What do you do about scars?

I have two large scars on my body as a result of open heart surgery. For those of you who read the blog regularly this will be no great surprise but I find that to people I meet on a day-to-day basis it can be very surprising.

My largest scar is runs diagonally from my left-hand side to my back. I say this is my largest scar but I don't know if it is the wider or longer of the two, it is just larger in my mind.

It is a result of my first operation when I was three months old and I have no feeling there. I find it hard to let people touch me there and don't even like to touch it myself. I am constantly aware of it if I am near anything that sticks out at that height, the most common of which is the top corner of a car door when I am getting into the left-hand side of a car.

I was always confused about why this one was the worst as I thought that the younger you were the better it would heal. Doing a little bit of research on the internet shows that this is not true at all, in fact the younger you are the more damage surgery is likely to inflict on your skin.

My second scar is down the middle of my chest and I really don't mind it at all. I have full feeling there, and although it looks like a very big scar I have no pyschological complex about it as with my other scar. This scar is from where I had open heart surgery at the age of 4.

I have plenty of small scars on my body from various procedures over the years and I even have a scarred aorta which necessitates me taking antibiotics prior to visiting the dentist and scarred ribs which can hurt from time to time.

As I am quite a curious person and scars are quite a big part of my life, I had to find out what I could do about my scars. There are many treatments available to people out there and I will try to show you through the motions of my thinking as I went on a quest of discovery to see if there was anything I could do about my scars.

The first and probably most advertised is Vitamin E. This can be in creams that you rub onto your scars, supplements or even just increasing it in your diet. Vitamin E is in eggs, green vegetables, nuts, vegetable oil and wheat germ so I think I probably get quite a bit in my diet anyway. According to Baumann (Dermatologic Surgery, 1999) applying Vitamin E to scars worsens their eventual appearance in one third of patients, so be careful with that. Do you take a 30-60 risk that your scars will actually get worse? Apparantly cocoa butter is much better than standard Vitamin E creams.

Surgery is fruitless in most situations as any surgery causes scarring. However if a scar is aligned in a way that it restricts movement or is very embarrasing then it can be altered with surgery. This is not an option for me but may be for other people.

Laser treatment has been proved successful in many scenarios but it is still mainly experimental, in some situations scars can grow back worse than they were. The best laser treatments are those that take a very long time and work by stripping of individual layers of skin rather than trying to demolish the entire scar.

Dermabrasion is becoming incresingly popular and is used to lower raised scars by slowly stripping off the top layers of the scar. My scar on my side is sunken so this is not an option to me.

One way to raise scars is to inject them with collagen but this is temporary and needs to be repeated often. I'm sure if you wanted to reduce the definition of a scar in a very obvious place then this would be good but mine is covered most of the time unless I am on holiday.

At the end of the day you have to understand the science behind the scar in order to do something about it. A scar isn't badly made skin that can just be fixed, it is completely different chemical. Skin is an increbibly complex array of cells that react to food and moisture whereas scars are collagen fibres. The best way I have found to reduce scars is with silicone pads which reduce the amount of collagen that is present in the scar. The only problem with this is that the pads are expensive and difficult to wear for long periods.

When I started writing this post I already knew what the outcome would be, I had decided many months ago that my scars where here to stay and that I am quite happy with them. If someone told me tomorrow that they had a machine that would remove scars completely to be replaced with perfectly formed skin would I take them up on the offer?

My scars are a big part of me, my personality and a reminder to me that life is precious and fragile but also tough and ready to fight back when necessary. Would it be all that good to live in Italy after spending your whole life in Holland, would you not miss Holland just a small bit if you couldn't even go back there for holidays? Click here if I just lost you.

I think that I have just convinced myself that I have made the right decision.