Just like a Slattery

It was cancerette, really, just a tiny thing, just under my nose.

It looked like a drop of lotion I hadn’t rubbed in well, about as big as a sesame seed.

Don’t stop me if I’ve already told you this story, because it’s important. And mildly amusing.

This is how I found out I had it: I pucker when I think, so I had these two vertical lines over my upper lip, which make me look both old and like a 4-pack-a-day-smoker. Because I am very much with the lipstick, I am quite vain about such things, so I scheduled myself for just a tiny bit of cosmetic lasering to get rid of those two little lines. And also that little spot, since I was there anyway.

But the spot didn’t go away. I asked the woman who waxes my brows if she could  get rid of it with one of those sharp aesthetician tools,  and she said nope, it was a dermatologist thing.

That thing had been bugging the hell out of me for over a year. My former dermatologist hadn’t noticed, when I had my skin check, though she did biopsy a number of other things, the result of which was I found out I’m allergic to band-aid adhesive, of all things, and spent weeks covered in duct tape patches.

My new dermatologist who I went to for other reasons I won’t go into (but I do not have leprosy or MRSA) hadn’t noticed it when I had my skin check with her, either.

So back I went and said, “Listen, Chhavi, I don’t know what this thing is, but I want it gone.” She asked if it hurt or oozed or anything like that, and I said, “Well, no, but it’s got it’s own circulatory system and it irks me. I have put pure Retinol on it and had it lasered and I’m about to take my Xacto knife to it.”

She said there’d be a minuscule scar and that she’d have to biopsy it. I didn’t care about that, either, as long as she cut it off.

I was not aware before she did all that that the nurse would be sending a syringe full of hellfire into my upper lip, and it’s a good thing, because I would have said nevermind. As it is, when she did it, I grabbed her wrist and asked her who she thought was.

But Chhavi came back in and sliced it off and put some paper tape on it, which I will tell you is about as effective as covering it with a post-it note. Then she said it looked like a clogged oil gland to her, but she’d call me in a week and tell me for sure.

Now. You might be aware that people from other cultures have different ways. People from some countries tend to be more…direct in their manner of speaking. Or maybe it’s just that most of the people I know would die before they’d just blurt out bad news.

The next Wednesday, Chhavi called and said, “Susan, it’s Chhavi. That thing on your face is CANCER.”

I replied, “I need to find me somewhere to sit down. I thought you said I had cancer.”

Hilariously, she said, “You do. You have cancer. On your face. It’s right there UNDER YOUR NOSE. Cancer. It’s not a clogged oil gland.”

It seemed as though my head was an empty oil can, because cancer kept reverberating in there, bouncing off the walls of my skull:

cancercancercancercancercancercancer

I finally had the presence of mind to ask what kind of cancer? and it was basal cell carcinoma, which is, as I said, cancerette.

Nonetheless, I told her I’d be there in five minutes to just get this taken care of.

There was a stunned silence before she said, “Oh, no. I can’t take that off, I’m not a surgeon. His nurse will call you.”

Naturally this was not expedient enough, being as I had cancer on my face and all, so I called him, whereby they gave me an appointment two weeks out. That wasn’t fast enough either, but HIPAA laws prevented them giving me their patient list and letting me negotiate something sooner.

Basal cell carcinoma is not usually life threatening, but it can be severely disfiguring. I can’t even leave two invisible wrinkles over my lip, let alone have my nostril chiseled at.

I finally saw the surgeon, and I swear he was 14. He informed me he’s the best, though, and that I would enjoy the Moh’s Procedure. I asked him was this his first time operating.

Here is another thing I will tell you: Surgery is not for enjoying.

These are some things that happened in the subsequent days:

1. More and bigger needles through my lip and into my mouth, through my cheek and into my sinus, through my lip and into my nose.
2. A perfectly round hole the diameter and depth of a button on a man’s dress shirt. I could very nearly see my teeth through it.
3. Cauterization of same. There is nothing like the smell of your own burning flesh to send you into rapid decline.
4. More injections in a larger radius, “just in case.”
5. Yards of paper tape on my face, to resemble a potato skin.
6. Inability to keep paper tape on my face for the required two days, due to non-waterproof qualities.
7. Need to go to a foreign-run medical supply store and request item I have previously only known as “titty tape.”
8. Urgent need to fill Lortab prescription, which I swore I would not need, for burning, searing pain radiating outward from wound.
9. Return trip to doctor to find I am allergic to polysporin and sensitive stitches which must remain in face.
10. Eventual removal of stitches, which were embedded underneath swollen flesh, requiring not one but FOUR nurses, and the surgeon, who I requested the presence of just so I could give him the stinkeye.

