Isn’t Skin Cancer Fun!

According to the Mayo Clinic website, “Mohs surgery is a procedure used to treat skin cancer. This surgery involves cutting away thin layers of skin. Each thin layer is looked at closely for signs of cancer. The process keeps going until there are no signs of cancer. The goal of Mohs surgery is to remove all of the skin cancer without hurting the healthy skin around it. Mohs surgery allows the surgeon to be sure that all the cancer is gone. This makes it more likely that the cancer is cured. During Mohs surgery, medicine to numb the area is usually given so that you don't feel pain. Mohs surgery is also called Mohs micrographic surgery.” What they don't tell you is at the surgical center you’ll be dispensed back into a waiting room in between skin scrapping while the cells are looked under a microscope and you end up being at the place all afternoon. In my case, I couldn’t get their WiFi to work with my Kindle so it was a long afternoon. I had downloaded the psychological thriller, The Sleepover by one of my favorite authors Keri Beevis, to read. But instead I had to read medical pamphlets and get dizzy from watching fish swimming around in a giant blue tank.

It was true that I didn’t feel much after the numbing needles went around the mole site but what the Mayo Clinic website failed to explain (but I found at another site when I got home) is that after the surgery they cauterize the surgery site “with acid or hot metal or lasers. Such a procedure is naturally quite painful.” I’m here to say that ‘quite painful’ is an understand! It seemed to go on forever and ever while the doctor who was doing it kept saying “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!” Had she warned me ahead of time that it was coming maybe it wouldn’t have hurt so much but even while the pain was going on she didn’t explain what she was doing until I asked. I don’t mind admitting it brought tears to my eyes.

Two days later when I could finally take the dressing off my ankle I saw a perfectly round and deep wound that is slightly smaller than a dime. (Photo above.) The ankle is a place where it’s almost impossible to put in stitches.They tend to tear out, the doctor said, and that ends up making the wound area bigger. I believe her, having had that exact thing happen on one of my recent thumb surgeries. So I have to keep it covered for a month hoping it will heal on its own. If it’s not starting to heal by my one month check up, other steps will be needed---a skin graft, hyperbaric or ultrasound therapy but I’m not going to borrow that kind of trouble…even though I can’t believe that ugly hole will heal without help. And I feel an Amazon order is in my future. Remember the bacon looking band-aids I posted a few weeks back? I'm pretty sure I'll still be having to keep the hole in my leg covered when spring and short pants are back.

I consider myself lucky because my brother had a skin cancer on his face that involved nerve damage and more than one surgeries. We both spent a lot of time in the water and sun growing up and---oops---sixty years later skin cancer shows up. Who knew back then that could happen? Back then we even drenched ourselves in baby oil and baked out in the sun to deepen our tans. I did have another cancer surgery---on the end of my nose that looked like the witch’s mole in the Wizard of Oz but being a vain woman I got into the dermatologist early-on for that one and that’s how I got my ‘teddy bear seam’ down the center of my nose.

Mohs surgery/treatment is a specialty and the doctor’s gay guy nurse was all of twelve years old. She was twenty-eight but I looked up her biography online and it was impressive. When I made the appointment at the dermatology center I was asked to pick between her and another Mohs specialist---an older guy close to retirement who started the center. “They are both good,” I was told, “but she will hold your hand more.” I thought that was an odd thing to tell a potential patient and I replied, “I don’t need hand holding. I just want this thing removed as soon as possible.” While the doctor was cauterizing the surgical site without warning I wanted to scream, “Is this your idea of hand holding?” But I didn’t. I was too busy wishing she’d given me a shot of whiskey and stick to bite down on the way they do in old black and white movies when they are about to dig a bullet or arrowhead out of someone’s shoulder. They held an old hunting knife over a fire before using it to burn the wound site to stop the bleeding. When my cauterizing was over, I made a statement about the way they did that procedure in the Old West to the nurse and he'd never heard of that. What am I one hundred and two years old? Nope. I’m guessing he really is twelve years old. As much as medicine has advanced over the past hundred years you'd think they would have found a better way to cauterize a wound, wouldn't you. At least give you a second round of numbing shots first. © 

* Photo of my mole site two days after surgery.

Embarrassing Meltdowns and Moles that can Kill You

Boy, did I have an embarrassing meltdown last week in the fine dining room. It’s so embarrassing I don’t even want to write about it and expose my childish behavior. But this issue has been doing a slow boil since I moved in to my continuum care complex and in Stephen King's non-fiction book on writing he says words to the effect if you're not willing to be brutally honest in your writing you're never going to be a good writer.

So, here's what happened when the new manager of our dining room came over to our table to ask us how our meal was and the filter in my brain stopped working. “Who cuts the pies around here?” I asked as I moved my piece over next a table mate's, lining up the outer crusts back to back. Her slice was over 2 1/2 inches wide while my mine was a scant 1 1/4 inches. Another person at the table spoke up and said uneven serving sizes has been an ongoing problem here since they opened. And before I knew it I jumped into my theory that "the waitresses always give me the smallest portions because I’m fat."

That night the lady who got the larger piece of pie was a tiny little thing who usually leaves part of her desserts behind because she eats like a bird. I’ve seen that happen so many times around here and it drives me nuts. Growing up I had to sit at the table until bedtime if I didn't clean my plate and even though I'm in charge of myself now, I still can't stand seeing food wasted. When people want to linger over dinner and there is still food on their plates I have the hardest time not asking them to take napkins and cover up the uneaten food, an old Weight Watchers trick. Out of sight out of mind.

