Mr. Potato Head taught me, ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but …’

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Being successful in life requires a sense of humor. Let’s be honest, the world is full of hurtful people who want nothing more than to bring you down and crush your dreams. Often times it’s because of their own insecurities and need to be validated by others. As kids, we are taught to ignore the hurtful words of others. In theory it’s great, but we all know it’s not quite as easy to practice.

Reality check… life is tough and people will say and do things to hurt you. The sooner you accept that the easier life is.

Many aren’t aware of the impact of their comments and actions while others simply don’t care and have no filter.

Kids can be cruel

I learned as a kid the importance of believing in yourself and not relying on the opinions of others to determine your self-worth and I am thankful for that hard lesson. I distinctly remember as an 8yr old schoolmates whispering behind my back about my burn scars. Trust me, you know when people are staring and talking about you. Then there were those more brazen who would call me Freddy Krueger to my face, in tribute to Wes Craven’s main character from ‘Nightmare on Elm Street.’

Then there were the hundreds of kids, and even adults, who would stare at me and make comments such as “ewww gross mommy, look at him.” Unless you’ve been in that situation, it’s hard to comprehend what it’s like for people to stare at you everywhere you go… and I mean everywhere – school, church, restaurant, movies, grocery store, etc…

There comes a time in your life, as it did for me, that you finally realize you have 2 options:

  1. Do nothing. Feel sorry for yourself and avoid going to public places. Play the victim card and fear change.
  2. Do something. Accept reality and learn to embrace your shortcomings. Commit to being the best version of yourself.

Acceptance

With the help of months of crying myself to sleep and praying for the scars to go away, I came to terms with the permanent nature of my scars. Call it faith or social evolution, I learned I needed to adopt a sense of humor about my scars if I wanted to be successful and have any hopes of living a normal life. I realized things wouldn’t change overnight nor would anyone do it for me. The evolution of my acceptance is no small feat and required years, even decades, of refinement. It’s a constant balance between overplaying your acceptance (and practical jokes) with being humble and thankful for your blessings. I have learned to just be myself and not worry what everyone else thinks. People respect genuineness and admire those that are comfortable in their own skin.

There will always be haters and I can’t control what they think so why bother. I learned to live for me and focus on my happiness.

From age 8-35 I had no right ear, not even a hint of one. You wouldn’t believe how many times people, often times kids my age, would come up and say “hey, you have no ear, where’d it go?” Finally, I started saying “what do you mean?” Then they’d point at it, or where it should be, and say “your right ear. It’s missing.” Continuing the role play, I’d reach up and feign shock and say “oh my gosh, where is it? You have to help me find it.” That story line never gets old and was best played out at a neighborhood swimming pool where I had kids diving into the deep end for 20 minutes believing it was stuck on the drain.

Evolution of Mr. Potato Head

At 35, I received a prosthetic right ear that literally snaps onto a metal bar that is anchored by permanent screws that are drilled into my head. As a result, I’m officially known as Mr. Potato Head by those who work in my industry and have witnessed it popping off at inopportune times. The beauty of meeting new people is they don’t know your story and form opinions quickly – i.e. the 2 ears on your head are real and won’t fall off while we’re talking, etc… For the most part those assumptions hold true unless I’m introduced to a dance floor. I absolutely love my dancing and always game for showing off my mad skills regardless of the venue. Most recently, I was working the floor in a dance off at an HFMA event in Atlantic City. Not to brag, but I owned the floor. I gave it everything I had and finished with a nice backspin – throwback to my 80’s upbringing. As I walked off the floor, fully expecting to receive applause and chants of ‘we want more’, instead I was faced with dead silence. I was stunned and thought what more could they possible want. It was then that a colleague pointed to the dance floor and said “your ear is still on the dance floor.” Not missing a beat, I strolled out onto the floor, grabbed the lonely prosthetic ear and quickly snapped it back into place. Needless to say, I don’t think the audience was prepared for an ear to pop off one of the dance competitors. I say competitors because everything is always a competition or at least to me. I believe you do everything with 100% of your ability and never hold back. I never do anything half ass and rest easy at night knowing if I lose any of my abilities I will never have regrets for not using them fully.

