I'm more broken than you

[cranefly]

Wishing you well, Yeti.  Hoping they don't have to remove too much fur.

[Drunk Monk]

If you would like to go under the knife, we can make that happen.

Already under the gun, thanks.

Hope the joint cleaning goes well.  Let us know.

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

So far, so good -- thanks!

They did have to shave my knee.

[Drunk Monk]

Shaved Yeti has got to be a euphemism for something.  Something really nasty.

Heal strong, brother!

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

A shaved yeti = lack of dignity.

A "Yeti-Shaver" sounds like the lowest of the low in the sideshow (one step below "geek")

[Greg]

Sounds like a discount fare to Nepal.

[cranefly]

At one time this was a web-based game; unfortunately, it appears to now be extinct -- unlike the Yeti.
http://www.eso-garden.com/index.php?/weblog/C5/P90/

[cranefly]

So I'm at the ophthalmologist at Kaiser, and for some reason I don't run into Greg.  My ophthalmologist is Vietnamese, slender, pretty, which doesn't mean a damned thing in doctorland, you just want someone competent.

But I like her, she's got a great sense of humor, always cheerful, engaging.  So it's a fun banter as she inspects the stubborn stye in the inner soft tissue of my eyelid, which rubs against the white of my eye and just refuses to drain even after two months.

And then I give an answer to one of her questions and her demeanor completely changes.  You know, from chatty and joking to a serious look, gears turning inside her head, reviewing everything I've told her, looking over her notes.  And that's rather unsettling.  What she asked was, "You've never had any cancer, have you?"  To which I told her of the basal cell carcinoma removed from the top of my head some 10 to 15 years ago.  So she re-examines the stye, asks me more questions, and I ask one myself: "Can you get a basal cell carcinoma in this location?"  Her response is, "Well, yeah!"  Silly me, wanting to partition the body up in some simplistic fashion, labeling the eyelid as part of the eye, not the body.  But the eyelid is skin.

She tells me it doesn't look like basal cell, and it hasn't been bleeding, so it's very likely just a stubborn stye that may never completely go away.  Like a blemish? I ask.  Yes, like a blemish.

She gives me various options, one of which is to cut it out and biopsy it, but I opt to just monitor it  -- which seems to be her thoughts.

And so it goes, yet another blemish in the land of aging.  Eventually I'll become just one big blemish on the face of the Earth, hopefully big enough to be detectable by alien civilizations.

[Greg]

We looked for you. I mean, we were in ophthalmology,too. Next time, I'll look harder.

My mother's issue was a dry eye and an over-cautious nurse for a daughter.

[Drunk Monk]

My mom has dry eyes.  She has to take a daily med, twice a day, and sit with an eye pillow over her eyes for a few minutes while it takes effect.  Every time she does it, she asks me if other people get dry eyes, if I've ever heard of it, or how everyone else in her senior circle seems to have it.  

I once had a skin tag removed from my eyelid. The doc asked me if I wanted anesthetic, but convinced me that administering that might be more painful than just letting him cut it.  So he cut it.  Feckin hurt.  He was not a pretty Vietnamese ophthalmologist.  He was a handsome Indian ophthalmologist.  Back in my AFS daze, I caught a metal splinter in my eye.  The ER doc flicked it out with a hypo needle.  She was stunningly beautiful and her image is burned into the back of my retina - so surreal - and I did opt for anesthesia on that one.  

Eye issues suck.

[Greg]

I'm self-diagnosing myself with a shingle. Not shingles, per se. Just one. On the right send of my back near the shoulder blade. There is this big itchy red spot on my back and it feels like somebody punched me really hard back there.

I've had shingles before. But that was almost thirty years ago. It could be psychosomatic. There was a lot of Shingle talk while I was in the Bay Area and a friend of my father's is suffering the full shingles over in Ireland at the moment. 

Either way, it feels not good. 

The Queen said something about doctors. Go figure.

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

It's probably a tumor.

[Drunk Monk]

I'm self-diagnosing myself with a shingle. Not shingles, per se. Just one. On the right send of my back near the shoulder blade. There is this big itchy red spot on my back and it feels like somebody punched me really hard back there.

The return of Bartholomew-Sargasso?

I had my doc friends look at the odd skin spot on my inner left calf. No, my tea tree oil treatment did nothing for it in the end. One said to get a biopsy.

[Greg]

I rubbed some dirt on it. That seems to be helping.

Bartholomew-Sargasso is always with me. He doesn't leave.

[Drunk Monk]

My odd inner left calf skin spot has been formally diagnosed as eczema. Dr Boyle (yes, that’s really the name of my skin doc - and she’s got lovely skin, quite stunning really) diagnosed it via email. I’m now some otc lotions 2x daily and can NOT scratch. 

At least my doc friend that said get a biopsy was being overly dramatic. She just got her MD this year so perhaps she’s overly cautious.