Surgical Scars | Artist's Statement

"Progress isn’t always a straight line. It’s a process full of irregularities and ups and downs at every step. My surgery scar is like that. I got it two months after my eighteenth birthday and even though I am now healed, there are still rough parts of its ridges that lay uneven and bunch up along my stomach like the “dotted” lines that are placed in the middle of the road. My scar was made while I was intubated for 96 hours after doctors found a small bowel mesenteric volvulus that caused my intestines to strangulate and resulted in profound septic shock. I was on life support and was taken into the intensive care unit in critical condition where I underwent emergent operations. The other round scars near both sides of my pelvis are from blake drains once secured with sutures that facilitated ascites. They found it rather atypical for a patient my age to have a mechanical obstruction like this. All this began when I went on a college semester-abroad trip to Hawaii. I left on August 26th and after I got off the airplane, I was rushed to a small hospital in Hilo, Hawaii in Intensive care. They never gave up on me and fought with me. My scars are the map of my survival and I’ve grown to become very proud of them. They give me strength and individuality. It’s very rare for people to survive this infection – and in actual fact I survived two, because after the mesenteric volvulus, I suffered a second infection – septic shock. We all fought on. As I look at it now, my scar’s features mirror the course of events that have brought me to this very point in my career."