surgery, adam sandler, twitter, my vagina, and sunscreen

So back in May I blogged about how UVSkinz is a wonderful company and how skin cancer is bad and how I got all inspired to visit the dermatologist. Which was awesome, in theory, until the dermatologist started shaving bits of my flesh off left and right.

About a month ago after the first mole-shaving festival, I called like, “Dude, where are my results?” And they were all like, “Oh, yeah. Sorry about that. Come in and have some surgery. Your moles are weird!”

Despite having pushed a baby out without any pain medication, I am a complete lunatic when it comes to medical and dental procedures. Up until last year I couldn’t even give blood. (The first time I did, I gripped a little stuffed animal so hard I ended up bringing it all the way back to my office from the Bloodmobile. I had to do a walk of shame back across the parking lot with a little blue puppy dog.)

When the chipper phone nurse scheduled my “fifteen minute surgery” I told her that I had some major anxiety surrounding the procedure. She said she’d call me back. And the next day she did. “The doctor says to take a Benadryl before you head over.”

“Um. A Benadryl? Are you sure?”

“Yes, it should relax you.”

I don’t know about you guys, but Benadryl makes me batshit crazy, not calm. So when my appointment arrived, I skipped on the Benadryl and settled for spamming Twitter with a series of ridiculous nervous outbursts.

They were playing Anger Management in the waiting room. The time before that it was Kate and Leopold. It’s like someone came in and consulted them on movies no one has ever actually seen. Fortunately, I can now cross both of those films off my bucket list.

Anger Management is apparently a film about baseball and Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson and that chick from The Wrestler who my husband wants to have sex with. Except she wasn’t a naked stripper in it. It ended with a bizarre musical number that made something deep inside my stomach/groin region ache with mortification on behalf of all the cast members and crew. (Was that my phantom balls shrinking?)

After that they played The Terminal, which features Tom Hanks demonstrating his inability to play anyone but Tom Hanks. This time he was Tom Hanks with a really bad Bulgarian accent.

At some point I realized I’d seen significant portions of two films. I stood up and approached the Really Hot Male Nurse behind the counter. “Um. Was my appointment at three?”

“Oh, uh, yes we’re running pretty late. It will probably be another 45 minutes.”

I shit you not, my eyes welled up with tears. “Well. I guess I’ll have to reschedule. I’m nursing. Uh—breastfeeding. And I can’t be here for hours. I have a little baby at home, UGH. Let me call someone.”

They all looked uncomfortable. I sat down near the door and called my mom, who proceeded to talk me out of running away. Then I called my husband and hysterically complained about how bad The Terminal was. Really loudly. Before hanging up and crying.

Acting like a lunatic in a waiting room is magical. (I wish I could say it had been an act.) Within three minutes they whisked me back to my own room. “How are you doing?” the Mama Nurse asked politely.

“I’m nervous,” I said.

“What are you having done?”

(What the fuck shouldn’t they have notes on that?)

“I don’t know. They didn’t really explain when they called.”

She read my chart and told me a little about bad moles and how it wasn’t melanoma but it was still bad and they had to get the “root” out. (Does the word root make you think about penises? Me neither.) I looked at the needle on the counter and started crying again the second she left me in there to wait. Then I noticed a mirror on the wall and wondered if it had a secret camera and I didn’t want the secret camera filming me crying so I grabbed a tissue and manned up.

Until the Doctor came in. At which point I started crying again while he explained what they were going to do with lots of scary ballpoint pen illustrations on my inner thigh. In between all the crying I pointed out two other moles that looked goofy to me. He circled them both and mentioned to the nurse that they needed to shave them off too.

“Wow, I’m really cruising,” I babbled. (For a bruising, by the way.) They looked at me like I was crazy. And Mama Nurse brought me a Capri Sun. (Fuck, I thought. This is now the second time I’ve sat in this office sniffling on a Capri Sun to keep from passing out.)

“Have you had stitches before?” the nice, middle-aged doctor asked.

“Um. Well, in uh. My erm. With childbirth,” I replied, chewing on my straw. “I HAD NATURAL CHILDBIRTH THOUGH WITH NO DRUGS,” I added.

“Not on purpose I bet,” Mama Nurse laughed.

