“What brought you in today, Mr. Simpson?” asked the teenaged nurse holding a clipboard and a ballpoint pen. As it turned out, she wasn’t actually a teenager, but she looked too young to be looking after me is what I thought.
It was my first ever visit to a dermatologist, and I didn’t know all the correct buzzwords yet. “I have a mole on my right temple and I thought someone smart should take a look at it,” I said.
“Are you worried about it? How long has it been bothering you?”
“I have no idea how long it’s been on my head, and it doesn’t really bother me. But everything I read about growing older says I’m supposed to pray attention to stuff like this, especially the stuff I’ve successfully ignored up until now. So here I am, against all odds, trying to be a grown up.”
“How old are you, Mr. Simpson?” she asked, smiling and looking at my graying hair.”
“I’m 51.318,” I said.
She kept smiling and said, “Ah, another engineer.” Then she asked me to take a seat and wait for the doctor.
The doctor spent about twenty seconds looking at my head through a magnifying glass and told the attending nurse, “Actinic Keratosis.”
He saw me react to the diagnosis and told me it was very common and is considered one of the earliest stages of skin cancer but it would soon be gone. He reached for some sort of metal cylinder offered by the nurse and zapped the side of my head with liquid nitrogen; something I later learned was called Cryosurgery. He spent about five more minutes looking closely at the rest of my skin, and then my visit was over. Just like that.
I later read in the literature he gave me – yes, I’m the guy who reads all those papers that doctors hand out – that “half of all older, fair-skinned persons who live in hot, sunny places” have some form of Actinic Keratosis.
Well, it was good to know I was in the top half, so to speak.
I spent most of my life never going to the doctor and never being sick. That plan worked well for me until a few years ago when I tried to donate blood (I’ve donated 78 pints so far) but instead found myself frightening the phlebotomist who was taking my blood pressure.
“Sir, do you have a headache?” she asked.
“Well, sure. I’ve had an ambient headache for the past year or so … why?”
“Sir, your blood pressure is (I don’t remember the exact number but it was 200-something over 100-something). I can’t take your blood.”
“If you took some of my blood wouldn’t that make the pressure go down … decreased volume and all?”
“Sir, you need to go to the doctor right away.”
“But you measured my pulse at 48 beats-per-minute. It seems to me that I have a pretty good pump if it will put out such high pressure with so few strokes.”
“Sir, you need to go to your doctor right away.”
Well, she couldn’t be talked into taking my blood, but I got distracted and forgot to go to the doctor right away. However, I made the mistake of telling the story to my friend Don Bomar who phoned me every day until I went to the doctor. Now, thanks to the miracle of modern chemistry, my blood pressure stays down within permissible levels, and I hardly ever have headaches.
When I complained to my friends that I was going to have to start taking a prescription drug every day for the rest of my life, well, I got no sympathy. They just laughed at me and started rattling off drug names and told me, “Welcome to the club.”
And so now, I guess I’m the last of my friends to have an Actinic Keratosis frozen off my head. I haven’t told anyone about it since I don’t expect any sympathy from my friends and I didn’t want to provide them an opportunity to laugh at me (again) and start pointing to their own cryosurgery scars. I guess this was just the next thing in my life adventure.
I showed Cyndi the brochure I brought home from the dermatologist about Actinic Keratosis (or AK, as we regulars call it). Not wanting to actually read the brochure herself since she didn’t want to look for her reading glasses and since she was actually horizontal at the time and about fifteen seconds away from sleep, Cyndi asked, “So what advice does it give?”
I said, “Well, the brochure says older men who live in hot, sunny areas who have AKs respond best to increased physical affection.”
She mumbled, “I’ll see what I can do;” then fell asleep.
Ha, nice ending.