Just when I thought it was safe to put away the bandages and polysporin, I had a superficial basal cell carcinoma removed from my neck yesterday. This is like something my sister used to say to me: boys always get scars on their knees or their elbows, while girls get the scars on their chins or their foreheads. So of course my basal cell carcinoma (mine didn’t look nearly as gross as any of these) is on the side of my neck where all the world gets to see and enjoy the incision. The doctor offered me the cream option, but I opted for the more permanent cut it out option (the cream has a fifty-fifty chance of getting rid of it once and for all, the surgery option is 100% – I prefer those odds). Anyway, we went in yesterday afternoon, and first the doctor drew an outline of the incision area (he had to cut out a larger area than the actual carcinoma to make the whole thing heal correctly) so I looked like somebody had made a bizarre attempt to draw the eye from the back of a dollar bill on the side of my neck) and I got a lidocaine shot in my neck (and with my skinny neck, the shot hit a nerve and numbed my jaw and my ear, along with the neck area -a very weird feeling, or lack of, let me tell you). Then the slicing and dicing commenced. I coudn’t feel any pain, but did get a serious case of the willies from the sensation of stretching and pulling and the snip-snip sound of him trimming my skin. Brrrrrrr……

The whole procedure took about half an hour. The feeling in my ear returned about four hours later. Now my neck feels sore and a bit pulled and I’m sporting an inch and a half long stitched up scar. Lovely. The stitches come out in 7 to 10 days when we will be in Michigan, so Chuck volunteered to take out the stitiches, and the doctor actually thought that was an okay idea! The doctor was going to give Chuck a surgical kit (which sent him over the moon), but they were out of them, so it looks like it’s scissors and tweezers for me!

Pics here. I’ll monitor progress as it heals.