A different kind of injury.
I apologise in advance. This is a long and boring post. If you’re looking for action you may want to skip this post.
As a kid I spent a lot of time swimming and being outdoors, there being nothing good on TV in the olden days. I remember being very sunburned often. It was hilarious slapping each other on the back and squealing with pain.
Just short of my 40th birthday, I woke up one morning and thought I had a blind pimple underneath the end of my nose a little to the right near the edge of the nostril. I tried to squeeze it but nothing happened except that it hurt a lot. Give it a day or two I thought. A couple of days later still no joy.
About a month later I got around to going to the doctor. By this time it has developed into a little pimple like crater that wouldn't go away. He gives me some anti-biotic for skin infections and asks me to check back in a month. A month later it’s still there. He sends me for a biopsy. Lunatic dressed in a Nurses uniform gives me a nose piercing. Unpleasant!
It turns out I have a basal cell carcinoma (BCC). I was lucky, these are the most benign of skin cancers and people rarely die if treated. Comparatively I knew of a lady that woke up one morning with a sore toe and a tiny black dot under her toenail. The tiny black dot was a melanoma and three months later she was dead.
I digress. The treatment decided for my BCC was a surgery (that I can’t remember the name of); where they remove a superficial (as in on the surface) cancer by taking 1/16” slices from the cancerous area. They then take the slice to the lab and do a test for cancerous cells. If they find any on the top surface they need to take another slice. I was conscious, sedated, and under local anaesthetic for the procedure. The first slice was OK. I was fully wacked of a magic pill they had given me and the local was working well. I was optimistic. I was disappointed to have to go in for a second slice an hour later. The second slice was much worse than the first. The anaesthetic was losing its effectiveness and the pill had sent me from happy go lucky daze to nauseous and depressed. When they came for the fourth slice I was in tears. They took grafts from my ears to rebuild my nose. There is nothing as deafening as the sound of a scalpel sawing cartilage off your ear. I try to suppress the memory of that hellish day and live in dread of it happening again.
The moral of my story is that this is a really crappy injury to suffer, and an even worse one to die from. Go and get a scan, regularly, you owe it to your loved ones. Speaking of which make sure your kids are Sun-Smart. What could have been a deadly injury to me was probably inflicted when I was a child. I get scanned all the time now, because the greatest predictor for cancer is cancer. At the moment it’s a dead heat between the smokes, the sun, and the ropes to see what’ll get me. As long as it stays a dead heat and I’m a careful climber I should be fine.
Please take care Y'all