Simple skin cancer surgery, successful

View from clinic window (top) is made ziggedy-zag by striations in the glass of the window --it shows up this way when you take a pic with the lens right up against it.

Actually, I spent a rather pleasant time there this morning while they removed a small cancerous growth from my left ear.

After the initial cutting, I was shown into a waiting room by a rather bossy head nurse type--there was just one other man there, on his cell phone, with his nose bandaged.

"Sit over near the window," barked the nurse," there will be other people coming in here in a while." It did not seem like a good idea to argue with her about this...besides, I liked being next to the window.

The man on the phone was telling a friend how he and his wife were leaving Park Slope, Brooklyn ("It's nice, but it just isn't US", he said) and buying a condo in what sounded like Tribeca on the 15th floor of some building " with sensational views and a dining area"....

Then a woman was led in, with no bandages. She was not that old but she seemed very shaky. 

Meanwhile, the man with the bandaged nose had got his wife on the phone. She was down on the street in the car, having just driven in.

Another nurse entered and he said to her " I can go now, right? My wife is waiting downstairs."

"Oh no," said the nurse very cheerfully, " you have to be here for HOURS yet...we have to reconstruct your nose all nice...unfortunately parking in this building is very expensive..."

The man told his wife to go home. Then about ten minutes later someone came and asked him to go with them...

I had a cup of coffee ( having eaten a banana and taken my meds for the morning) and in a much sooner time than I had anticipated, the second nurse came back.

"You're fine," she said, and led me to another room where the surgeon explained there was practically no cancer cells on my ear, most of them having been removed when they had done the biopsy a week before.

Then they gave me a list of instructions on how to clean and bandage my ear, --then cleaned and re-bandaged my ear and told me to keep the bandage on for 48 hours. Sounded sensible.

I had also been reading a pamphlet that said basically all skin cancer is at least 99% curable if caught early enough. I go to the dermatologist every six months because I have had skin cancer before, which makes them anticipate more..

I use lots of sunblock etc. these days but the cancer I have now probably dates back to some awful sunburn such as the one I got in Mexico when I was 16...

Some of my friends and acquaintances have had much worse times with skin cancer than I have--one man had a melanoma that appeared suddenly on his chest...he is still nervous about something coming back...

I suppose the moral of all this is that if you have any reason to be puzzled by something weird on your skin, you are well off going and seeing the docs about it as soon as possible...as if you didn't know that.