The Pecan Park Eagle

Chinatown (1974)

Chinatown II (2014)

Today didn’t start well. I set my alarm for six to make sure I’d be on time for my eight o’clock appointment for day surgery with the skin cancer doctor, but I awoke at five and was already downstairs slugging down a cup of of hot tea when it dawned on me in the dark that I had forgotten to shut off the now pointless alarm. But being the good guy that I am, and not wanting to awaken anyone else, I went back upstairs just to turn the dad-gum thing off. – I hate it when that sort of thing happens.

Leaving the house about 7:30, I could see that we were in for a cold, grey, windy day – the kind of day that makes you think the City of Houston forgot to pay their technicolor bill to that big climate manager in the sky. If it were January or February, the chalky grey skies would make sense. We sometimes never see the sun at all in either of those two months, but this is friggin’ November for gosh sakes. The golfers and other sun worshipers in this town aren’t going like this weather for sure.

As for me, I no longer care. I grew up playing ball in the sweaty hot sun of Houston springs and summers in the belief that the sun was good for me – my best pal, so to speak. And all of those new beach seasons in Galveston were the time and place for good fun and falling in love, but we all had to pay the entrance fee to dance and swim in that little paradise – and that gate tab was sunburn on the first time or two out there. After that, we got to peel away the dead fair skin outer layer and start tanning the natural way. “Be Brown and Get Around” could have been our tee shirt anthem back in the day – if we had been hip to the quick literacy of clothing and tattoo slogans back in the 1950s. – We just didn’t have time to be hip in 1957. We were too busy being cool – and bopping the night away as the Duke and Duchess of Earl. That worked for us.

For us, the children of the 50s, phones were just something that plugged into the wall of all our homes that we had to fight or trick our parents into using. We saw no need for phones once we were out and about and away from parental control. We had no need to call others who weren’t with us – because we hung out with the person or persons that we enjoyed. – Sure, we had stuff come up, social stuff that we had to work out, but we had no concept of polling people (our friends?) from all over the world on how to work out a social problem. We either came up with our own answers and moved on – or else, we kept repeating the same mistakes until we became willing to see our pattern and learn from it.

But I digress. – Today I was going to the skin cancer doctor to have my second recent skin cancer surgery performed, with another one probable before the year ends. For the past 19 years, since my first botched nose surgery for a basal cell cancer, I’ve just been one of the millions who now pays for not knowing the dangers of the sun while I was younger.

Today was a doozy! I was there from 8 o’clock in the morning until 1 o’clock in the afternoon. Attacking another basal cell in my nose all this time, the doctor kept calling me back to go back under the anesthetic so he could get a little more of the cancer that had gone deeper. Each time he did an excavation, I had to await the lab analyses that kept coming back “needs a little more digging” after more anesthetic needle shots in the nose to deaden the pain after it inflicted a brief piercing pain of its own.

When we finally went back for the fourth and final dig on this well, I couldn’t resist laying an impatient comment on my surgeon that pretty much summed up the mystery in my own mind as to why this whole process required all these baby step digs.

“You know, Doc, I do appreciate what you are doing” I said, “but, if you were able to perform surgery the way I dip ice cream, we could have been out of here hours ago.

“How so?” The doctor asked. (I couldn’t believe he had to ask and then lob the ball back to me for an explanation.)

“Simple enough, Doc,” I said. “You see, when I dip ice cream, I always scoop up a little more than I know I need.”

Well, Mr. Smart Aleck me got his answer when the fourth medical scoop got all the cancer that could be found. Now I have to go back next Tuesday for a skin graft to the nose because of all the tissue my doctor was forced to remove in pursuit of the spreading malignancy in four digs. If that first lesser excavation had been enough, they could have just sutured me up – and I’d have been good to go. My dermatologist didn’t take any short cuts. He was trying to get all the cancer in a way that might have spared me the procedure that now will be necessary.

Now I appreciably know the difference between dipping ice cream and excavating skin cancer from the nose – and I respect my surgeon all the more.

I still walked out of there at 1 PM today feeling like an older Jack Nicholson getting ready for a sequel to the forty-year old movie classic, “Chinatown.”

Friends, please watch those little blood spots that come and go in the same locations on your body. They are especially prevalent on the face. Anyone who has lived much of their lives in the sun also needs to see a dermatologist at some point – and don’t dismiss it because there’s no pain, – Getting cancer is painless, but skin cancers are one of the most controllable families of cancer if you catch them before they spread. And know this too – these lesions do not simply appear on parts of the skin that have been exposed to the sun normally. They can also appear on those parts of the body that are usually clothed and never seen directly by you, except in a mirror, if at all. That fact alone is worth a medical evaluation.