Surgical Scars and Traces: Life Purpose Trilogy - Volume I

What happens when your life veers off course at fifteen and never makes its way back?

A memoir trilogy about illness, survival, and the stubborn search for meaning when life refuses to follow the script.

Surgical Scars and Traces is the first book in the Life Purpose Trilogy, a bilingual memoir project spanning more than twenty-five years of living with an aggressive vulvar angiomyxoma that metastasized to the mediastinum - an exceptionally rare tumor with very few documented long-term survivors worldwide.

Across three volumes, M.D.P. Martínez Pascual uses three distinct voices - the patient, the athlete, and the woman who decides to build a legacy out of honesty - to explore what it means to live in a body that never got the "normal life" memo. With raw honesty, dark humour, and zero motivational glitter, she writes about repeated surgeries, visible and invisible scars, impossible motherhood, unfair dismissals, and a marriage that slowly runs out of road.

Surgical Scars and Traces opens the trilogy: a radically honest invitation to rethink illness, work, dignity, and the many ways we keep choosing ourselves even when our bodies refuse to cooperate.