I was 25 when I met my ex boyfriend. I was insecure, full of self doubt, very little self esteem. I was heavier, and very much brain washed by society to hate how I looked. Also very unlucky in love.
The guy I had been “seeing” had just accidentally exposed that he had a real girlfriend whom he had spent Christmas with, and then proceeded to block me from all social media when I attempted to confront him about it. I felt like no one could ever want me for anything more than a clandestine hook up. I was sad and desperate for affection.
My ex, the textbook definition of an abusive narcissist, saw all that from a mile away. He knew exactly what to say and what to do for me to fall head over heels for him basically immediately. I was so inexperienced and so hopelessly eager to be loved. I didn’t stand a chance.
Three months to the day of when he and I first met, we had our first big blow out fight. I stormed out of his apartment and slammed the door, blacking out on the way home. I have zero recollection of driving. I was there, and then I was home. Until that moment, I had never in my life experienced that kind of rage. And still, I stayed with him for 7 years. It took me 7 years of verbal, mental and emotional abuse to finally realize I deserve better. That spending the rest of my life completely alone would be better than spending another millisecond in that relationship.
I can’t remember the exact moment I noticed a small bump had appeared on my forehead. Seemingly out of no where, there was just this mound growing out of the centre of my face.
At first, I thought it was an ingrown zit and didn’t let it phase me. A few weeks later, though, when it was still there, I started to get concerned. It was hard, it didn’t move, and it was ugly. No one ever said anything about it, but already being as insecure as I was, it killed me. It was all I could see when I looked in the mirror.
I’ve always thought I had a decently pretty face, so being “fat and ugly” (as I thought at the time) and hating every part of myself, my face was my only saving grace. My only redeemable physical quality, I thought. So now with this giant bump on my head, any little bit of confidence I had had disappeared. Another reason I stayed with my ex for so long. He never said anything about it, and I figured anyone else would see it right away and think I looked like some kind of freakish monster. Better to stay with the evil I knew, y’know?
Even more time passed, the bump stayed. It was after another big blow out fight with my ex, a regular occurrence by that point, that it occurred to me; the body manifests anxiety and anger in more than just mental issues. Cold sores can be a result of stress and anxiety. Rashes, headaches… this giant growth in the middle of my face.. was this from stress?
Did this thing start growing because my body needed somewhere to put all my rage and anxiety, so all of a sudden this weird thing appeared on my face? With no other explanation for it, that’s when I chose to believe that this had to be true. I decided that this was in fact a manifestation of all my stress, anxiety and rage from my relationship. And so I named it, my Anger Horn.
Did it make me feel better knowing this is why I had a huge bump on my face? No. But it helped me cope with it at least. And again, no one ever said anything to me about it. When I would bring it up people would say that they never even noticed it. I figured they were just always being nice. How could you not notice it? I saw it in every photo, in every reflection. It was so prominent on my forehead, it actually annoyed me when people would say they never noticed.
I ended things with my ex on January 10th 2020. On January 31st I moved out of the apartment I shared with him, and left my dog there because I knew it would be more traumatic for both myself, and the dog, if I tried to take her. I had already tried that and it had not ended well. So it was just me and my dad, driving the 6.5 hours back to my home town from where I was living with my ex. I was free. Free, and incredibly, incredibly broken.
Some months passed. I had spent most of my time since leaving him alone in my room, starting this blog actually. What else could I have done after a worldwide plague hit us and we were all stuck in quarantine?
I did a lot of self reflection. A lot of learning and growing. A lot of healing. Soon we were already 2 years in to the pandemic. I had changed so much of myself for the better. I had grown in to the person I had always wanted to be. I had worked through a lot of my trauma, and addressed the reasons why I had let my ex treat me the way he did. And still, even though I was moving on, this giant bump on my face remained. A reminder of all the bad times I had gone through over that near decade. It was then that I decided I would have to get it removed. It would be the final step in truly letting go of the past that haunted me.
I had spoken to a friend about this, and it was she who had first told me about the term, “Osteoma”. I looked it up, and it did seem like that’s what this could be. I still called it my Anger Horn, but it was nice to have what I felt was an actual diagnosis of it. I booked a doctor’s appointment and asked my doctor about it. She took a look and said that it seemed benign, but what did she know? That wasn’t her specialty, she said, so she referred me to a plastic surgeon.
It was early spring when my appointment with the plastic surgeon rolled around. I had never been so eager to see a doctor in my life. I checked in, waited for a short time in the waiting room, before the very French nurse guided me to an exam room. The very French and distractingly handsome surgeon didn’t keep me waiting long.
