- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 0
-
Sparkle (0)
On Friday I saw my dermatologist for my annual skin check. Everything looks good. I go to the dermatologist every six months or so at this point, with the skin check once a year. For a while I was seeing him every two or three months. In 2006, I was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma - skin cancer - so I take my appointments with the dermatologist very seriously.
I was really lucky in a lot of ways, not all of them obvious except in hindsight. First of all, the tumor showed up on my face, right above my lip. It just popped up overnight, and at first I thought it was a cold sore. But after a couple of days, I still wasn't sure what it was, but I was sure that it wasn't a cold sore. And there it was, staring back at me every time I looked in the mirror, so it was difficult to ignore or pretend it was nothing. When it started getting bigger, I called to make an appointment with my primary care doctor.
When I went in to see my doctor, she said it could either be this benign sort of thing that some people get sometimes when they are under a lot of stress (um, yeah, I was under a little stress at the time...I had just called off a wedding, for one thing), or it could be a tumor. There was really no way to tell without having a dermatologist look at it and take a biopsy.
Fortunately, I had already been to see a dermatologist fairly recently. I had gotten a referral to see one about a year earlier so he could look at a big brown mole on my leg, which turned out to be nothing. I knew it was nothing, but every time my father saw it he would yell "what the hell is that thing on your leg!" I went to the dermatologist so I could finally yell back "it's nothing, and I have a doctor's note to prove it!"
My primary care doctor coached me on what to say when I called the dermatologist's office for an appointment. She said it could sometimes take weeks to get an appointment, so she told me to make sure they knew that I was a current patient with this dermatologist, and that the thing was on my face, and especially that it was on my lip, and to say really emphatically that it was GETTING BIGGER. And if that didn't work, I should call her back and she would find me a dermatologist who would see me sooner. I called the dermatologist's office and said all of those things, and they got me an appointment the very next day.
The dermatologist took a biopsy, and it turned out to be a squamous cell carcinoma, which is more serious than basal cell cancer but not as serious as melanoma. It also turned out to be an aggressive form of carcinoma, which explained why it had popped up overnight with no warning, and also made it especially lucky that I had done something about it pretty quickly.
My primary care doctor is based at a local community health center, which is a convenient location for me relative to where I live but wouldn't appear to be very prestigious at first glance. Except that the health center is a branch of Brigham & Women's Hospital, which is a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, and which also includes the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. You can't get much more prestigious than that, right?
So my Harvard-Medical-School-affiliated dermatologist refers me to his colleague at the Dana-Farber for something called Mohs surgery. This type of surgery has a very high success rate and removes the least amount of healthy tissue - very important when the thing being removed is on your face! Basically, they cut out what they can see, then they slice it up to look at under a microscope so they can pinpoint where they need to cut next. Then they go back to cut out any remaining cancer cells, slice that up to look at under a microscope, and repeat the process until they are sure that they have gotten everything. It's all done with a local anesthetic, in one day. I was lucky that they only had to go back in once after the initial cutting.
Then my Dana-Farber cancer specialist referred me to a Harvard-affiliated plastic