Reflection On Keloids

Envision walking down the street on a terribly hot summer day, looking over, and seeing a girl in a long sleeve shirt and jeans. You think to yourself, she is completely insane and looks ridiculous wearing the wrong season’s clothes, especially on a day like this. A person can only wonder why someone would ever do that to themselves. Ever since spring of 2013, I am able to express the feeling to need to cover up every inch of your body so that no one is able to see what is underneath. I spent that entire summer in jeans because I was afraid to let the world see what had happened to my body.

After all of the doctor’s visits that I had endured for months, the road rash I had gotten from flipping a golf cart had finally been turning into
Sherrie took one quick look at my legs and diagnosed me with having the disease Keloids. She told me that I was going to need treatment immediately, otherwise the keloids would continue to grow larger and eventually would not longer be treatable. That being the case, if I chose not to get treatment I would have the hideous raised scars for the rest of my life. After hearing this my heart sank. I spent much of my summer in and out of the doctor’s office, attempting to fix the scars that have taken over my legs. This trip to Sherrie’s cottage was supposed to be a fun escape from everything, but now I had found out that I had to go to see her every six weeks to get treatment for my legs during the school year. Having a cosmetically disfiguring disease is a challenge because of the insecurities it can come with, but with proper education of treatment one can move forward and have relief when they know there are options to fix the
There currently is no way to prevent keloids completely, but there are ways a person with this disease can prevent themselves from developing keloids. To prevent a keloid formation, a person should not get anything that will change your appearance, such as surgery, tattoos, or piercings. If a person has to undergo surgery the best option for prevention would be to immediately get injections to the site of the procedure and have pressure wraps around the wound to try and stop the keloid from forming. This aspect of prevention for me has been a struggle because I want to break the so called “rules” of not getting a tattoo or a piercing. I am an 18-year-old girl that can not go out on the weekend with her friends and get another ear piercing if I want to because of the side effects it could possibly have. Since there is just a possibility and not a guarantee that I will be getting keloids for sure, if I go through with one of these things, it makes it even more tempting to just test it out and hope that a keloid will not form.. Although getting a piercing or a tattoo is a minor thing that many people do not want anyways, being told that you will never be able to get one has an effect on