Reading My Skin: Experiential and Creative Explorations in Skin Cancer

A Blot on the Landscape: Pre-Surgery
Summer/Fall 2003

The first is the worst, they say. I’d let the problem with my skin go on for too long—not really thinking it was a problem, just a drag, the way the skin on the bridge of my nose would sometimes just skim off, like paint or ink in a tin, and then ooze or bleed not a lot but just enough to be annoying and then thin-scab over and be all red looking.

A couple of guys, casual acquaintances, seemed to notice, though, and keep track. One of them, a real estate agent, kept asking me about it. I think he thought it was ugly. A blot on the landscape. Good looks were very important to him. Everyone in his family was good looking, and I guess he wanted that to extend to all of his acquaintances. He’d joke about wife assault and ask me if I wanted him to go and beat up the old man. The other guy was a doctor—more of a research scientist-type doctor. He’d kind of come up pretty close to me and peer at it. I think he thought it was ugly too but knew there had to be a root cause. He kept telling me to go and get it checked out.

And, finally, I did. And then I got my first dermatologist who had to make it look worse by scraping cells off for the lab tests and then, when the basal-cell carcinoma diagnosis came in as predicted and I chose surgery over radiation, I got a plastic surgeon—the best hand-reconstruction surgeon in the area, apparently, although I didn’t really know what that had to do with me and the bridge of my nose. Both the dermatologist and the surgeon were worried about the scar. With the radiation there wouldn’t be a scar, but I couldn’t make myself go through radiation treatment for something that was just a surface-layer malignancy. Plus it was on my face which is close to my brain and I didn’t want radiation on my brain. I had no idea what it really meant anyway, and the dermatologist wanted me to make up my mind on the spot right there in her stark office, so I’d just said surgery. Part of the scarring issue was that I already had a scar from an old bicycle accident on the bridge of my nose, so there’d be lots of scar tissue to deal with. And then there was the shape of the cancer. Kind of asterisk shaped which promised a very flamboyant, wild, and asymmetrical scar right in the middle of my face forever.

Something about Michael Jackson’s Face ...
Wednesday 11 February 2004

Day Surgery sounded so casual to me. And it was at first. I just followed the signs at St Joe’s, and it was just this little office where you checked in with a receptionist and then you sat in chairs with all the other day surgery people. A lot of the other people had other people with them. I had just walked over to the hospital by myself thinking it was just like going to the dentist’s office, and it was in the sense that it was only about three blocks farther south from the dentist’s office, and I just walked in and said my name and sat down. But then things started to get more serious. First there was the big room, the surgery room, that I got let into having not really had to wait that long. And I had to get into the gown like with real surgery (so they could gain easier access to my face?). And then there were the two strange people who came in and knew all about my surgery. They were residents or Dr Levis’s greeters or something like that. Anyway, they told me that they were going to prep me...