Not Cut Out For This Job

So, yesterday I went and had my pihrana mole sliced off. It looked all sad after it was done, a little piece of me sitting on a sterile field, becoming blanched from the lack of perfusion, looking very resigned to its fate as a pathology lab specimen. I felt really sorry for it, even if it could have one day grown up from a cute baby dysplastic nevus and turned into a nasty adult malignant melanoma, spread through my lymphatic system, and killed me. Future psycho killer of the skin cancer world or not, I was still sorry to see it go, because I liked that stupid little mole. It made me feel special when I was a kid, and now I have to settle for plain old stupid little skin tags and cherry angiomas like any other person over twenty five.

I also got to feel what it's like to be the patient in a very different way than usual.

I'm pretty good with pain, and after the lidocaine set in, I thought I'd observe a little procedure, the way I do at work, watching people go through uncomfortable/painful procedures while lying through my teeth, "This will only pinch a little." Pinch a little my ass. The surgeon even warned me, "You can look away if you want; even people in health care get a little woozy when they're on the other side."

I nodded politely but thought, "Yes, but this would be interesting learning experience for me, so I'll watch, because I've never actually watched any one slice off a mole and then stitch me up before, and I can handle it, I've seen/done a lot worse."

The comparison to Lot's wife is striking, isn't it?

Well, at least I didn't turn into a pillar of salt, but I did discover that the surgeon was right about that bit about what happens when the slicing and sewing is happening on you, rather than performed by you on someone else.

Yesterday, even after the lido had kicked in, and the blood started to ooze, the realization finally set in: this man was actually slicing into my skin with a sharpened--although presumably sterile--object, and though it wasn't painful, it just looked... well, grotesque.

Perhaps it was even more creepy because it didn't hurt, and Oh my god, is that a little layer of subcutaneous fat , my subcutaneous fat that just spurted out of that red 1cm gash? Oh Jesus, now he's going to stitch me up. Must. look. away. Must. fight. urge. to. pass. out. Because then the surgeon would probably laugh at me (after he'd revived me with smelling salts, or whatever they use in offices to wake up weak-stomached idiots like myself who don't take their provider's suggestion seriously and look any way from the messy nevus excision, please.)

So I stared with great, focused interest at the poster of The Human Intestine, honing in on the nice pink colored colon as if it would some how give me the strength to go on through the next five minutes of the procedure as (I had to peek, ok?) he proceeded to stitch me up sans one dysplastic nevus. (Well, we hope it's that and not malignant melanoma.)

And for the first time ever in my life I finally figured out what people are talking about when they say they get lightheaded and faint when watching certain procedures or what not, because I realized that funny lightheaded, I must-now-go-to-my-special-place-and-think-happy-thoughts feeling was related to watching someone cut a piece of skin off of my arm.

Lesson learned: next time, when someone is about to place a scapel to my skin tells me to look away, I'm going to listen to him/her, and think about something relatively pleasant, like cleaning up C-diff diarrhea.