The Scars You Can’t See Hurt the Most
Dale Snavely 
Some of us have scars that are quite visible but it is the scars you can't see that hurt the most.
In November of 2004, violent nightmares of fiery helicopter crashes woke me up out of a medically induced coma. It was unlike anything I could describe. Opening my eyes, it was hard to understand what was happening.
I knew one thing for sure: The need to stay awake, away from those very real nightmares that were so scary. The helicopter crash was a very real memory, but not mine; it belonged to a patient on my caseload, who had related the story to me in my office.
The surgeon came in to check on me and said it wasn’t often he spoke to dead people. He explained that I was one of the 3% of people who suffer an acute Thoracic Aortic Dissection and survive. The procedure left me with nerve damage in my right hand, severe muscle loss in both my legs and my arms. It also meant months of cardiac rehab while learning how to cope with the pain.
My next lesson was learning that scars do hurt; some of the patients on my caseload had explained that to me. Yes, I had a big scar running down the front of my chest and the incision in my shoulder to hook up the heart-lung machine. They didn’t stop for red lights that day, so a nerve was nicked that led to a year of rehab to learn how to use my right hand again. Please understand, it was a small price to pay to stay alive.
Since 2004, I’ve made every attempt to keep working even when advised that it wasn’t necessary. I owned my first business at the age of 10. My business came to an abrupt halt after an older boy followed me on my route of cutting grass for the older women in my neighborhood. The following Saturday, I got up early, got my push lawn mower, and headed out on my route. By the time I reached the first two houses, I immediately noticed that the grass had already been cut.
The older women were kind as they explained that they felt so bad for me pushing the lawnmower, and the other boy had a gasoline-powered mower. Deeply discouraged, I went home to tell my mother that I couldn’t help buy food anymore. The following week, I started going to the park to find glass soda pop bottles in the trash cans and going to the store to exchange them for money to buy food. At age 14, I got my first job bussing tables in a restaurant.
In 2019, Teacher Dale spent the summer at Jiaotong University in Xi’an, China. Shortly after returning from China, I started teaching online. Then came the diagnosis of an Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm that measured 4 centimeters (cm). There was a second Aneurysm in the Left Iliac that also measured 4 cm, so a decision was made to do open vascular surgery, and 54 staples, which left me with a large, noticeable scar on the left side of my abdomen.
Now, it is 2025, and I recently celebrated my 67th birthday. To celebrate, I embarked on a fantastic adventure that is just beginning. My purpose is to make my part of the world a better place. That starts with my students, and as soon as I can overcome some technical hurdles, I will open registration and resume teaching my online classes again. My hope now is to once again earn money from teaching online and create educational courses that students will want to purchase. Getting over the tech hurdle means everything to me, so it just means getting up early each morning and working until I’m finished, no matter how I feel.
Please don’t think that I am making excuses for not being able to endure the pain in silence. It is easy for people to misjudge and not understand that the most painful scars aren’t from the hearing loss, the vision impairment, or the constant pain. Nor is it from the heart conditions that include now a new aneurysm, but it’s the scars you can’t see that hurt the most.