I have had a couple of requests to explain the presence of gravel. It's not too terribly exciting but here goes.

When I was eight we lived in Virginia and I used to ride my bike around the corner to another neighborhood where my best friends lived. This was no ordinary bike. It was a pink Huffy Sweet Thunder, the only girl's dirt bike at the time. Needless to say I thought I was the sh*t, the stuff and the deal. That never ends well. It gets a little hazy but I remember being in front of my friend's house racing my bike around and some how ended up on the ground. I might have been avoiding a car because I remember a station wagon being involved. Anyway I split my elbow open and there was lots of blood. My friend's mom was a nurse or something and she cleaned it out and patched it with some butterfly closures. After that it became a scar which grew progressively smaller over the years. Around the time I went off to college something surfaced under the scar and attempted to work it's way out. I thought it would do it on it's own but it didn't and then it disappeared again. This happened several more times and I got used to my piece of pet gravel. Then it moved farther down my elbow against the bone and became uncomfortable when I leaned on it or bumped it. It had to go. So it became one of the many things I brought up at my physical this year. Yesterday that problem was solved.
I wish it was a cooler story like the one for the scar on my forehead (went downstairs in a box painted like a police car when I was five), the scar on my ankle (skateboarding incident with my boyfriend in Italy when I was twelve) or the scar on my knee (sea urchin spine from a night dive in the Red Sea that I then had to put urine on). But really if I never go back to the doctor for a foreign body removal then I'll be happy.