07-18-2017, 08:30 AM
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.
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.