I am fortunate that it was just basal cell carcinoma. It could have been far worse. It could have been malignant melanoma, which is a bastard.

I know that browned fat looks better than pink fat (witness the raw pork chop). I know that it feels gooooood to be out in the sun. I know that your clothes look better with a tan.

I know you think if you get a base tan, you’ll be safe. I know you think if you’re black or Jewish or Mediterranean or whatever, you can’t get skin cancer. I know you think getting in a tanning bed is safe.

Here are a few facts from the Skin Cancer Foundation to disabuse you of those notions:

1. One person dies of melanoma every hour (every 62 minutes).
2. Melanoma is the most common form of cancer for young adults 25-29 years old and the second most common form of cancer for young people 15-29 years old.
3. The survival rate for patients whose melanoma is detected early, before the tumor has penetrated the skin, is about 99 percent.  The survival rate falls to 15 percent for those with advanced disease.
4. Women aged 39 and under have a higher probability of developing melanoma than any other cancer except breast cancer.
5. One or more blistering sunburns in childhood or adolescence more than double a person’s chances of developing melanoma later in life.
6. A person’s risk for melanoma doubles if he or she has had more than five sunburns at any age.
7. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, an affiliate of the World Health Organization, includes ultraviolet (UV) tanning devices in its Group 1, a list of the most dangerous cancer-causing substances.Group 1 also includes agents such as plutonium, cigarettes, and solar UV radiation.
8. Frequent tanners using new high-pressure sunlamps may receive as much as 12 times the annual UVA dose compared to the dose they receive from sun exposure.
9. Indoor ultraviolet (UV) tanners are 74 percent more likely to develop melanoma than those who have never tanned indoors.
10. While melanoma is uncommon in African Americans, Latinos, and Asians, it is frequently fatal for these populations.

If this has whipped you up into a frenzy, then great. Go here and watch this video.

I pride myself on not being a nag. But I will hound you over this. You don’t have to die of melanoma. Get your skin checked annually. Check your own skin. Wear sunscreen. Stay out of tanning beds. Melanoma is a stupid reason to die.

I haven’t finished painting the cabinets. They need another coat.

I don’t even have a good excuse, particularly.

I mean, I had to housesit the weekend after I put the first coat on, but it’s not like I was housesitting on the moon.

And then I had the week-long migraine, but I played tennis for 12 years before I ever missed a match because I had a migraine.

So I could have been painting.

I’m just sorry.

I’m going to have to get on the stick and do it this weekend, though, because the children are coming for Independence Day for hotdogs and whatever you have for Independence Day before going to Decatur for the fireworks.

Calling them “the children” makes me sound desperately elderly, like they’re my children, which they are not, or my grandchildren, which they definitely are not, as I am a mere petal, too young for grandchildren. Also, there will be actual grandparents here.

The children I’m referring to are actual children, my timeshare children, who will be bringing their parents. Which makes it sound like I suffer the parents to get to the children.

It’s a little tradition we started last year, since I live close to the train station, and we don’t have to fight for parking spots in Downtown Decatur and lug in cooler kits and blankets and all.

But anyway.

Instead we all come here and them as what can stand the heat play in the yard, and everybody else stays inside, where it’ll be no hotter than 71 degrees (see petal, above). There will be friends and food and non-stop talking.

Independence Day. I’m looking forward to it.

Today we are going to have a lesson in placing phone calls.

Here are a few things we don’t say when the person at the other end answers the phone:

1. Who is this?

2. How you doing today?

3. Where is Herman/Gertrude/Anastasia?

4. Let me speak to the manager (please optional).

When we call someone, we are intruding, just as surely as if we walk into their bedroom while they are in flagranté delicto.

Unless we are calling someone we speak with all the time who we are certain will recognize us by voice, the appropriate greeting after hello is:

Hello. This is Myrtle Beach. May I speak with Six Flags, please?

That’s all. No asking who’s answered the phone, no fake concerns for their health or well-being, no demands regarding the whereabouts of their friends, family, and co-workers, no presumptions that you’re not already speaking with someone important.

And please, before launching into your story about what you just saw walking down the street, ask if they have time right now. They might be busy.

A year or so ago, I had a friend(ish) who was a correspondent to another blog I keep.