32 years removed from my injury, I think the single biggest accelerator for my healing and resuming a meaningful and fulfilling life is due to embracing my situation and learning to laugh at myself. Time continues to reinforce my mantra – age has a unique way of forcing us all to come to terms with our shortcomings and learning to focus on the things we can impact and not losing sleep over those things we can’t. I would like to issue a formal apology to the TSA agent working the security scanner at the Hartsfield Atlanta Airport when I decided to pull my latest prank. I can assure you it gave him something to talk about in the break room and you know he probably walked in and said, “y’all ain’t going to believe this…”

PS. Yes that is 2 right ears. I have to replace them every 2-3 years and carry the old one for grins and giggles. Perhaps I’ll have a warrior necklace in 20 years of all my old ones.

ABOUT SHAY

Shay is an All American and World ranked triathlete, burn survivor with scars over 65% of his body and is a sought out national motivational speaker. Despite being told he’d never compete in sports again at the age of 8, Shay is living testament to “Anything is Possible”: 4x Ironman, 4x member of Team USA, ranked top 1% of Ironmen worldwide and has competed in 9 triathlon world championships, including the Ironman World Championships in Kona, Hawaii. His mantra has always been to not merely be a “finisher” but to be a “competitor.” If you enjoyed this article, I encourage you to check out my other posts.

A Breast Implant in my neck?

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As a man, I thought I’d never have to consider having a breast implant put in my body, much less in my neck. Leave it to modern medicine to change that notion. Breast implants are essentially tissue expanders, silicone balloon like devices inserted under the skin to stretch and grow new skin. Tissue expanders are most commonly known for breast reconstruction, but they have also gained popularity for use in burn survivors. As a burn survivor, this concept was advocated in 1989 for the treatment and remedy of the severe scar contractures in my neck. The belief was a sizable tissue expander (insert breast implant) would be inserted under my unburned skin on the left side of my neck. Over a period of 2 months the tissue expander would be inflated to full capacity, basically a softball projecting from my neck (see sample pic below). After the expander was fully inflated, it was believed it could be removed and the excess skin could be stretched to the right side of neck, thus allowing for the removal of about 7” of restrictive burn scar tissue.

This methodology had achieved miraculous results in other burn survivors. I distinctly remember seeing one kid who had 2 of these, though little smaller in size, inserted in the top of his head. Lucky or unlucky for him the location of these expanders made him resemble Mickey Mouse once fully inflated. For this particular kid, they were able to replace 4” of his scalp that was ridden with burn scars with fully normal skin. When finished, he had a normal hair line again. Utterly amazing. There were other comparable success stories that made this procedure seem like a perfect fit for me. One thing that couldn’t be predicted was my skin’s inelasticity and keloid scarring.

The Procedure

Inserting the tissue expander required the surgeon to cut me from ear to ear and then back to my left clavicle – basically a large sideways V across my entire neck. The expander was positioned directly in the center of the left side of my neck with a port buried under the skin beneath my left ear. The port was where they would insert a syringe and inject salt water in the expander every week. The resulting incision scar rivaled those of Frankenstein. You can only imagine the stares I received returning to high school, a freshman at that. It was almost comical the stories that circulated. The best was probably the story of me riding a motorcycle in a pasture and accidentally running into a barbed wire fence. Story has it that my head was almost severed from my neck but by some miracle I was able to hold it together and ride back to safety. I’m not sure how the story was propagated but I could have had some influence.

Over the years, I have learned you need to embrace your shortcomings and be able to laugh at yourself. If you can’t laugh at yourself, life will be pretty miserable.

Over the next 8 weeks, I would go to a plastic surgeon and have him insert copious amounts of salt water into the tissue expander. Each time, the expander was inflated to the point of discomfort and borderline unmanageable, feeling like my skin was going to explode at any minute. After a couple of days, the skin would stretch and the discomfort would go away just in time to have the next series of injections. I endured this routine for 8 weeks. Besides the pain of having a balloon stretching your neck, I also had to be careful not to do anything that would cause the expander to bust – i.e. wrestling with friends, falling down riding my bike or getting hit with a basketball. Busting a tissue expander is not a common phenomenon but there were stories of them breaking and the fragmented pieces being circulated in the body – one such incident required open heart surgery to remove from a patient’s heart. Surprisingly and obviously not my brightest decision in life, I would often play basketball during our lunch recess thinking I was safe since all I was going to do was post up and take a few shots. That careless thinking came to end after a ball was deflected and hit me square in the neck. I remember going home that afternoon, obviously not saying a word to my parents of my stupidity, and thinking the expander would start leaking fluid into my body while I slept, making the surgery a complete failure. Luckily God was just reminding me of my stupidity and gave me a 2nd chance. As a kid who has underwent many a surgery, the hardest part of recovery has always been refraining from physical activity. I think my inability to sit still as an adult is a direct result of being told as a kid for months on end that I couldn’t do anything. If you’re like me, tell me I can’t do something and I want to do it even more. Fortunately, it seems my kids have inherited that trait as well.

