Surgical Taco

I dropped by the dermatologist yesterday on my way home from work. And while I like to make it sound off the cuff and casual, there was nothing relaxing about it. My doctor and I are not friends. She’s a small trim woman with dark short-cropped hair and she smiles a lot while asking to do unspeakable things. In the past six months she’s carved so much skin cancer off me that when I told my brother-in-law Wade I’d been hit with a shotgun blast he believed me. This was in July while boating on our family vacation. “Really?” he asked. “Did it hurt?” I thought about really running, taking him for a nice ride, but considering the pattern of scars across my chest and arms it’s hard to believe the involvement of anything but a shotgun.

I’m no stranger to injury but, for me, there’s something about laying down and voluntarily being carved like a Christmas ham that makes my head spin - quite literally. Yesterday was my 5th visit in 6 months, I think, yet still every time my doctor asks me to lie down I begin to sweat profusely. “You look pretty good, Christian,” she said with a smile. “There are just two more spots we need to remove. How about we just take care of those right now?” This is a woman who knows my history, one who’s seen me nearly pass out at the first sign of a scalpel and so she tries to make the suggestion of removal sound easy going and optional. “Just roll over to your stomach and I’ll start with the larger one on the back of your neck.”

And it’s at this point that things become really uncomfortable. I try and roll to my stomach but have already begun sweating so much that the paper liner I’m laying on is stuck to me head to toe, wrapping me up like a paper taco. My doctor asks if I’m OK and all I can think is, “I hope Wade doesn’t hear about this, he’ll really run with it.”