About 6 months ago, I was running and I hit the front of my shin on a Metal Cart.
For the next few weeks, I had a nasty bruise and some light bleeding, but once it healed up, I felt my skin and there’s a perfect chunk of the corner of the cart in my shin. When you feel it, it feels like a missing puzzle piece.
So I’m wondering why the body can heal the tear and the open sore, but not make the area or muscle smooth again.
In: Biology
For your case, you had some fat cells burst on your shin which aren’t replaced. That’s the cause of your hole.
The body doesn’t have a memory of what used to be in a missing area so it can’t rebuild it. That’s why we can’t regrow limbs. Healing happens when your body is closing holes and reconnecting parts mostly randomly. When bones heal, the broken ends start forming a kind of scab on the ends of the bone. If they are close enough, then they’ll merge back together, but they don’t automatically line back up if they’re in the wrong position. If the ends are close enough to merge, then they’ll remain forever broken into multiple pieces and don’t magically find a way back together.
If you cut yourself, the blood forms a scab and the hole is slowly closed off. The skin will expand to fill the hole and you’ll be left with a little scar where the hole was. Underneath, the layers of tissue all heal differently so some parts close completely and others don’t at all. Muscles for instance don’t regrow and reconnect when torn; very very very small tears sometimes, but most of the time they don’t. To repair a torn muscle, a doctor needs to use a metal anchor and reattach it to the bone like when nailing a piece of wood to a tree.
Now if you have a hole in your skin and you keep your body from healing and closing the hole, then you’ll be left with a [fistula](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fistula).
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