About stitches...and ticks

Remember back in the day when we all poured baby oil on our skin and laid in the sun for hours...making sure to turn on a regular basis so as to brown evenly? We were like pieces of meat roasting on spits. We were cooking ourselves and permanently damaging damaging skin cells. Gross.

On Monday I paid for that youthful vanity when I had an “atypical” mole carved out of my back. A mole that was the result of all that roasting in the sun. It wasn't melanoma or cancerous, just a spot that would be better if it was gone rather than forget about it and run the risk of it changing into something that could kill me later in life.

This started a couple months ago when, after being referred by my doctor, I made an appointment with a dermatologist to have a couple annoying skin tags removed. Having never been to a dermatologist I didn't know what to expect. I planned on walking in, having a couple tags removed, getting a couple bandaids, and walking out. If it were only that simple…and if it were only that simple, there’d be no point in me discussing it here.

Appointment day. The nurse practitioner called me to the exam room and had me hop up on the table. I showed her the offending tags. Simple. Easy to remove.  

Then she asked me if I wanted a full body screening. 

Um. No. Not really. She asked if I had ever had a full body screening. Um. No? Not really?? I don’t think I’ve mentioned The Tick Encounter yet. I need to go back a couple years...as painful as it is.

The tick encounter. Once upon a time Randy and I went exploring around Center Hill Lake checking out campsites and other potential fun things to do. When we got home that evening I got into the shower and noticed a seed tick on my arm. (Just typing this makes my skin crawl.) I picked it off…and then I noticed another, and another, and HUNDREDS of them. My hysteria was instant and complete. For the sake of my sanity, I have repressed most of the memory, but I believe that was one of my lowest, most humiliating moments. Me. Naked. Totally freaked out. Brightly lit kitchen. Randy. A magnifying glass. Tweezers.

It was worse than awful. At some point during our adventure I had walked right through a nest of ticks. I was wearing jeans so the little bastards went undetected for several hours. My right side was covered with them…from my ankle to my elbow and EVERYwhere in between. Ok, maybe not “COVERED” but way more than 50, and I had ticks where a lady doesn't want ticks! I was too close to a total “just take me to the ER” breakdown to count each pinch of the tweezers. I've had better moments...not sure if I've had worse. I loath ticks.

Back to the appointment…the nurse explained that a full body screening would be a good idea because I’m fair skinned, had never had one before, and we might as well do it since I was already in the office, paid my copay and all that. Might as well. After all, I had just paid $45 and I do like to stretch a dollar. She told me to take off all my clothes, including my bra, but leave my underwear on, then left me in privacy to undress. Oh. Hell. Green cotton underwear and legs that hadn't seen a razor in more than a week (probably longer). It was too late to call her back and tell her I had changed my mind so I kept my green big girl panties on and sucked it up. Why do I even have green underwear? (I don't anymore, I threw them away.)

She walked back into the room and pulled a magnifying glass out of the drawer. That's when The Tick Encounter night came screaming back at me. No no NO! We don't do magnifying glasses. There are just some things that don't look good any bigger than they actually are in real life. But wait! She's got a flashlight. Humiliation complete.

I stood in the middle of the exam room while she scrutinized every inch of my skin. Good times. At least she wasn't picking ticks off me. But as she was "screening" she used Sharpie marker to circle and label questionable spots. My back looked like a treasure map. Including the "elective" tags I wanted removed, there were seven areas that needed to be checked and sent to the lab for closer inspection (like she wasn't close enough).

In order to send the spots to the lab they needed to be removed from my body. In order for them to be removed from my body those seven areas needed to be numbed. She inserted a tiny little needle in the spot on my arm and my breathing stopped. HOLY MOTHER OF PEARL! 
I thought she was going to numb the areas before the procedure! It felt like she had inserted a hot jagged match that had been dipped in sulphuric acid under my skin. She warned me to keep breathing or I'd pass out. Really? How does one breathe through that? The beauty of the situation is that I had 6 more injections to go. Someone needs to invent something to numb the area before numbing the area. She assured me the injection hurts less than removing the spot without anethesia...I seriously doubt it. The spots were removed and sent for biopsy. Only one ended up being "atypical", hence the appointment on Monday.

The mole is now gone and in its place are a couple layers of stitches. The inside layer will dissolve (Yep. Dissolve. Gross.) The exposed stitches, which will be removed in two weeks, look like I squished a giant spider with my back. The doctor is obviously not a fan of piecework. The area to be stitched up was pretty much a circular hole so she really didn't have a lot of stitch options, but seriously....she used ugly black thread and zigzaged a puckered, spidery-shaped looking pattern over the hole. It's going to look like I have a sphincter scar on my back! If I could reach it I'd be doing some mending and repairing. Maybe verigated silk thread in a cool decorative pinwheel embroidery stitch, a few seed beads, some funky knots...