Messages from the Pale Blue Dot

Super Fast Healing: 48 Hours Post-Op

Aside from a little redness and swelling, the incision for my skin cancer procedure seems to be healing up very quickly.

Resisting my natural inclination to ignore doctors’ orders and throw myself back into the usual frenetic pace of normal activities, I’ve taken some pain killers and done my best imitation of a vegetable since Tuesday afternoon. Yes, I actually just put my feet up and have done nothing but read and catch-up on backlogged TV following the surgery. Sometimes just being a lazy schlub is a good strategy. Aside from the discomfort of having 27 stitches, this hasn’t been all that awful and things are looking good.

Mohs Surgery

Recently on Facebook, someone posed the question, “If you could send a two word message back to your younger self, what would it be?” I thought about this for a while and pondered the obvious answers; a) “Buy MSFT” or b) “Pamela Chasek” (thinking that we might have met earlier than 1993 if I had known her name and gone looking for her) or maybe c) “no fire-eating” (since I think that more than eighteen years of using naphtha in my nightclub act  has had a contributing factor to my pancreas problems.)

However, today, I think that my answer to the question would most definitely be, “Use sunscreen.”

Two weeks ago, during a routine every six-month appointment with my dermatologist, Dr. William Long, he discovered a small cyst that turned up, after a biopsy, to be basal cell carcinoma (with follicular differentiation.) They caught it early and today, Dr. Wendy Long Mitchell performed Mohs surgery to remove the cancer.

In oversimplified lay-person language, the procedure involves cutting out a small section around the cyst, examining it under a microscope while the patient waits to see if the first sized hole got all of the carcinoma. If it didn’t they make the hole larger, look again to make sure they got the roots .. and so on until they get it all. In my case, Dr. Wendy made three progressively larger excavations, followed by a little more around the margins since she had been a bit conservative in her cutting at the surface of the wound. But, in the end she got it all out and, after four and a half hours in the dermatologist office, I was out the door and in a cab home.

The purple lines were Dr. Wendy’s markings for where my natural smile lines are and indications for the stitching.

I’m counting 27 stiches on the outside.. and I think that she did about eight or nine internal stiches at the subcutaneous level.

So, now I have a week to do nothing that will mess up the stitches. Focus on healing. No working out. No yoga. Specifically no cycling.. even on the indoor trainer. No mugging for the cameras. And, certainly, no sunbathing.