Do you bruise easily?

She asked me from across the room. It was a reasonable question. She was dressed in her surgeon's scrubs, having just left one surgery and getting ready for the next, while talking to me in between the two.

I looked down at my legs, seeing the foot long lines of bruised flesh under my clothes where a friend's dog had jumped up on me, then slid down thighs, leaving trails of welts, not quite breaking skin. That dog weighed more than I do. My dogs, neither weighing more than forty pounds, leave the same marks.

"Do you bruise easily?"

When I was first learning how to play ultimate, I would come home with bruises on my arms from where I hit the disc trying to catch it. Back then, I rarely came home with less than a dozen bruises on my arms, more than twenty was normal. Any injury I had always seemed so much worse than it should. A sprained ankle, a jammed finger.

"Do you bruise easily?"

I think of all the weight lifting I've been doing, and how lifting weights causes micro-tears in the muscle fibers. How the reconstruction of these muscles makes them stronger. How tired and hungry I am all the time as I try to heal from all the new exercises I've been doing.

I look up at the surgeon and think of all the vitamin K I take because I bruise so easily, and wonder how much blood am I going to lose with this surgery. Will I notice the scars? Will I heal cleanly?

I respond, "Yes, I do."