Mohs Nose
The procedure is drawing near and I’m beginning to show the strain. Before this it was stiff upper lip. But now my bottom lip is trembling in anticipation of the unknown. Barb faced cancer a few years ago. Now it’s my turn.
They say it may be all day, to bring a lunch. That doesn’t sound good.
They’re cutting the basil cell carcinoma out.
Then they take the slice of you out and take it to a lab. Somebody in a white coat freezes it so they can slice it and dice it to a get a 3-D view of the tumor.
“Sometimes they have roots that grow deeper into your flesh,” Barb tells me. Did you hear they can have roots?”
“Yes, I did. But I’m hoping mine isn’t like that.”
When she was battling breast cancer, I had a sty in my eye. She got all the attention and I had to sleep upstairs when I was suspected of having a cold. She got bouquets, cards, cookies left on the doorstep, and deserved it all, bravely battling a disease that could have done her in if she’d given up. Now I’ve got the least harmful version of the same disease, I’m shaking in my boots, and the treatment hasn’t even started.
“If you’re going to get a cancer,” they told me, “basil cell carcinoma is the one to get. It’s the most treatable.”
I suppose that was said to soothe me. It’s good news as far as it goes, but it leaves out the ugly procedures. Her biopsies and breast-Xrays, those horrible machines she put up with, now I must face them myself.
She’ll be with me day after tomorrow and she’ll have to drive me home. I’ll be an altered state. And the idiot bandages the size of a football on my nose won’t be alone. They’ll be on my ear too.
“They may have to cover the hole on my nose with a skin graft they’ll cut from my ear.”
Barb reached up and fondled my lobes with both hands.
“You’ve got plenty of material to work with.”
Now she starts singing, to the tune of the 1930’s song “Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye”.
Root root rootsy goodbye,
Root root rootsy don’t cry,
Watch for the slice,
If it don’t look nice,
Then take your knife and go back in,
Just one more slice and dice again,
Root root rootsy goodbye,
Root root rootsy don’t cry.”
For a significant other, Barb shows no mercy. She’s attempting to toughen me up. She should have been a Spartan instead of an Ashkenazi.
I admit it’s referred to as minor surgery. They intend to give me a local. It’s nothing. Yet I’m cringing because I’m facing a new experience, facing the unknown. At least I don’t have to face it alone.
I’m going to sleep close to Barb tonight and hear some of that brave and confident tone she gives me when we first cuddle up, and her soft and secure tone just before we fall asleep.
Hearing her so close always helps soothe me.
***
©StevenHunley2020
to be continued...?
https://youtu.be/KD_YRnuuKyY Toot, Toot, Tootsie! - Al Jolson