right station, perhaps one that would play just the right song for such a girl on such a day. She took her blue eyes off the road long enough to drift over the center line into the wrong lane, looked up, and suddenly the road ahead was filled with the 18-wheeler. It almost missed her, but sideswiped her car and smacked the driver-side mirror in through her window, right into the side of her head and face.

After a complete exam, X-rays and CAT scans, soap and water, all that was left was to repair the ear and face. The doctor took great care closing the wounds and repairing the ear, because it is a doctor’s job to make bad days as good as they can be. Every jagged skin edge had its mirror opposite across the gash found, aligned, and sewed into place. If all want well, some day the scars would be fine lines clearly visible only to those who were kissing close, or to the young woman searching her face in another mirror for a bad memory.

During the repair, the patient’s mother sat quietly in the ER treatment room, saying nothing except by a look on her face that said it all. It was the look of a parent staring into the abyss that would have been left behind had her child died that day. All of the love, pain, work and the heartfelt hopes almost went for naught, in an instant’s inattention. She was another child’s parent, but the doctor could feel her pain as his own.

Weeks later he thought again of the patient and her face, as he watched his own daughter graduate from high school. He knew that in a few short months his daughter would take her own road out of his town for college in another state, in a big city. He thought about the patient, and how lucky she had been that night; had she drifted a foot farther to the left into the truck’s path she would never have known what hit her. Life is like that, he thought, a hit or miss proposition where your fate can be determined by inches. There are no guarantees for parents; you bring your children up to stay on their side of life’s road, and hope that, with a little luck, the trucks will always just rattle by them in the night.

He watched his daughter take her diploma and stride off stage toward her place in the world. She was bright and beautiful, and going off to college where there would be boys and car radios, and those great days of wonderful distraction. He and her mother had taught their children not to take their eyes off the road, lest they drift into the path of real trouble, but he knew if we all did everything our parents told us to we would probably not have children to worry about. He prayed that if she drifted into trouble’s path she would only suffer one of life’s sideswipes, the kind that leaves small scars and more wisdom. He took comfort in knowing that the road they had made for her and put her on was as safe as it could be.

Together she and they had paved it with her common sense and street smarts, lit it with a first-class education and a healthy skepticism, and lined it with guard rails of conscience and ethics. Beside it lay a rest stop called home where she could pull off any time, come in for a few days to fix an emotional flat tire or just to let the engine cool. She could not have been better prepared for the real world if he sent her to college with a black belt in karate, pepper spray, a cell phone, and condoms, although come to think of it…

Erik Steele, D.O. is a physician in Bangor, an administrator at Eastern Maine Medical Center, and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.