A Personal Insight into Scar Tissue

By Jet Rupar, LMT CMLDT EP-C EIM-II

Several years ago, I went to a conference through the Society for Oncology Massage (S4OM.org). One of the classes that I attended was on the topic of scar tissue management. I thought it would be an amazing class to take, considering that I just started to do oncology massage. My thought was: “Wouldn’t this be helpful to the people I work with, both those living with cancer and those who aren’t.” Why? Because all humans gather scars.

Plus, at that point, I had at least one client who came to me just for scar tissue work, and I found it absolutely fascinating, and I loved it. I wanted to know more.

I learned many amazing things that day. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any hands on work, because it was a 6 hour (in one day) class with lots of information and lots of students. However, it gave me a lot of physiological background to what I was already doing, and allowed me to better work with what I had. (And yes, I had *some* work in my oncology class on scar tissue work, this expanded on that knowledge)

Fast forward to this year, and I find myself in a class that is working with lymph drainage and scar tissue release through a technique called SMRT (spontaneous muscle release technique). I had done some work previous with SMRT, and thought that taking this class would be great for my clients. The class, as expected, was amazing! (As was the whole trip to Denver, CO). This class gave me first hand experience with working on scar tissue with SMRT, which was amazing. It also allowed me to experience it, as well, and let me tell you, my mind was blown. Having work done on me made me realize just how pesky scar tissue can become.

A BIT OF PERSONAL HISTORY.

I got really sick back in 2011, and I found out that my gallbladder was working at 20%. Which isn’t great, as you could imagine. The day after Christmas, it came out. Merry Christmas to me! Recovery was interesting of course, but that isn’t really the juicy part of this story.

Between stress of college and other things, I still ended up being sick for several years. Which wasn’t really any fun. And then I started having other abdominal issues, and through it all, the tests, the exams, etc, I had NO CLUE what was wrong with me, and it was disturbing to both me and my doctor helping me through this.

Back to this year in Colorado. We start to talk about scars we may have built up over the years. One of the thing the teacher mentions is that if you’ve had any kind of abdominal surgery, there maybe a bunch of scar tissue that you can’t see. Especially if you’ve had laparoscopic surgery (which is how they took out my gallbladder). This is because they use the tools to get to where they need to, and moving the various organs can create scar tissue. They also blow air into the area, and though they say that it all gets absorbed, supposedly some of it can stay in the abdominal cavity which can make you feel bloated.

As we all start working on each other, and the teacher comes over to see if we have any questions (I am on the table being worked on). They were telling her what was going on, and she stated some stuff, and puts her hand on the middle of my abdomen and does just a little bit of work, and then my fellow students do some other things. I get off the table and the day goes on, which means I got lots of hands on time as well!

The next day, I was shocked to find that the things that have always bothered me aren’t bothering me at all. Not at all, not for the whole day. Or the next. I was amazed. I was so amazed that I decided that I would work on myself so that not only would I not forget the work, but so that I would never go back to hurting like I had for so long.