A Covered Wound Heals Faster
I don’t spend much time getting ready in the bathroom these days. Brush my teeth. Still need to go in and get checked for chemo-cavities. Sprinkle water across my new hair. It’s growing in the color of a selkie pelt. It is still not thick enough to provide much protection. Sunscreen on my face, neck, chest. Chemo-kissed with discoloration the dermatologist says will be “challenging” to treat. Pull a shirt over my lopsided tissue expanders. Reconstruction must wait till February 2027. And then out the door, quickly, into the rest of the house, where dust, books, and children help me forget my body's past, present, and future.
Meg Conley
Yesterday, I’d just pulled my shirt on when I noticed the package of bandaids on the bathroom counter. A white tin with a short sentence on its side, “A covered wound heals faster.” I started to cry, leaned against the door and slid down onto the bathroom tile. I’d like to say this is the first time package copy has brought me to my knees, but you and I know that can’t possibly be true.
Why did I cry this time?
Maybe I cried just because those five words are true. A covered wound really does heal faster.
A very well-cared-for wound will not form a scab.1 Scabs usually form because a wound has not been properly covered. A scab is a crust formed by dehydrated and dead cells. This crust inhibits the migration of healing cells to the surface of the wound. Scabs form in dry environments. Wounds heal twice as fast in a moist (or wet!) microenvironment. A moist (or wet!) microenvironment helps healing cells migrate to the wound, sustains the extracellular matrix that supports those cells in their work, and reduces the progression of inflammatory reactions. A moist (or wet!) microenvironment prevents dehydration, enhances collagen synthesis, and breaks down dead tissue.
Maybe I cried because I’ve spent the last year being wounded and caring for those wounds. I’ve been pierced, scraped, cored, and sliced. After each wounding, I was given the same instructions: keep the wound moist, usually with Aquaphor, and covered, usually with a bandage, until it isn’t a wound anymore.
I create a moist wound microenvironment when I cover a wound with a bandaid. I create a wet wound microenvironment when I cover a wound with a bandage that seals against the skin around the wound.
I find wet healing particularly aggravating. When my nipples were removed, my doctor covered both wounds in a gauze and then a layer of plastic. It all felt very seeping and weeping. I wanted to scratch away the bandages and dry everything out.
I tried to reason with myself in my unreasonable way. I told myself the wet wound microenvironment is like a rich fen! And rich fens sustain diverse ecosystems that let things grow! Like dragon’s mouth orchids, wiry witch grass, downy wood mint, and purple milkweed! And isn’t that lovely and so aren’t the sites of your waterlogged never-again-nips lovely too?
This reframing helped, kind of. My brain went from fen to bog to bog woman producing bog water where other women produce milk. And listen, a bog woman’s gotta bog, you know? I settled into the seeping and weeping.
Maybe I cried because knowing a covered wound heals faster has not helped my shaking hands change my own bandages. I spread the Aquaphor thick on my fingertips so that I can’t form a tactile memory of all the puckered ridges and too-soft centers. My hands remember things my head cannot. Sometimes when I am falling asleep, I can feel the heat of my daughters’ fevers in my right palm. I do not want to fall asleep feeling my ragged bits in my fingertips.
Maybe I cried because I’ve not done enough to stop the progression of my fear and so there is no part of me that is not wound now. Maybe my tears are trying to soak my parched self so that healing cells can resurface me entirely.
Maybe I cried because I still feel certain that Love covers all things, but now the aching part of me asks if that means there is a wound at the center of the universe. (The non-aching part of me rolls her eyes at this thought. She’s like, Maybe you cried because you are the type of person who thinks all this absolute bullshit. I’d cry too. Oh, wait.)
Or maybe - and this one seems the most likely now that I’ve come to the near end of this - I cried because chemotherapy knocked me into menopause at least a decade early. I can’t have HRT. And everything makes me cry all the time. Even copywriting on the side of a bandaid tin. (When everything isn’t sending me into hot flashes.)
I got up. Slowly, because my joints stiffen if I am still for more than three minutes. Wiped the wet off my face. Maybe the neuropathy will keep my fingertips from remembering these tears. And then went out the door, quickly, into the rest of the house, where dust, books, and children helped me remember my body's past, present, and future.
1 Please note there are exceptions to this scab rule but I am not going to get into them because writing about scabs is making me a little sick.
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