to a crisp...

All went according to plan yesterday at the clinic named after a condiment (which is a concept in and of itself...birth control and fresh breath in one convenient product, but I digress). I went in. The doctor told me exactly what the biopsy showed, which was skin cancer, but confined to the top layer of skin and very small. He said they'd numb the area, scrape it, cauterize it and I'd be on my merry way. All that would be left is taking care of the spot for a few weeks to save it from infection.

So I laid back on a table and he injected flesh numbing stuff into my ear. This was very effective. I couldn't feel a thing he was doing, but, being as it was on my ear, I could hear everything in detail. Scrape, scrape scrape, and then some electrical device and a crackling sound. Then again, scrape, scrape, scrape, electrical device and a crackling sound. Somewhere in here I smelled....burning...like walking into the kitchen and realizing a toaster oven disaster was in the making. More...scrape, scrape, scrape..the process continued as my mind churned...burning? Is something wrong with the electrical thingie? It took a few minutes, but the light bulb finally illuminated....cauterize...that burning...is me. This guy is toasting my skin with the setting on dark. I'm not sure why this concept brought the reaction, but it had a kind of eeeeeeewwwwww feeling....like, if you're going to cook me, can we steer away from the 'well done' setting?

The whole ordeal was over in about 10 minutes. They wrapped the top of my ear in gauze and I was pronounced healed. Now, I have to keep it clean, put Vaseline on the spot for the next two weeks to keep it moist. For the first week, put a band-aid over it to help prevent infection (my ear makes me look a bit like some animal tagged by a researcher studying my migratory habits), and it'll all be done.