I’m Not A Doctor, But I Play One On The Interweb

I have been very aware for most of my life that I am a skin cancer poster child just waiting to happen. I have super-fair skin, blue eyes – and I’m pretty sure my original hair color is some variety of blonde, though at this point I’d be hard-pressed to tell you what shade of blonde, exactly. So we’ll just say that it’s blonde-ish. Blonde-esque, if you will.

When I was a little girl I had three or four really bad sunburns – mostly on my shoulders and back – and when I was a teenager I got a sunburn so awful that I threw up fourteen times ON A VAN on the way home from a church retreat. When I was eighteen I decided to try my luck with tanning beds, stayed in one called Bora Bora for all of seventeen minutes, then suffered a sunburn so severe that I could not bend my knees for three days.

And let me tell you: after that Bora Bora tanning bed sunburn? I stayed inside for the next fifteen years.

Anyway, I know that because of my sunburn history (sidenote: I have never had a tan in my life – the closest I have ever come to “tan” is one summer when I turned a light shade of beige) I need to be super vigilant in terms of wearing sunscreen and checking my skin from time to time to make sure that nothing has exploded or started to resemble a Rorshach test. There have been a couple of times when something has looked suspicious to me, I’ve had a doctor take a look at it, and it turned out to be nothing. For the last four or five years, everything skin-wise has appeared to be pretty normal.

Until last summer.

Last summer I found myself outside a lot at pools and beaches and whathaveyou, because the funny thing about young children is that they enjoy all the water and the splashing and the sliding and the etc. and the so forth and the so on. And one day last year, when I was sitting by a pool at Gulf Shores watching Alex go up and down a water slide approximately 248 times in a one-hour timespan, I noticed something funny on my left leg. It was a pretty sizeable bump – but definitely not a bug bite. And definitely not something that had been there for a long time.

IT’S HAPPENED, I thought. I HAVE THE SKIN CANCER. And because I am deeply mature and incredibly proactive when it comes to my own medical care, I determined that whatever it was could wait. Which means I did absolutely nothing about the place on my leg (unless you count ignoring it). The ignoring became even easier when cold weather hit and I wasn’t wearing shorts anymore. I just figured I’d deal with it in the spring or the summer or maybe sometime in 2015. Since I don’t have anything on the calendar for 2015, that seemed like an excellent time to deal with The Bumpy Mole-Type Thing On My Leg. You know, if nothing else came up.

Over the last couple of weeks, though, the bumpy mole-ish thing has really worried me. Weekend before last I made the mistake of consulting Google about “new mole on leg,” and that was a TERRIBLE decision on my part. Within five minutes I was convinced that I only had hours to live, and it never even crossed my mind that I might be overreacting to the fact that I HAD SELF-DIAGNOSED AN ALLEGED MEDICAL PROBLEM WITH GOOGLE. Because all I could think was that if Google said it, IT MUST BE TRUE.

The next week Melanie‘s hubby found out that he had basal cell carcinoma, and as Mel and I discussed the details of his diagnosis on the phone, I knew that I had to call the doctor about my bumpy mole-ish thing. I didn’t want to call the doctor, because I’m one of those annoying people who would rather avoid bad news altogether than just confront an unpleasant-ish situation head-on. However, I decided that I’d wait until I got back from Pittsburgh to make an appointment, mainly because I didn’t want to ruin my trip by going to the doctor before I left town and having to deal with the inevitable bad news when my doctor confirmed THE GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS. So I went to Pittsburgh. And I thought about that stupid bumpy mole-ish thing pretty much the whole time I was there. Dang it.

After I got home I spent most of Monday dreading calling the doctor. So instead I called Melanie and talked to her for no less than thirty minutes about how I didn’t want to call the doctor. I felt like it was okay to do that since the week before we spent at least thirty minutes talking about how Google told Melanie that she had some sort of life-threatening throat condition. Really, it is beyond fortunate that we met on the internet a few years ago because I tell you, we have walked through AT LEAST 15 self-diagnosed medical traumas together. None of those medical traumas turned out to be, you know, REAL, but I find that it’s helpful to have friends who will support you through every bit of your crazy. Thank goodness we found each other.

At some point Monday afternoon it dawned on me – and I have NO IDEA why, except that maybe God was tired of listening to me pray about the bumpy mole-ish thing AND NOT DOING ANYTHING ABOUT IT – that the enemy counts on the fact that we won’t face our fears. He banks on it. And for whatever reason, the notion that the devil would delight in all my worry and anxiety just TICKED ME OFF. So I picked up that phone and called that doctor and made an appointment for Wednesday morning at 9.

And then I’m pretty sure I cried.

I was 42 kinds of nervous when I woke up Wednesday, but I also felt relieved that I was going to finally find out the truth and nothing but the truth regarding That Thing On My Leg – ALMOST ONE YEAR AFTER I FIRST DISCOVERED IT, mind you. I made it to the doctor’s office on time, filled out the paperwork, walked back to the examination room, told the nurse why I was there, then waited for the doctor with my heart beating 90 to nothing. Scared to death. Wishing I could jump off of that table and run for the hills.

The doctor came into the room, and I told her about another skin-related something that I’ve also been neglecting to get checked. She told me how she could make it all better, and then I said, oh-so-hesitantly, “I also…have…this new mole…on my leg.” I pointed to it. And no kidding, y’all: she looked at it for less than two seconds and said, “Oh that? That’s not a mole. That’s a keratosis. I can freeze it off before you leave today. Nothing to it.”

I immediately heard two voices in my head: my husband, saying I TOLD YOU IT WAS FINE, and Melanie, laughing hysterically because GOOGLE FOILED ME AGAIN.

So now I have this super-ugly place on my leg where the doctor used that liquid nitrogen stuff to freeze the keratosis in its tracks, and it makes me shudder a little bit every time I see it because, well, it’s nasty. But it’s fine. I know that now. I’m SO glad I got it checked. I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders, only the irony is that the weight never was really even there because NOTHING WAS WRONG WITH ME, MY WORD AT THE WASTED WORRY-RELATED ENERGY.

Finally, I would just like to say that my hypochondria and I hope you have an absolutely wonderful weekend. We’ll be right here – staying far, far away from the Google.