Right or wrong, the inability to be distracted from what you want in life is something I think everyone should pursue. I call that PASSION.

It’s all about perspective

Life is so interesting. Everything is always a matter of perspective and I think we should remind ourselves more often. As some of my friends say, many of our problems are ‘first world problems.’ My peers were worried about pimples, bad hair or their feet looking too big and here I had a softball protruding from my neck. Needless to say, everywhere I went people stared and did double takes. Let’s be honest, it’s not every day you see a big softball sticking out of someone’s neck. I could tell many people were confused and unable to process what they were seeing. I had to keep reminding myself it was temporary and the long term benefit far outweighed the pain and discomfort – or so I thought.

After 2 months of pure misery and constant anticipation of enjoying a life without the scars limiting my neck mobility, the day finally came. I had envisioned in my head what it would look like with normal skin on both sides of my neck. I had envisioned being able to turn my head in both directions without my right eye and mouth pulling down. I envisioned being able to hear again out of my right ear when I turned my head to the left. In hindsight, perhaps the surgeon should have given me more tempered expectations but if he had I’m not so sure I would have agreed to the procedure. This was truly sold as a life changing event as it had been for so many other burn survivors. I saw the lives of those who were transformed and knew there’s a risk to any surgery.

Unfortunately, the surgery and overall procedure was not as successful as what they anticipated. It was estimated roughly 7” of scar tissue could be removed from my neck. Instead, less than 2” was removed. The surgeon was baffled at my skin’s inelasticity. There were no complications during the surgery and all the injections/inflation of the expander were performed as scheduled. In short, we were left with a medical mystery. No one could explain why my skin didn’t stretch like everyone else. Some things in life just can’t be explained or predicted and that was what I was left with. All in all, I was now left with a permanent scar that went from ear to ear and back to my clavicle with no distinguishable improvement in the mobility of my neck. And let’s not forget that I keloid, meaning the incision scar thickened to 1/2” and was bright red for several years. As a far as any doctor was concerned, the procedure was a failure and those were 10 weeks of my high school freshman year that I will never get back.

The Next Chapter

After the final sutures were removed, I assessed my new reality and tried in vain to make sense of the situation. As previously mentioned, this wasn’t the first time a surgery didn’t go as planned. Basically, the burn scars on my neck looked the same, excluding the addition of the new scar which now looked like someone tried to cut my throat, and I had still had the same limitation of mobility. If I was in a gang, this new scar would be perfect and I’d for sure have street cred. No doubt I could easily circulate stories of a knife fight that left one man standing (me). However, I was just a 15 year old high school freshman trying to find his way in the world and resume a life of normalcy, or at least normal for me. The more I prayed and contemplated the inevitability of my situation, the more I realized some things are just out of my control and some things just don’t work out no matter how hard you try. That doesn’t mean you don’t try again or curse the system. You just accept the outcome and chalk it up to a learning experience. I’ve done a lot of learning in my years and I truly believe God has used these experiences to strengthen my fortitude and to not focus on the superficial things in life.

Eventually, you build your self-confidence around being the best version of yourself and ignore the naysayers who are always looking to tear people down. You also learn as tough as things may seem, someone else always has it worse and yet they still find a way and the willpower to be successful.

There is another silver lining in this story. The surgeon gave me the tissue expander (breast implant) as a souvenir. What else would a 15 year old boy do but take it to school and show it off to his friends? I can safely say that no one else had one of these to pass around at lunch. As always, thankful for the memory.

ABOUT SHAY

Shay is an All American and World ranked triathlete, burn survivor with scars over 65% of his body and is a sought out national motivational speaker. Despite being told he’d never compete in sports again at the age of 8, Shay is living testament to “Anything is Possible”: 4x Ironman, 4x member of Team USA, ranked top 1% of Ironmen worldwide and has competed in 9 triathlon world championships, including the Ironman World Championships in Kona, Hawaii. His mantra has always been to not merely be a “finisher” but to be a “competitor.” If you enjoyed this article, I encourage you to check out my other posts.