Many of his replies and posts were along the lines of people just don’t get me and people don’t like me and I don’t fit in and everything I say pisses somebody off.

These were followed by but they don’t stick around long enough to get to know me.

I do not (and did not) think he wanted to be alone, mostly because he also said things like nobody will have me.

I finally said “Well, maybe it’s you.”

Which went over like something brown and smelly in the punchbowl.

He argued that it could not be him, because he was just being himself – argumentative, sarcastic, dark.

All I said was, “How’s that working out for you?”

He defriended me.

Which kind of made me sad, because I genuinely liked him, and I think he is a good person. I thought I could help. I always think I can help. I am a fool that way.

But the truth, and you’ve heard it before, is that you get more flies with honey. Nobody likes to be around somebody who’s always negative, who’s always argumentative, who thinks nobody likes them, who’s sarcastic and nasty.

I was sitting at my desk, minding my own business, addressing an envelope to some reader who wanted an extra copy. Nothing strenuous or overly taxing, you understand.

And then my head hurt.

It didn’t hurt before that, but then it did.

Sometimes that’s what it’s like to be me.

Nobody’s smoking around me, or wearing strong perfume. I didn’t sleep funny, and I haven’t eaten any chocolate or had aged cheese or a glass of red wine. I didn’t hit my head or change laundry detergent, and my pants aren’t too tight. Sometimes it just happens.

Thanks to modern pharmaceuticals and the best doctors money can get me in to see on a regular basis, it doesn’t happen nearly as often as it used to, but sometimes it does still happen.

I keep a fairly rigid regimen as regards my sleep and eating schedules.  I only have two bulbs in the fluorescent fixtures here in my office, relying mostly only the natural light from the windows. I would dearly love to be able to spend more time outside in the sun, but the heat and pollen might trigger something terrible, so I’m extremely judicious about when I go out there.

I worry about the dulling effects of coffee on my formerly bright white smile, but a cup in the morning seems to help stave off the morning headache, so I have one anyway, and then brush my teeth like I’m cleaning them for the queen to inspect them.

At the first inkling of my headache, I downed four Advil, which is, of course, way more than the bottle advises, because it might stop it in its tracks. If it does, I can take a pass on the one $30 prescription pill + three Aleve for the migraine, followed in an hour by the two other (cheap) prescription pills for the corollary tension headache.

At some point, my liver is just going to start screaming in protest and I won’t be fit company for all the noise.

Meanwhile, I think I’ll rattle on off and find something for lunch.

What I did was I painted my kitchen cabinets.

My kitchen cabinets were fairly new – maybe two years old. I picked them out and ordered them myself, in fact.

But the color was…off.

It wasn’t white and it wasn’t gray and it wasn’t, well, it wasn’t anything I could quite put my finger on.

I was having a hell of time picking a color for the walls that would go with it, and moreover, that would go with the red dining room it spills into, and I’m not willing to change the color of the dining room.

So to hell with it. I painted the very expensive cabinets. I painted them purple. If you want to get all technical about it, I painted them raisin.

Now. You might not believe this, but raisin is more neutral than chalk, or whatever the color of the cabinets was.

I think I’ll paint the walls gilded pear.

In other exciting news, Wednesday will be June 1. The projected temperature for June 1 in the briarpatch is 96 degrees. Allow me to point out that it’s not even really summer yet. Lord have mercy.

Every year, I like to post the story of Curtisene Lloyd, because she is one of my personal heroes. I did not write the following story, Jill Conner Browne did, in her 1999 book, The Sweet Potato Queens Book of Love. We all need to be more like Curtisene. For that matter, we all need to be more like Jill Conner Browne*.

Before Xena, There Was Curtisene

Every word of the story I am about to tell you is true. It is authenticated in court documents.

 Curtisene Lloyd is a mild-mannered, sweet-voiced little Sunday school teach of a lady, middle aged, nurse. She lives with her very old deaf aunt, in a nice house in a little town not far from Jackson, Mississippi, where she works at a large hospital.

 February 1990. Late one night Curtisene awoke to discover a man in her bedroom. And he was definitely not there at her invitation. This intruder advised her of the various and sundry obscene things he planned to do to her before he made up his mind whether or not he would kill her. “I might kill you,” he said, “but I’m gone git me summa dis fust.” And with that he removed all of his clothing and climbed up on the bed. He situated himself on the headboard somehow and began giving Curtisene some rather detailed instructions concerning the performance he expected from her.

