Locker room and the Loach saga
Then a small but univocal cheer went up from some of the players when Otis P. Lord appeared at the door, his cadaverous dad escorting him, O.P.L. out of post-op and pale but looking his old self, with just a thin little choker-width bandage of gauze around his neck from the monitor’s removal and an odd ellipse of dry red skin around his mouth and nostrils.
Context
Lord returns from having the Eschaton monitor surgically removed from his head — the novel's most cartoonish injury resolving into real body-hardware residue: a gauze choker and a ventilator-shaped ellipse printed on his face. The locker room cheers him like a returning veteran; damage is E.T.A.'s one universal credential, and the marks the apparatus leaves get read as decorations.