I Was Born Missing an Ear. To the World, It Was a Problem to Fix

This essay by Toronto writer Kate Gies is excerpted from her new book, It Must Be Beautiful to Be Finished: A Memoir of My Body, published by Scribner Canada. Gies’ memoir chronicles her journey as a girl navigating both a medical system and culture set up to “fix” her. As a child, Gies underwent 14 surgeries to rebuild a missing ear. This short but powerful excerpt in The Walrus describes one encounter with a surgeon when she was 7 years old.

I would get to know this man well in the years that followed. He was a man who could twist my stomach into knots just by entering the room, a man who tried his best to relate to me through bad jokes and kid jargon. A man of good intentions, who wanted only to build me the best ear he could. A man who, despite his efforts at kindness, was still the man who sliced into me while I was asleep.

With Uncle Louie, I became two bodies: the one I experienced and the one he measured. The one I experienced flushed pink when excited, nerve endings shining. It knew the interplay of skin and sun. The warmth, the tingling. The one he measured was skin that split easily. It was trails of sewn flesh mapping the damaged bits. The one I experienced made puppets of its fingers, mouths of its knees. It hummed songs it didn’t quite know the lyrics to, feeling the purr in its face. The one he measured was arms and legs flailing and stiffening. The thump on the examination table. The slack of the upper lip in the operating room.