Clean Bill of Health

Mmmm. Raisin-y tastiness...

That, or rabbit shit.

Or cancerous lesions.

So my doctor checked me out, and thinks I'm doing alright general, except for a suspicious mole on my left forearm that has three out of the four criterion for malignancy as the pretty little picture (Nurses, remember your ABCS: asymmetry, border, color, and size)!

Jumper-to-conclusions that I am (practicing to be a paranoid and anxiety ridden ninety five year old, you remember, so I can torture my family members on holidays when, out of guilt they come to visit me for the requisite "Let's sit in awkward silence for an hour after we've exhausted talking about the weather and then back away slowly and quietely when we think granny's finally nodding off to sleep, the old goat" annual ritual):

OH GAWD. I HAVE SKIN CANCER. Well, at least a questionable metastatic nevi, from the looks of my Physical Assessment book from nursing school. In fact it looks exactly like melanoma picture number one up there, except the shape on my arm is different.

I stay away from oncology stuff because it really scares me. Really scares me. I watch patients with cancer every day and pray it never will happen to me. Because I am whiney wuss, and and would probably be a bad onc patient.

Seriously, I've had the thing since I was a kid, and I always called it my pihranna mole, because it looks kind of like a flesh eating prehistoric looking sea creature, if you squint your eyes and look at it in a certain light at a certain angle.

So probably the worse they'll do is sizzle or slice it off and send it for biopsy. But I *like* my potentially malignant melanoma, damn it. Can't I just live with it? I mean, it's an identifying, albeit potentially lethal trait. Come on, doc, chill out, just let everybody live happily with cancer bits growing on their arms. I'm going to have to remind them to take the mole off of my identifying features on any Missing Person Information surveys, because what a bummer to be caught in the back of some psycho's handy van (it's always the handy vans, isn'it?) bound and gagged but able to show a passerby through a small back window The One Identifying Feature that isn't even there any more, and him squinting into the window and shrugging, like, "Hey lady, no malignant melanoma, no positive ID, no $50,000 for your reward. And I gotta go buy a packet of smokes next to your kidnapper, so I might have at least given a really good description of the pyscho-murderer. See you in the movie Saw III, sweetcakes."

Ooooh... this just gives me an idea. Even if turns out to be something relatively benign with no mets any where, and the treatment was just "put a bandaid on the part we sliced out and try not to get it infected, dummy" I could totally be the jackass equiavlent of Frey's controversial book A Million Little Pieces, except I'd name mine A Million Little Cancer Dots, or something catchy like that. And Oprah would invite me to her show, and give everyone in the audience HumVees and Tiffany necklaces, and we'd all do a group hug/love-in session until it was found out that the whole book is basically a well-written lie, and then she'd invite me back on the stage so that I could recant in front of hundreds of angry upper middle class white women hurling burning copies of my book at me with Oprah in fine Torquemada form orchestrating the whole thing.

And I will presently stop looking at skin cancer websites that say scary things like malginant melanomas account for 77% of skin cancer deaths in the United States. One person an hour dies from metastic melanoma. Stop. Looking. Lot's. Wife.

Oh please, little piranha black/brown/irregular bordered/raised spot, oddity of my childhood, please do not end up make me dead, and just be a nice little dysplastic nevi, quirky like you and me, and not become part of the my epithet on my tombstone. Thank you, sincerely, Jamie.

I am also 5'1/2" tall, and weigh 95 lbs with clothes on, AFTER A MEAL. My BMI is 18.2, which is underweight. Gee I wonder why. Perhaps it's because I spend three 14 hour days out of the week running around and not eating all day. Or my thyroid's been working overtime. Bummer if that's the case, because I don't really mind being thin (although now size zero pants are getting baggy around the waist; thank god scrubs are drawstring).

Oooh! I even have slight ST depressions in leads V4 and V5. Sexy. (Not really, they are often thought to be part of ischemic changes, although it also could be lead placement, and I'm skinny).

And my back is still slightly fucked up, but better. No more transfering patients, I swear. I weigh 95 lbs, which is easily a quarter the weight of some of my obese patients.

Also, doc put me on OsCal d/t my risk of decreased bone density and later risk for osteoporosis. GOOD LORD, I really am practicing to be 90 years old!!

And I even knit, and read books, and become confused from time to time (like yesterday when, overly dehydrated and severely orthostatic, I attempted to head for the kitchen for water, stumbling along seeing yellow spots suspiciously like Sauron's Eye floating in front of me). My husband finally noticed what I was doing and carried me back to bed, all panicked and saying we had to go to the dr.

No thanks, I'd rather drink a liter of water in the comfort of my own home rather than sit in the ER for 12 hours only to be laughed at during triage. You're a.... what? A nurse? And you came to us for mild dehydration?! When you could have just had a liter of po fluids in the comfort of your own home? HA HA HA HA.

Honestly though, I need a bed alarm when my B/P is 70/50. I'm going to be a lot of fun at my nursing home already, I can tell.