He came in, introduced himself, and immediately took hold of my cranium. He pressed his thumb hard in to my Anger Horn and said, “yep, it’s an Osteoma”. I could have googled the full definition and causes on my own, but I hadn’t. So I asked him what could have caused this? He explained that Osteoma’s are caused by blunt force trauma to the head. It’s a mound of calcified blood under the skin. You see it a lot in military folk, from taking hard blows to the head. Often they have to have the Osteoma’s removed because it hurts to wear their helmets. As he was explaining all this to me, it’s like the clouds in my foggy brain parted, and I realized exactly how I had gotten it.
The surgeon suggested we book the surgery for late fall or winter. It would help to do it during the less sunny months, as sun exposure would make the scar more visible. I agreed, and booked it for November. As I left the clinic and walked across the street to the grocery store where I had parked because there was no way I was paying $15 for parking at that clinic, I just started sobbing. Holding it in as best I could until I got into my car and could really let it out.
Once comfortably situated in the solitude of my vehicle, I just wailed, and wailed and wailed. Like dramatic ugly crying you only see in like, really sad, dark, depressing movies. I texted my two girlfriends in the group chat whom I had told about my appointment, and began to explain to them what my Anger Horn actually was and how it came to be.
It was Canada Day 2014. In true Canada Day fashion, it was raining. My ex and I had gone to meet a friend of his (actually, the girlfriend of his best friend) who worked for a beer company out of Montreal. Maybe not a beer company? Maybe it was like an advertising company, or like, something to do with event planning? Regardless, there was a Coors Light Beer Olympics event taking place near our apartment downtown, and his friend would be there, so we braved the weather and went out to meet her.
It would have been an awesome event if the rain hadn’t put a literal damper on everything. We stayed for an hour or two, but were eventually too cold and wet to really enjoy ourselves, so we went back home. I can’t recall exactly the sequence of events that occurred after that, but I’m fairly certain that my friends had invited me to their own Canada Day event. Since our day had ended prematurely, I assume I would have asked if he would have wanted to go to this new Canada Day bash with my friends.
He hated my friends. Mostly because they hated him and saw right through him. He knew that the more time I spent with them, the more he risked losing me to their logic and knowledge of what a horrible human being he is.
We had a fight. A big one. One of our biggest. We both screamed at each other. He punched a hole in the drywall of our bedroom to try to scare me. And when I still wouldn’t let up, he threw his half full flask at me. It hit me directly smack dab in the middle of my forehead. I stumbled back, grasping my head. Instinctively I want to just crumble to the ground in to a pile of tears, but I couldn’t give him the satisfaction.
I stormed out. Shaking. Crying hot, slow, steady tears. I couldn’t go home to my parents and tell them what happened. I couldn’t tell my friends. They would tell me what I already knew but wasn’t ready to hear, that I should leave him. I wouldn’t be ready to leave him for another 5 years.
Instead, I called a co-worker and went over to her place. A huge goose egg had already started to form on my head. My friend gave me an ice pack and helped me wrap it around my head. We talked all night. I cried and cried. But in the morning, I had to go back.
My ex apologized. The goose egg eventually went down. And by the time I really noticed the Anger Horn, so many other things had happened, it really didn’t even occur to me as to why it was there or what it was from. It didn’t occur to me until I was sitting in that exam room. And now that I knew exactly what it was, it was my mission in life to get rid of it. It was already a reminder of trauma when I thought it was just an “anger horn”, but now it was literally the physical embodiment of all the terrible shit he put me through. It had to go.
Several months passed before the surgery was to take place. It was October 2022, my appointment wasn’t until November. Still, even though I had waited 8 years by then, all of a sudden I couldn’t wait a second longer. I called and moved my appointment up to their first available date. A week before Halloween. Whatever, I’ll take it.
The day finally arrived. The French nurse showed me to the exam room, had me lay on the bed, and proceeded to poke my face with what felt like a hundred needles as she began to freeze the area. She left to get the surgeon, and I just lay there, staring up at the ceiling. A wave of calm I’d never felt before took over my body. I had never been so sure of anything in my life. This was the beginning of a whole new chapter for me.
The surgeon came in, talked me through the steps, and then we were off. He sat behind my head, and the nurse pulled what looked like a dentist bib over my face, to protect my eyes from the light and any spray off from the osteoma removal. I couldn’t feel anything, but I knew he had begun his work.
