Show-and-tell is my love language
Last week, I had surgery to remove a small amount of basal cell carcinoma from my face. Not my favorite experience in the world, I must say! But not terrible, either. I shared the adventure on Instagram Stories and saved it in a highlight on my profile, and I’ve poured all those slides into a gallery at the bottom of this post.
Short version: I’ve had a small red patch on my nose for a while; I asked a doctor about it 18 months ago and he said it was just a pigmentation change, nothing to worry about; he was wrong. In November I noticed the patch was a bit bigger and it had begun flaking. I asked my new primary care doctor about it, and she too didn’t think it was likely to be anything worrisome, but she referred me to a dermatologist just to be sure. Good thing! He did a biopsy and it turned out to be basal cell carcinoma. That’s the better kind of skin cancer—it doesn’t metastasize—but you still need to have it removed. The most common procedure is called Mohs surgery and it’s a trip! I had it done last Thursday. The surgeon removed a disk of skin from my nose, checked it for clean margins, took another slice, and whew, that was enough to get it all. Sometimes it takes several more rounds to get that clean margin.
Then he did the repair, which is a bananas process! He made a series of small zigzagging cuts all the way up my nose and then shifted the skin down a notch so that the bottom zag covered the surgical hole. Then he stitched me up. I’m on day five now, with stitches running the entire length of my nose. I spent the weekend swollen and bruised, but today the swelling is almost gone and my black eye is yellow. 😉
I’ll have a scar right down the side of my nose for a while but Mohs scars fade to nearly invisible over time. (Could be months or a year, I’ve heard conflicting accounts.) I’m super curious to know what my nose will look like when the dust settles, but for now I’m amazed at how well it’s already healing (even if things look a bit lopsided at the moment), and I’m glad to be cancer-free once more. Sheesh.
(No, really! That’s the short version!)
