Visited the dermatologist yesterday and he found three potential new basal cell carcinoma lesions. If confirmed by the biopsy results, that would make five in the last eleven months. I expected that the spot just over my right eyebrow was a problem, and I half-expected that the thing on my neck could be an issue, but I wasn’t expecting him to biopsy the supposedly innocuous “sebaceous hyperplasia” spot on the bridge of my nose. As usual, Happiness = Reality – Expectations, and so worries about disfiguring surgery scenarios took over my mind for several hours and took me on an unpleasant journey through a dark jungle of fruitless catastrophizing and ill-advised google searches.
Speaking of jungles, I stayed up watching the Werner Herzog documentary Wings of Hope, the story of how a 17-year-old girl, Juliane Koepcke, survived a two-mile fall through the sky after being ejected from an airplane, then survived a ten-day journey through the Peruvian jungle before being rescued by locals. A truly amazing story that I had never gotten wind of before. Incredible. If she could survive all that, I should be able to get through this skin cancer situation. I was told by the surgeon who carved up my forehead last summer that I should expect to see him and his scalpel again. I was hoping it wouldn’t be so soon, hoping his future scalpel exploits would at least spare my nose, as a wound there (if comparable to the two inflicted on my forehead) will no doubt define my appearance, for several months at least, to all who gaze upon me.
Hope is the province of the helpless, those of us who can do nothing about it, those of us in need of rescue or a lucky break. There is hope, then there is acceptance of whatever happens. In any event, we must keep heading downstream.
Juliane Koepcke: How I survived a plane crash
