A Little Turns into A lot
My skin cancer surgery went down yesterday morning as scheduled. At my last visit he sliced the top of the affected area off for the biopsy. Since then that area has healed and looked almost normal. When I sat in the chair I pointed out to him that what remained seemed very small. He said he could still see from the texture on the surface that there was still cancer cells there. Since the spot that remained was very small, about the size of a couple BB’s, I figured this would not be a tough MOHS procedure and it wasn’t in regards to the cutting out portion, which didn’t take that long.
After waiting roughly 30 minutes I was told they got all the cancer cells and I should return at 11AM to get closed up. During that two hour hiatus I played some Hearthstone on my phone, got coffee, dropped off some packages at the post office and even had time for a brief ride on the One Wheel.
The closing procedure took longer than I expected, I felt like a football having it’s laces pulled together. Later in the evening when I looked at the incision I was surprised to see a curved line that was at least 3 inches long, way bigger than the small spot that was cut out. I suppose this is done to minimize scarring and have any lines sort of melt into what is already there. The dermatologist has done a good job before with minimizing the end result of the multiple removals of flesh from my head so I am confident the end result of this again will be good. I was just surprised at just how big the incision line wound up being.
I had orders to take it easy the rest of the day as anything that would get your blood pressure elevated is not a great thing right after surgery. I decided that mowing the grass was not one of those things. I put a buff awkwardly over my head like an oversized bandana to keep the bandaged area covered and then put my oversized hat on top of that. I zipped through the mowing in maybe an hour and a half. Unfortunately the high temps had me sweating which in turn resulted in the bandages coming loose. Technically I was supposed to leave the original bandage on until today but they were useless by bedtime.
Showering was annoying as you weren’t supposed to get the area wet right away either. I used a combination of weird head angles and a wash cloth to clean my hair and face the best I could. Cindy then redid the bandages before bed which thankfully stayed in place through the night. Walking around with a wound to the head is never a great time but it’s happened so often now I almost used to it. I guess anything, when it happens enough, can become routine.