He made a decent sized incision in my forehead, and used some other contraption to keep the incision open. Then, the big, white, calcified blood mound was exposed. Next step, scraping. That’s how they do it, guys. They just scrap and scrape and dig and dig. It’s basically like, soft bone at this point. Harder than cartilage but softer than real bone. And he just dug away at it. It didn’t hurt because I was frozen, but I could definitely feel the pressure.
I asked the nurse to take pictures for me. She laughed, but when she realized I was serious, she was happy to accommodate. I could hear them chatting to each other in French. Some of their conversation was just general co-worker banter, but I did hear the surgeon say something to the effect of, “damn, this is a good one”. Thanks?
After what turned out to be just under an hour, but what had felt like an eternity, it was done. The surgeon sewed my face up, put the scar tape on, and applied the gauze and tape to cover it. When it was okay for me to sit up, I did, and I looked at the tray beside me. It was just covered with the bloody chunks of anger horn he had scraped out of my forehead.
I wanted to cry with joy but it was hard to scrunch my face up. I paid $1,100.00 from my moving out fund to have this monstrosity removed from my head. Worth every god damn cent.
My mom picked me up. I came out of the clinic with a bandaged face, and a headache brewing as the numbing was wearing off. What better time, then, for my mom to stop at the grocery store before going home? “I just have to run in for a few things” she said hurriedly. I was in no state to protest, so I just lay in the reclined front seat as she ran in, holding my head, tears of joy streaming down my temples and in to my hair.
Finally made it home, and I went right to bed. It would be two days before I took the gauze off. I was instructed to leave the scar tape on for at least two weeks, or if they fell off sooner that was okay too. If I thought I had a horn before, the physical trauma from him scraping away at my forehead left me with an even bigger mound on my face. I knew it would go down eventually, but I wanted instant results.
It was a week in to November that I was finally able to take the scar tape off. I don’t know what I expected to see. A giant gash? Bruising? Dried blood? It was a bit underwhelming, then, when I took the tape off to see just a small, tiny pink line on my forehead. Some light bruising around the sides, but over all, from afar it just looked like I might have bonked my head slightly. It was nothing. That surgeon was a miracle worker!
I sat on the end of my bed, wet and naked except for a towel after having just gotten out of the shower, and I just cried. Cried and cried and cried. It was gone. He was gone. Officially gone forever. Fucking finally.
The scarring from this surgery can range from non-existent, to remnants of the bump lingering if you don’t crush the scar tissue enough during the healing process. I crushed the shit out of that thing. Every morning and every night, I would apply the vitamin E cream the surgeon referred me to, and pressed as hard as I could on it. I could feel the scar tissue moving. I could feel it breaking down.
About 5 weeks post op, I made a follow up appointment with the surgeon. As well as it was healing, it didn’t seem like it was going down enough. When the surgeon looked at it, through the surgical mask he was wearing I saw his jaw literally drop. He couldn’t believe how good it looked and how well it had healed so shortly after surgery. Fuck yeah!, I thought. It was then that I realized how good it really did look. I just needed confirmation that I was taking care of it properly.
At the time of writing this, I am now 13 weeks post op. The scar is barely visible and the scar tissue has gone down immensely. There’s still a small bump if you touch it, but its more spread out now, less protruding like the osteoma itself had been. You’d never even know anything had been there. I sometimes catch a glimpse of myself and expect to see my anger horn. Like phantom limb syndrome, maybe? But it’s not there. It’s gone. The reminder of all the trauma I went through is now just a memory.
I had been avoiding writing this essay. I didn’t want to go back and relive the realization of what this was, and relive parts of that time in my life again. Except now that I’m coming to the end of this post, I’m happier than I was before. I know that this era of my life is for me. I’m doing things for me. Self care level, 100. And if anything, this experience is just a reminder of all the things I will never let anyone else to do me ever again. Like I said, this is the beginning of a whole new chapter for myself. An exciting chapter of self love and acceptance.
If this story resonated with anyone at all, first of all I’m really sorry you’ve gone through whatever it is you’ve gone through. But I hope you take with you the knowledge that you, too, deserve better. Whatever you have to do to get yourself to a place of joy and self love, do it. Your happiness is paramount. And once you achieve this level of joy, self confidence, and self worth, there’s a whole world of possibilities just waiting for you. You deserve to be happy. You deserve to feel safe. You deserve self love. Do whatever you have to do to get yourself there. I promise you, it’s worth it.
Stay tuned for more chapters, Wednesdays at 8pm