Self -portraits of Spinal Cord Injury & Surgery
Sarah Scott Biography
Those hours that I was alone in that hospital will stay with me till the day I die. Hours tick by and no one tells me what is wrong, they just file in and out doing whatever they have to do and I lie there with tears in my eyes and terror in my mind. I can no longer feel below my sternum, and I need someone to hold my hands so I can feel reassured I'm still there, that the rest of my body isn't still back on that cornfield with my legs still trying to finish the race. The morphine hasn't taken away the phantom feeling and it terrorizes me and threatens to make me insane every second. But people do arrive, and the next day I have my first spinal fusion surgery where they seek to stabilize all the shattered bone with titanium rods. My biggest relief when I wake up is the phantom feeling is gone, but now the pain is even worse. The pain after is like none I've ever known and I find myself woefully lacking in proper pain management until I'm taken four hours by ambulance to the rehab center back in Philly.
The longest moments in your life will eventually becomes seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months, and suddenly you realize in all the carnage you're still alive. Under the surface you may feel like you're drowning, but no one really notices after awhile, it's just white noise. That's how my life went for the next nine months, until I find out I have to have a revision surgery because I've developed the deformity the original surgery was supposed to prevent.
I was devastated by the news but it happened and two years later I'm handling the possibility of another spinal surgery with relative ease because I'm used to lemons by now, lots and lots of lemons and not a whole lot of lemonade. I have great days, I have terrible days. I keep trying to move on in some fashion and I keep getting slapped back because the world isn't meant for me anymore. But somehow I manage to still be ok, to smile, to laugh, and even to love. There are vestiges of the old me, but anymore it's just glimpses here and there.
The new me is paralyzed from the bottom of my sternum down, 100% reliant on a wheelchair for mobility. I'm no longer a size four with marilyn curves etched on taut muscles. I no longer wear heels, and I've had to give away most of my clothes from my old life. Some I'm still holding onto, but slowly and surely they continue to be discarded as I keep loosening my grip on the past.
That's the story behind scar which I wasn't quite ready to post when I took the picture. The picture to me said it all, the broken scarred body that still manages to look beautiful, but I realize it probably means something very different to most. But that's how I see the photo, the scar, and me, broken but still beautiful in unexpected ways.
Images
I am a disabled photographer, and much of my work is self-portraiture. I became disabled, paraplegic, in 2005 while racing my bicycle. Something, whether it was the mild traumatic head injury, or the PTSD aftereffects of going through such a catastrophic injury, changed the way my brain functions and I suddenly found a well of creative urges that were all but dormant prior to the injury. Suddenly, photography and writing became a crucial outlet for me, an overwhelming passion as well as an effective form of therapy.
I've had six surgeries since I was first injured, two on my back. The first was to insert titanium scaffolding to hold up my shattered back; the second was nine months later, when it became clear the instrumentation was failing to do it’s job of keeping me in alignment. The revision surgery was an enormous effort by everyone involved and the recovery traumatized me emotionally.
Early on after the injury, I developed a phobia of being touched anywhere near the scar/instrumentation. No more pats on the back for me, no shoulder massages, I could barely stand to run a bar of soap across my shoulders. I grew my hair long and refused to so much as look at the scar for the first few years. I certainly never, ever, looked at the x-rays even though I had them all to carry to my various doctors.
About a year after the injury I started keeping a blog and taking pictures, documenting my life as I went about trying to recover and rebuild my life. I found it hugely therapeutic to document and publicize the things that bothered or shamed me, all the things that came with living in a partially paralyzed body and being a refugee of sorts in my own life. Writing and photographing my story freed me in so many ways.By 2009 I started thinking of my story less from a perspective of victim, to one of a survivor. That mindset stopped me from being ashamed by my scars, and motivated me to explore my back scars photographically. 2009, four years after becoming a paraplegic, I saw my scars in full for the very first time. Some find these pictures difficult or impossible to look at, but to me, they are beautiful. I can look at my scars and feel proud of all I’ve survived. I am reminded of becoming a better, happier, more fulfilled person than I ever was before. I look at my scars and know no matter what happens, no matter how difficult and heartbreaking life can be, it goes on and I’m happy to be a part of it. There is no shame in survival, only beauty in the end result.
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