I made this face → -_-

Mama Nurse had some major finesse with the injections and scraping. She also started asking me about my kids, which always calms me down. After about four million shots in my thigh, we were ready to go. I started babbling and shaking. “So yeah, after I had the baby, they had to do stitches then, but like, the anesthesia wouldn’t take and my husband was all, dude you’re Rambo, and it hurt a lot. But like, there was a baby involved and all that so I got something out of it which was cool.”

Nice, middle-aged doctor pointed out that the Lydocaine was either expired or they were inept at injecting it if it “didn’t take.”

Mama Nurse glanced at me. “Or it was in a difficult place.”

YES, I wanted to blurt. SUCH AS MY CLITORIS. WHICH IS, IN FACT, A DIFFICULT PLACE.

But I just eyeballed the weird huge overhead light and tried not to throw up. They explained that the shaking wasn’t me being terrified, it was the epinephrine in the injections.

“I’m pretty sure I’m also terrified, so we’ll call it 50-50,” I said. Nice, middle-aged doctor thought that was hilarious.

It took forty-five minutes. They put, and I’m not even joking, this huge chunk of flesh in a little plastic jar for the lab. Mama Nurse kept talking to me and gesturing with wads of bloody gauze in her hands. Nice, middle-aged doctor eventually stopped chatting and started frowning through stitches, eventually pointing out that the inner thigh is one of the more tedious, difficult places to work on. Awesome.

I asked him about his son, who we’d discussed earlier. (Apparently his wife went from 6cm to 10cm and delivered their son in a rush of water “like Fred Flintstone when he’s surfing.” I can’t make this shit up.) His son is 21 now.

“He’s probably Twittering right now,” nice, midde-aged doctor told me.

I chuckled that crazy chuckle you do when you’re freaking out. “Oh, haha, I Twitter too. Yeah.”

IN FACT, I narrowly avoided blurting, I WAS TOTALLY TWITTERING ABOUT HOW PISSED OFF I WAS THAT YOU WERE RUNNING LATE AND ALSO PROBABLY HOW ADAM SANDLER IS KIND OF A DOUCHE IN ANGER MANAGEMENT.

Nice, middle-aged doctor was actually really reassuring and sweet. And I totally loved him until he finished and held up a mirror and showed me that “two or three stitches” as explained when I signed the consent form actually meant EIGHT stitches and like eight more on some sub dermal level. Oh. My god. It’s so gross. I’ve never had stitches I can see before and let me tell you, I am now utterly grateful that I can’t see my own vagina without the aid of mirrors and bendiness because if I could see that it looked anything like this shit after childbirth I’d close up shop for good.

They told me to take my time getting up but I had to haul ass to get home and feed the baby.

While I was checking out and stealing skin care samples and making my appointment to get the stitches out and have a laser treatment to avoid the scar turning into what nice, middle-aged doctor described as “a big keloid football,” I remembered that he’d mentioned a prescription for the weird peeling skin I currently have on my palms.

(And no, it’s not from masturbating. My boner is imaginary. Perverts.)

Of course Really Hot Male Nurse was there. “Oh—I need to get a prescription and he forgot.”

He whisked off to the back of the office, where I heard the doctor say, “She doesn’t need a prescription.” (For pain medication, he meant. Since we’d established that I’d have to deal with it with Tylenol what with the breastfeeding.)

“For the fungus,” I mumbled.

“What?” the receptionist asked.

“For the FUNGUS,” I said.

Really Hot Male Nurse glanced down the hall at me.

“I NEED THE PRESCRIPTION FOR MY FUNGUS,” I called out.

Nice, middle-aged doctor came bustling down the hall.

“I was trying not to yell fungus,” I said. “But that didn’t really work out in my favor. Yay!” (I was still pretty woozy.) “I have a hand fungus everyone!”

“You’re not alone,” the receptionist murmured.

(What does that even mean?)

So, I have a crazy-ass wound thing, a bunch of skin care samples in my purse, two new mole-holes, and an appointment with a laser. In conclusion: Wear sunscreen. Or, if you’re like me and you have a “genetic predisposition for weird moles” you’re just fucked. Sorry!

(True Story: The whole time I kept thinking to myself, "fucking Dooce.")