A Mild Case Of Outpatient Surgery Anxiety
I have basal cell carcinoma. It’s relatively easy to remove, but it’s still skin cancer.
Tomorrow I go in for surgery. It’s fairly routine surgery they tell me. Nothing big, nothing special. But I’ll be on a table for 2–6 hours to have cancerous skin removed from my neck. I’m writing about it now because the kids are asleep, my wife is asleep, and I really don’t know what else to do with myself.
I can recall the first time I had skin cancer about 29 years ago. I had a wound on my neck that would never heal. It’d be red, it’d never bleed, but it always looked like it was going to bleed sometime soon. I can recall waiting months for it to heal, and then one day it dawned on me that maybe, I should get this checked out. So I did.
With a few phone calls, I found a skin doctor and I took some time off work to go see him. I remember the shirt I wore that day, a nice mint green dress shirt — I still have it — and I wore a pink and green paisley tie that day. The doctor had a look at me and said something like, “Yep. You’ve got a basal cell carcinoma. If you like I can take it out now.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah, only a few minutes and some stitches, and you’re done.”
