The first big part of my issue with skin cancer is over and done with – on the scale once offered up former UVA Football coach Al Groh, who said that surgery is successful if the patient lives through it; the surgery was successful, because I’m writing this.
The only thing that stinks out of this: I didn’t get to thank personally and profusely all of the exceptionally nice and pleasant, and dramatically qualified, people who got me through what could have been more of an ordeal.
ICYMI
I’m still kinda, sorta in the fog of war on this, so the only person’s name that I remember from yesterday is that of the surgeon, Dr. Russell Witt – but in addition to the doc, there was the anesthesiology team, the ER nurses, the nurses who prepped me ahead of the ER nurses, the guy named Zach on the nuclear radiation technology team.
What I like about all of the above: quick introductions, then they all talked with me like we were lifelong best friends.
I can tend toward having bad anxiety, as I’ve written about on these pages, though I like to think that my years of therapy and prescription meds have helped me get that under wraps, by and large.
Gotta say, if I had any inclination toward being overly anxious yesterday, the team’s approach would have disarmed me.
Not entirely out of the woods yet – the pre-op visit to the nuclear radiation department involved a precautionary measure to make sure that the superficial skin cancer hasn’t spread elsewhere through my lymph nodes.
The early return on that looks positive, but we’ll need to get confirmation from the biopsy that Dr. Witt did around removing the cancer from between my shoulder blades.
I need to use my effort here to get your eyes on this column to advise you – make it a point to check yourself out for possible skin cancers on the regular.
Mine got discovered quite by luck – my massage therapist saw something, and said something, leading to my wife to schedule a trip to our local dermatologist, who took a biopsy, leading to the rest.
We caught mine really early – my skin cancer measured 0.8 mm, which is still Stage 1.
I don’t have a sense of how long it would have taken to get to Stage 2, and pose a greater risk of spreading to other locations – and I’m glad I don’t have to develop that sense.
In the meantime, I owe a meadow of flowers to the team at UVA.
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Chris Graham