Waking up from surgery to discover doctor performed the wrong procedure

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Imagine waiting 15 years for a life changing surgery only to awaken and realize the doctor performed a completely different surgery than you consented to. Then, imagine the surgery is your worst nightmare… undoing 15 years of progress, leaving you with scars on your body that previously were unscarred. I can not only imagine, I lived it, and it was one of the worst feelings I’ve experienced in my life. It was a complete violation of my trust, my belief in everything sacred I held for surgeons and a destruction in the belief my scars would ever get better.

With over 30 surgeries to my credit, I feel like I’ve experienced it all. I’ve had my fair share of complications but I have always accepted them as an inherent medical risk. In each situation, I knew the surgeon did the best he could and was executing our mutually agreed procedure. I had not only accepted Murphy’s Law as being the rule for me, I had learned to embrace it.

Burn surgeries are known for complications and high rates of infection.

In the past, I had willingly accepted the outcome of losing 3 skin grafts to infection. I had accepted my fate when gangrene set in and eventually necessitated the removal of my right ear. I had accepted the outcome when my surgeon accidentally harvested too much skin from the top of my legs, essentially making them a 3rd degree burn, and had to harvest skin from the bottom of my thighs to repair the top of my thighs. I even accepted the impossible when a 4” x 8” full thickness skin graft was harvested from my abdomen and shrank 65% once inserted into my neck (statistically it would only shrink 5-10%). The healing of my body has always defied the laws of medicine and I make every surgeon aware of my history prior to undergoing new surgeries.

I’m growing but my burn skin won’t grow with me

What most people don’t know is burn scars don’t grow when you grow. The scars have limited elasticity and mine in particular were impacting my hearing and pulling down the right corner of my mouth and eye. It was manageable pain but something that was getting worse with the passing of each day and something that needed to be addressed while my insurance was still willing to treat the condition as a “medical necessity”. Previously the impact of growth was so substantial that my right arm was 2” smaller than my left arm, requiring a skin graft 3” x 10” to be harvested from my hip.

It was 1999 and I was finishing my 2nd year of MBA. I had spent the last 2 years methodically interviewing surgeons around the country in person to determine who I felt could deliver the best solution to improve my situation. As you might imagine, despite all of them looking at the same scars and doing the same evaluation, no 2 surgeons offered the same solution. Surprisingly, some were in direct contrast to each other. One surgeon went so far as to say,

if you have the tissue expander put in your neck as Dr. XXXX recommends, it will severely impact your breathing and put you at major risk.

That’s the challenge of burn scars. They are the hardest trauma to fix and everyone’s body responds differently.

As I finished my nationwide search, I relied on my personal experience over the last 15+ years to conclude the simplest solution is usually the best. I opted to have a section of skin, roughly 4” x 8”, to be harvested from my thigh and stapled into my neck, similar to what had been done in 1995 (sample image below). Almost all of the skin had already been harvested from both legs over the past 15 years but surprisingly I personally had great results with reharvested skin grafts.

Impact of the medical battery

Immediately awakening from the surgery I knew something was wrong. My back and my buttocks were in extreme pain, which was strange considering they were not even remotely associated with the consented surgery or ever even discussed. These were the only 2 areas on my body that were still virgin skin – unburned and intentionally not used in previous skin grafts. Over the years, many surgeons had mentioned using my buttocks for a full thickness skin graft to my face – it was soft, unscarred and supposedly the pigmentation of your buttocks is the closest to your face. I repeatedly refused these suggestions knowing I would never be comfortable knowing part of my butt would now be part of my face. Call me crazy, although most would never know, there was nothing appealing about skin from my butt being on my face – one can only imagine how much fun my fraternity brothers would have with this one. Let’s be honest, your face is the first thing people see and would you be comfortable with a large portion of your butt being on your face? The reality of my situation was only telling considering I had called my little sister “butthead” the first 3 years of her life and convinced her that was her name.

As I began to regain mental clarity, I requested to see my surgeon only to be notified he would not be available as he was on vacation fishing for the next 5 days. However, the nurse felt a phone call with the Dr could be arranged when he called in tomorrow morning. How could this be? In all my years the surgeon has always visited me the day after an operation to make sure everything went smoothly and no questions. The harsh reality began to set in, the nightmare was only beginning.

I will never forget the pain I experienced when I tried to sit up in the hospital bed. There was an intense knifing sensation of pain radiating from my buttocks and back. It literally felt as if the skin was ripping apart. It was then the attending nurse informed me that I needed to remain on my left side as large sections of skin grafts had been harvested from the entire right half of my back and the entire right side of my buttocks. The extreme tugging sensation now made sense as she explained the dressing on these areas were actually stapled into my skin. The sensation of skin ripping in my back and buttocks as I moved were not just sensations, they were actual skin ripping – creating 1/2” gashes in several spots on my back.

