Allisoninoz,
Congratulations on healing so well, outside scars as well as inside (I read your other post, the newspaper article, what a story of survival from childhood surgeries to Ross!).
My scar is about 9 inches long, and I’m not a large person so I thought it would have come out in the range I had read about, where they say it’s usually 6 to 8 inches. My surgeon must have needed more wiggle room so totally lifted up the hood. It doesn’t bother me much (the good thing about growing older, no time to waste, and battle scars show where you’ve been). Besides I had ruptured my spleen back as a 12 year old (a skinny kid hit by a fast ball), and that splenectomy scar on my belly is about the same size as my AVR scar, but much thicker and gnarly due to old school incision methods. I remember being afraid to take my shirt off when I got to high school to shower in front of my baseball teammates, the scar screamed out back then and I was so young and self conscious about it. But looking back, no one really teased me, well maybe a few winced at the site of it, and I still hid it from the girls during the summer for a while longer. So now I kid my gal and say that “I have one large zipper from collar bone to belly button so you probably want to trade me in for a newer model”, she says nope, it doesn’t bother her one bit
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Glad you made it, are enjoying your family, and helped others in a unique way through your newspaper article. By the way, I was also unicuspid (this forum makes being a heart patient feel more commonplace than it would be otherwise, and a smaller world).