Aside from that, sweets are my drug of choice and the wanting equal serving sizes is an issue that also comes from my childhood when my brother and I used to fight over who got the biggest serving of our desserts. Finally my mom made us start a new thing of one of us cutting and the other being the first to choose. We kept a ruler in the kitchen for this nightly ritual and it cut down on the fighting but as long as we lived together the measuring and cutting was part of our sibling relationship.

That night when I announced that the waitresses were body shaming me with their decision on who gets the larger portions I realized that I was speaking loud enough that the people on both sides of us could hear me, I wanted to be teleported out of the place never to be seen again. The new manager has only been on the job two weeks and probably wears a size two dress but she knelt down next to our table and softly said, “I’ve got a pie cutter on my list of things to buy. I’ll get this resolved.” My biggest shame in this is that in my heart I know the waitresses aren’t doing it out of malice---or even necessarily on purpose if I were inclined to be fair minded. We have three college students from Ethiopia, all from the same family and they are super sweet and respectful, polite and well mannered thin little girls who are very religious. They come from a family of nine and one of our waitresses is studying to be a lawyer, another is going into bio-engineering and the third is just in her first year. 

Speaking of young people, I went to see the PA associated with my dermatologist who did the biopsy on my cancerous ankle mole last June. It’s not healing up and I’ve been sending photos of it each month to the doctor ever since but this time I insisted on going into the dermatologist’s complex. I could have waited six weeks for the doctor or take the PA right away. The PA turned out to be a kid who looked all of twelve years old and he was as petite as the Ethiopian sisters. I’m used to young doctors but this kid, truly had a baby face that he tried to age with big horn-rimmed glasses. It didn’t work. 

He suspected there was more going on than just a slow heal on a part of the body that, in general, is slow to heal because of circulation issues in our extremities. He gave me three choices and I went with door number one which involved a deeper biopsy to makes sure they got all the cancers cells the first time. He said that because the mole was in a slow healing place, they don’t generally go very deep. Not sure if he was just covering up for the doctor or what but it is what it is and the damn itches like crazy.

I just got this second biopsy report back and now I'm scheduled for a "live mole surgery" that could last one to five hours, depending on how deep they have to dig. And won’t that be fun. It's the surgery where they scrape a layer off, put it under a microscope, then keep repeating until they are sure they got all the cancerous cells. At least I'll be three weeks out from having my second carpel tunnel and trigger thumb surgeries on my right hand.That takes place October 17th. Trying to keep our bodies working gets more time consuming with each year, doesn't it. ©

 

The Lonely Widow and the Exterminator

If you came here today hoping to find something to laugh about, you’re plum out of luck. The dog took my funny bone, buried in the back yard and by now the ground moles have devoured it. I hate ground moles! I have so many ground mole mounds marked with flags for the exterminator my yard looks like an 18 hole golf course. The neighbors probably think the mole exterminator and I are having a hot, torrid affair he’s been here so often this summer. They (the moles not the neighbors) must smell really bad when they die---duh, Jean, they’re decomposing---because the dog follows their tunnel runs until he finds a good sniffing spot and if I’d let him, he’d start digging. He actually got one before I got smart.

I guess I should feel lucky that the biggest problem in my life right now could theoretically be solved by keeping the exterminator on my speed dial. Wow, it just dawned on me that the term “speed dial” will be a thing of the past in the not too distant future, what with smart phones taking over the planet. Ten years from now I’ll be telling a caregiver to “call my niece, she’s on my speed dial” and the caregiver will look at me like “what’s a speed dial you crazy old woman?” This reminds me, if I should die tonight, no one should think they aren’t loved because they aren’t on my speed dial list. My landline phone plan doesn’t include long distance so if I want to call family in another area code I have to use my cell phone. I know, I know, I need to join the 21^st century by getting rid of my landline and my old lady Jitterbug cell and invest in one very smart phone that can turn lights on or off, unlock the back door for repairmen and fry bacon on Sunday mornings.  In truth, I’m afraid to get a phone smarter than me. I’m afraid they’ll come a day when I’ll forget how to use it. With “dumb phones” I’ve had decade’s worth of practice embedded in my brain so I’m less likely to forget how they function.

I was feeling sorry for myself last weekend. That happens a lot on Sundays when there is nothing to do, no place to go and the phone doesn’t ring. Not that it rings much the other six days of the week but once in a while I’ll hear a human voice telling me about a sale at Salvation Army or that the FBI reports home burglaries are up and I need an alarm system or that I could fall and having a medical alert pendant could save my life. The worst telemarketing call comes from a credit card company warning me that this is the last call I’ll get from them about lowing my interest rate. I wish! I’d add my name to the national ‘do not call’ register but how will I know if the phone is still working if I do?

Seriously, though, why do we---me to be more precise---have to make life so hard when in fact it’s pretty easy? For example, I don’t live in a country that is war torn or where its citizens can’t trust those in power not to use chemicals of mass destruction against them. I don’t live in a place where food or water is scarce. I don’t live on the edge of poverty and my health is better than many people in my age bracket. I could go on forever listing the things I don’t have to worry about including some that are clearly age related like I don’t have to worry about getting pregnant out of wedlock or getting head lice from sharing a comb with a classmate. We get smarter as we age. We seniors know stuff and not just history book facts and figures. We know important, life-lessons like how to find inner strength and give comfort to those who need it. We know that people die and those left behind must go on. We know that loneliness can be cured if we keep putting ourselves out there in the big, scary world so we can eventually connect with others in the same boat. And we know how to laugh when the mole exterminator finally arrives and the sprinkler system turns on while he happens to be standing directly over one of its heads. Oops!

“Do you have a set of dry clothes with you?” I asked while twisting the end of an imaginary villain’s mustache. “You could come inside this widow’s house and change if you like.”  

“No, no ma’am. I’m fine,” he replied while backing away. “Occupational hazard. It happens all the time.” ©