Now, Curtisene, she was paying really close attention. She had taken note right off that his guy did not have any sort of weapon with him. And then she did something that never in his worse nightmares had he dreamed she would do. She just reached out and took aholt, and then she commenced to twisting. She got both hands on his merchandise, and she twisted – in opposite directions at the same time with as much force as she could muster.

Apparently it was sufficient. Her attacker beat her about the head and shoulders and struggled frantically to get free of this death grip, but Curtisene was on him like all those time-honored phrases you’ve heard all your life – white on rice, duck on a June bug, and so on.

 So, still holding fast, she drags him, now sniveling and crying through the house, where her little old deaf aunt is sleeping in peaceful oblivion. He’s begging her to let go:

 “Let go and call the po-leece! Just let go!” He’s swearing he’s dying.

“No, you ain’t dying,” she says back to him. “I’m trying to kill you, but you won’t die.”

He promises he’ll leave if only she will, please God, let him go.

“Fine,” she says, “go on then. Leave.”

He’s crying and saying he cain’t and how can he when she won’t let him go?

To which our Curtisene casually replies, “You broke in, didn’t you, sumbitch? Break out!”

He is wailing to beat the band, and she is dragging him to the front door. She tells him there are three locks on that door that he’ll have to open in order to make good his escape. He is pretty much a lifeless heap by now, except for the bawling. She hoists him up to open the first lock. He gets it open and falls back to the floor. “He was starting to wheeze a little by this time,” Curtisene reported.

 He’s crying and saying how much she’s got him suffering, to which she snappily replies, “How ’bout all that suffering you were fixing to put on me?” She tells him he’s got two more locks, if you please. She hoists him up, and he thinks he’s out.

 “Nope. The screen’s latched,” Curtisene tells him.

 And up he goes again. And he’s sure he’s free now. At this point, she later confessed to the jury – in the shyest little voice you ever heard, like she was letting you in on a little secret – “I kinda worked on him a little bit.” Meaning, if it had been possible to twist his genitalia completely off his body, she would have accomplished that feat at the end of her front porch.

 And then she repeated to those assembled her final words to the man: “I’m takin’ you to the end of the porch, and then I’m gon’ go back in the house and get my gun, and I’m gon’ blow your m—–f—–g head off, you slimy, stanking, low-down piece of sh-t, you!” As she repeated those words, clear as a bell, in open court, you could feel, in every living soul in that courtroom, an almost overwhelming desire to stand up and cheer.

 What happened to the rapist wannabe? Well, he limped off through the bushes, but he wasn’t hard for the police to find. Especially since he departed buck nekkid and left all his clothes in her bedroom – with his full name written on the labels inside. He was also pretty easy to spot in the lineup: He was the once who didn’t stand up straight. He may never stand up straight again. And don’t you just know he was a big man in jail, after the truth came out? Little-bitty Sunday school teacher just waxed his ass.

Curtisene Lloyd did not get the standing ovation that her testimony so richly deserved – courtroom decorum and all that – but every single person in the courtroom that day went up to her afterward and said, “Miss Lloyd, I just want to shake your hand.”

*I have personally met Jill Conner Browne, in Jackson, MS, while adventuring there with the lovely and talented Sarrah Ellen McDonald, but that’s another story for another time. I will say, however, that SE can make up a naughty song about you on the fly, so be careful around her.

I had an appointment this morning in a building I could see from my office if there weren’t a billboard in the way.

I gave myself twenty minutes to get there anyway, because contrary to popular opinion, I do try to be on time, and you need time to park and get in and go to the bathroom and what have you.

There were no spots left, but I saw a car with its taillights on, so I pulled behind it and turned on my blinkers.

It was 10:45, so I still had 15 minutes to get parked and get upstairs. It was all good.

I knew the lady was in the car, because I could see the flash of a hand waving periodically.

Five minutes passed, then seven. Cars began queuing up behind me. There was nowhere for me to go. I gently honked my horn. Nothing. She carried on her conversation.

Finally I got out of my car and went and tapped on her window, “Are you finished with your business here?” I asked.

She was quite pleasant, actually. “Yes! Is there really nowhere else to park?”

“Well, no,” I said, “and we’ve all been sitting here ten minutes. There’s a bit of a jam going on.”

She rolled up her window and continued her conversation (naturally) as the other cars started honking their horns, and eventually left.

I made it to my appointment at exactly 11:00 on the dot. Not what I’d hoped for, but not late, either.

But man, I’ve had my eye on some 1978 Better Homes & Gardens that I’ve been wanting to swipe.