What's on Her Face?!

Today I'm one of those people you sometimes see walking around with a bandaid right on their face, and you don't want to stare or ask a question, but it's hard to ignore. Yesterday I went to see my dermatologist for a routine "body scan"—you know, "What's this thing? Can you remove that thing? Is this anything to be worried about? And, while you're in the neighborhood, what the heck is that?" He zapped a bunch of harmless but unattractive "things," and then I happened to point out something that I didn't think was a big deal, just a small dry patch near my eyebrow. That interested him, and he decided to do a biopsy (hence the bandaid). He said it's "very unlikely" to be basal-cell carcinoma (and believe me, I pushed him to commit to how likely he thought it would be), but it did look suspicious, so he wants to send it to the lab. We'll know next week. I made him promise not to leave an ambiguous message on my voice mail—and preferably not at 4:59 next Friday, so I don't have to stew all weekend. (I also made him laugh when I showed him a white dot on my lip. I said, "Once on 'Seinfeld,' George Costanza had a white dot on his lip, and his doctor was concerned." He said, "What happened to George?" I said "Nothing.")

While I was there, I asked him to check my head for lice, because two more of Pete's friends have it now, and I'm just itching at the thought. I check him every day (pretty easy because of his back-to-school buzz-cut) and have found nothing, but still. Sometimes it seems like only a matter of time.

Comments

[Charlotte]

ick, now I am itching...

[DJ]

Hi Karen -

Please don't worry about this. I have, and have had since childhood, a whole lot of oddities sprouting out on the old epidermis here and there, including an abnormal amount of what the French call "beauty marks" and the Anglophones call "'moles", and it turns out this year's visit to the dermatologist reveals that the smoothest, palest, least-yukky looking freckle on my forehead is in fact indeed basal cell carcinoma. To which my derm added right away, "I don't know why they still call it 'carcinoma' because it never kills anybody."
As I now understand it, the thing is this: if you do have a basal cell carcinoma, it needs to be removed. Some fine day. Not because it's going to spread and eat your body up from the inside, but because in another thirty years it will be the size of a quarter and look bad. Melanoma is the one that spreads, and the only form of skin cancer that you really need to worry about, i.e. get taken off right away. And get this: according to my dermatologist having basal cell carcinoma is no indication that one is at greater risk for melanoma. My mother, whose greatest pleasure in the summer months from about 1942 through 1950, before anyone had any inkling about the value of sunscreens, was spending all day at the pool working as a lifeguard, has had a number of basal- and squamous-cell carcinomas removed AND some melanomas, none of which developed to the point of being dangerous. And by the way she is now 80 years old and in great health.
So the real message is: get checked often and if they find it early enough you'll be fine.
And don't skimp on the sunscreen. For the first time in my life I have started wearing a hat in the summer. A nice Panama that my wife found intending to wear it herself, but since we have the same head size...