1/15/05--A visit to the doctor--postscript

So yesterday, I ventured with my lovely bride to the doctors office.  As in....the dermatologist.  Now mind you, the last time I had gone to the dermatologist was when I was like 16 years old because of the dreaded.....acne.  A couple of months of tetracyclin and I was done with the skin doctor.  A few months ago I noticed that I had something on the side of my nose, up around my left eye.  At first, I was thinking that I was WAY too old to be getting a zit but the darn thing just wouldn't go away and gradually started getting bigger.  Well, the wife goes about once per year to the skin doctor cause of the whole freckles thing--ya know, wanting to make sure she doesn't have one there that's not really a freckle--so she told me that I should go with her. 
First of all....if I come back and have a 2nd life, I'm coming back as a dermatologist.
What a racket.  The guy we saw, not that he wasn't very nice and totally professional, but....he shared an office with like 10 or 12 other doctors.  They have like 15 to 20 patient rooms at the location we were at, and a lobby filled with patients.  And then you notice on the receipt--they have like 8 other locations all over the tri-county area.  Do you know what sort of cash these people have to be pulling in?  Holy crap.  We were in the office for all of 20 minutes, the guy did about 5 procedures, and Kim told me that if we didn't have insurance it would've cost us about $1,100.  20 minutes work--$1,100.  Dad was right.  I should've taken school more seriously.
Anyway, so we're back in the patient room and they're looking at every freckle that Kim has with intense focus, and then ask me why I'm there.  I point to my, um....blemish.  The doctor walks in, asks why I'm there, I point and he says:
"Oh yes!  That's not a problem."

I told him that in the top 10 things you don't want to hear from your doctor, # 1 is:

"I've never seen anything like that in my entire life."

So he tells me that I have a lovely cyst, and then procedes to drain it and then lop it off.  And yes, it felt just wonderful.  He asked me if it hurt and I told him that it didn't, but that I shouldn't have any problem with nasal congestion the rest of the day.  Then he asks me if I wanted him to look at anything else...now mind you, I really had only come about the cyst but I figured what the hell, ya know, I'm here.
So I take off the shirt, slight fainting spell by the nurse, and their giving me the old once over lightly....and then I hear:

"Hmmm."

That's not something you want to hear from a doctor.   "Hmmm".

Hmmm?  What does "hmmm" mean?  Oh nothing, he says.  Probably nothing.
"Probably" nothing doesn't mean nothing.  So he says I've got a mole, or a beauty mark (not that I would be surprised by that--ahem) and that he's going to take it.
How the hell do I have a weird looking mole?  I NEVER go out into the sun.
Geez, I'm as Irish looking as you can get!  So then of course the doctor's assistant goes about telling me how this is all no big deal, that they just want to check it out, ya know--"better safe than sorry".  Yeah, now in the meantime I'm going to be all paranoid.
But the point is....I wouldn't have even had him look at my back if it hadn't been suggested for me.  You can't ever be too sure....if you go out into the sun on a regular basis--get that shit checked out.  The good news is that I got the cyst off of my nose so I don't look like the only 43 yr old with an acne problem.  So, ya know, I got that going for me.

Later,
Jeff