The end of the day finds me rather calm considering my new experience at a doctor’s office. My wife finally beat me down to make an appointment with a dermatologist to check out a bunch of spots on my skin. My skin’s brown and I have many freckles. Or, I should say freckle-looking spots. Some of them are like little trojan freckles that could really be skin cancer.
I’ve been to this doctor’s office before and he’s a nice guy. It’s a stand alone building that’s rather modern. I got there at 1pm and the door was locked. I walked around to the front and the nurse was unlocking the front door after coming back from lunch. So I’m the only patient in the waiting room. I filled out my paper work and waited while listening to classical music. Very relaxing.
I opened my magic device -Kindle- and they called me back. It’s my magic device because that last two times I’ve taken it to doctor’s offices expecting to read while I wait forever, I’ve ending up waiting about 10 minutes. It’s magic.
The doctor comes in my room and I read out my skin dot list and he inspects them like cities on a road map.
“Right ear”.
“It’s nothing”, after he takes a look.
“Left eyelid”.
“Nothing, but I’ll remove it”.
“Left thigh”.
“I’ll take that off and we’ll test it but it looks like nothing”.
All the other spots are nothing.
He tells me to lay back and places a very cold pad against the spot on my calf. Then the nurse comes in and is down there with the doctor and hands him something attached to the wall. It’s starts making a noise, I don’t feel anything but pressure so I’m not worried. But the room smelled horrible. He’s talking to me about his wife and I’m responding about my wife. Just some regular guy chit chat. He leaves and the nurse slaps a band aid on me. I told her it didn’t hurt too much but then I asked her what that smell was. She kind of laughed and said “that’s your burnt flesh!” and left the room.
All of the sudden, this calm, pleasant doctors office quickly morphed into a modern day torture chamber. They lured me in there with their niceness and burned my leg and are laughing about it!
It was an absolute repugnant smell. I wish she would have lied and told me it was the hair on my leg or maybe even imply it was the doc, “he always smells like that after lunch”. I did not want to add burnt flesh to the things I have smelt in my life. My smell innocence was violated.
He came back in to freeze the spot off my eye. I was already a little shaken and now he’s going to do something to my eye. So he takes his Q-tip and puts liquid nitrogen on it and sticks it to my eyelid three or four times. I’m being very still as I didn’t want a frozen cornea. He’s a very calm, soft spoken doctor so I relaxed a little. Then he was done and told me to come back next year.
As I drove away I felt like I escaped more horrible things. I almost pulled into traffic without stopping. The transition back to life was a little weird. It was like going to a slaughter house for a few hours to see how cows are processed and then going to take care of children in a Sunday school class.
Now I’m off to take my son to soccer. Everything will smell like my burnt flesh. Gross.
After I Think About It... 