The day started out OK but tilted downhill just about the time I remembered that today was the day of reckoning with my dermatologist.
After years in the sun, I've developed an alarming, to me not him - he seems to handle the situation very well - profusion of actinic keratoses. Although these aren't really visible except to dermatologists and my wife (who knows the family income gets reduced if I die), I am always encouraged to have these treated so that the perfection of my ruggedly handsome face is never less than optimal.
In March and June I had a couple of treatments that involved someone daubing a sensitizing-solution on my face after which I get exposed to a high level of light at specific wavelengths. If you care to experience what that is like, an equivalent feeling can be achieved by spraying one's face with a thin layer of cooking oil and then positioning one's face really close to hot broiler coils. They do insist you wear goggles, though.
The dermatologist, who said I reminded him of a teacher he once had, said that those treatments weren't totally effective so now we go to steps 2 and 3. He did mention, with what I thought was a remarkably ambiguous expression, that he hoped we wouldn't have to go to step 4 because, as he said, 'that makes a real mess and we'll only talk about that later - if we have to'
He gave me quite a lovely brochure about step 3, a multi-page, four color brochure which signals that the medicine is expensive.
Inside there was calming text, explaining just how wonderful the medicine and then, in the spirit of getting the patient ready, were pictures of how patients' skin look 4 days after treatment, 7 days, 14 days and 29 days. I looked with marked dismay at the row marked 'mild reaction', forced myself to look at the pictures in the row labelled 'medium reaction' but, in an example of how one's brain responds to scenes of horror that the mind can't deal with, didn't see the row marked,'severe.'
Don't worry he said, 'a severe reaction occurs much less often than the others. I've only seen a couple of those this year.' Wouldn't that mean that one is about due, I thought.
Today, he said, for step 2, we will freeze a bunch of those spots and he proceeded to hose my face down with liquid nitrogen for an hour or so. Touch the end of a lit cigarette. Repeatedly. There, that's the feeling.
So I drove the 30 minutes home trying not to cry and now I just have a week to heal before I do step 3, assured by the 4 color brochure that next week there is only a minor chance my face will look like I had picked up a flamethrower rather than a razor to shave and hadn't noticed the mistake until I was through with my entire face. Not that bad.
But, after talking with Mr. Percocet, things don't seem so bad.
