Charlie Says Your a Butcher...

I lost two good dermatologists this summer. One had a massive stroke and the other retired. The waiting list to see the "new" guy here in Logan...8 months (gasp). Excuse me, but in my family you have to have moles and cancerous lesions removed every couple of weeks! What's a fair-skinned girl to do?

Desperate times call for desperate measures...meaning I called a guy in Ogden. If you have ever been to downtown Ogden you will know why this is not a desirable health care destination. They had a check-in for the registration desk (on both floors). I was glad that I arrived early. They also wanted to see two forms of identification...supposedly there are some people who don't want to be identified by their dermatological markings. The good news is that once I got through the TSA security checkpoints, Dr. L was Johnny-On-the-Spot. He came rushing in through the door with his "nitrogen blowtorch" (seriously looked like a spot welder). He took one look at my back and said, "This must be the reason your here." I said, "Well, no, but I guess that you are going to cut that off anyway?" "Oh, yes," he replied. Okay, so now I will have another bullet hole scar in my back. He removed a few more spots and then finally asked why I was there? (okay, only 3.6 minutes had passed to this point). I mentioned that I had a bunch of growths (fine, they were warts...ugh) on my left index finger. I wanted them gone. period. Dr. L says, "The only way you can really give a good effort to remove them is to cut off the top layer of skin and burn the surrounding tissue. Then I will give you some venereal wart treatment (he kind of laughs) to use as a topical ointment."

"Wow, cut off the top layer of skin and burn the rest??? Won't that really hurt," I weakly respond. "Nope. Be fine," he says. "What is going to hurt is when I poke this needle into the end of your finger, you're really going to feel that."

Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Pain vs. vanity. Vanity wins. It hurt, but at least he did give me some warning when he said, "pretend that you are biting on a piece of leather." And that's when it occurred to me that Dr. L looked a lot like Sam Elliot (mustache and everything).

But the story doesn't end there, because I still had to go to Costco and Target before going home. And it wasn't until I was in the frozen foods section of the Target (about 45 minutes later) that the anesthetic began to wear off on my finger and I noticed that blood was still dripping out from the bandages. And it did hurt. It hurt like a son of a #%@. It bled for two days. Needless to say, Dr. L lied. I believe that he did it for the sake of time. He wanted me to bite down on that piece of leather and move on down the road.

Moral of the story: If your dermatologist looks like a cowboy, acts like a cowboy and cuts into you like a steer at branding time...well, you better pull your hat down tight my friend.