The next day I was finally able to talk with the surgeon. I’m not a violent person, but my head was filled with thoughts of anger and rage as I kept saying to myself how nice of him to take time away from his fishing trip to discuss why he changed the surgery while I was asleep without asking me or my mom who was waiting anxiously outside the OR. I played the conversation in my head 1000 times. Would I just start yelling at him and ask,

what the hell did you do and are you freaking crazy, who in their right mind would do this?

Would I threaten legal action and yell repeatedly,

you’ll pay for this and you’ll regret the day you f***ed me and left town?

Or, would I calmly ask him to explain what he did, and why, and try to keep my emotions out of it. I decided on the latter as my temper has never resolved matters in the past and usually prevented me from getting what I really wanted – the real answer. As calmly as I could, with pain increasing my voice inflexion, I asked my questions and bit my tongue as best as I could as he rambled through his explanation. It was obvious he sensed my anger and overall disapproval of his actions. Without saying I’m sorry or even offering a hint of an apology, he admitted once I was on the operating table, sedated and he could examine my scars in their full majesty, he felt using the virgin skin from my buttocks was the best option for my neck and would give me the best long term benefit. Consistent with what I had told other surgeons over the years, I never doubted that using skin from my buttocks was a viable option. However, I had intentionally chosen not to use it knowing it would always be an option when I was ready. I also held out hope there would be a procedure in the future where using buttocks skin would completely replace all the burn scars from my face (this had been mentioned by other surgeons but they had said to wait as well). Equally frustrated, I asked why did he remove the skin from my back and staple it into my armpit, especially since we never even vaguely discussed my arm being an issue. He reverted back to his story that once I was on the operating table and he was able to fully assess the contractures on my arm, he felt the procedure he did offered the best long term solution.

Road to recovery

Returning to grad school was a challenge to say the least. Essentially, I had two large scabs covering half my back and half my buttocks. Every small movement from a twisting of the back to sitting in a chair to bending over to tie my shoes to grabbing a backpack or even just walking, caused the scabs to rip and start bleeding. When I would sit down in the classroom desks, the large scabs on my back and buttocks would crack open, bleed through my clothes and then bleed again when I stood up because the clothes had dried to the scab. After a couple of days of bleeding through all my shirts, I decided to never put my back against the chair, limiting the bleeding to only my buttocks. It was a nightmare to say the least. To make matters worse, I was also working 30hrs a week at a venture capital firm in hopes of securing a permanent position upon graduation. I managed to keep up with my work responsibilities in the hospital and couldn’t afford to squander this great career opportunity once I returned back to campus. To prevent the chance of impairing my driving, I delayed taking pain medication several hours, and sometimes not at all on days I was working only 4 hours or less.

I registered for campus escorts to class when I first returned to campus but abandoned them after the first day realizing the shuttle service was not timely. Instead, I rode my bicycle and learned to just take the pain and picked a route that minimized pedaling and pot holes. As the weeks amassed into a month, the scabs were finally healed and my daily actions were no longer limited. However, the new scars did not fade and were a daily reminder of that tragic day when my trust was stolen.

Where am I today

One thing I have learned over the years is that people will let you down. Some will do it intentionally and some do it even though they had the best intentions in the world. Luckily and by the grace of God, after 3 years of wrestling with this life changing event, I was able to put the past behind me and restore my belief in tomorrow being a better version of today. I have forgiven the doctor and harbor no ill will against him. I also pray he is not burdened by the years of hardship he put me through. I guess I really should thank him for the idea he cemented in my head that,

I need to continually focus on what I’ve gained in life as opposed to what I’ve lost.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve lost a lot but I have definitely been given way more than I deserve. Who knows, but without this tragic event, I may not be married with a beautiful wife and 5 healthy kids.

ABOUT SHAY

Shay is an All American and World ranked triathlete, burn survivor with scars over 65% of his body and is a sought out national motivational speaker. Despite being told he’d never compete in sports again at the age of 8, Shay is living testament to “Anything is Possible”: 4x Ironman, 4x member of Team USA, ranked top 1% of Ironmen worldwide and has competed in 9 triathlon world championships, including the Ironman World Championships in Kona, Hawaii. His mantra has always been to not merely be a “finisher” but to be a “competitor.” If you enjoyed this article, I encourage you to check out my other posts.