blood

two of my scabs fell of in the last few days. does that mean i’m healing or scarring?

blood is an interesting thing. do an idle search on google for “blood, scabbing, and healing” and you’ll find a lot about tattooing, PC game cheats, some about tainted blood and platelets, and less about what a scab might actually be good for. there’s hardly a thing you can look at on the news, or in the ‘real world’, these days that doesn’t have as its basis — and its manifestation — blood or its products, yet i hardly comprehend what it’s actually made of and what it does, much less what to do about scabs and scars. my friend todd and my late friend david were forever changed by bad blood products from bayer, baxter, and alpha pharmaceuticals. deb suffers from an entirely opposite condition of the blood, and many of us rely on products that affect the blood – but ironically might damage it – to keep us alive. two years ago you couldn’t turn on the news without hearing about mounds of burning animals, killed in masses because of the ‘mad cow’ disease risk. the phrase of today is once again ‘no blood for oil’.

if scabbing means bleeding has stopped, what does the end of scabbing mean? there is only a tiny scab left on the left corner of my medial incision. i haven’t even been picking at the scabs, because i understand that could make scabbing worse — though i don’t know why. when i lie on my stomach, one of my favorite ways to sleep, my breast hurts; when people hug me these days, i often wince. sometimes, even if it doesn’t hurt or they didn’t hit the sensitive left breast, i shout out ‘ow’, but nobody thinks its funny.

i suspect all the scabbing will be gone soon, and then i’ll see the full potential of the scars — marks of being stabbed, however precisely and on purpose, and then prevented from bleeding. then i just have to figure out how to heal.