There’s a lady in this world who has repeatedly saved my life. I’m not talking about my wife, my mother, my daughter or my granddaughter who are all a very large part of my world or various girlfriends (numbers 1, 2 and 3 in particular – christened thusly by the child bride in fact, and girlfriends of the purely platonic type I might add). I’m not talking about a religious icon or a sporting legend or a racehorse, none of whom/which have risen to sufficient heights of achievement to even raise my heart rate. To be fair though, if Monica Bellucci could play rugby, she’d be up there.
No, I’m talking about my dermatologist. I visited her again yesterday and left with a bloodied right leg, a bloodied left hand and a slightly bloody left arm. But first we have to backtrack a little. Actually, I wish it was a little but it’s actually a lot. I was born in the UK some decades back and it was immediately obvious that there is Viking in my ancestry – my red hair and fair complexion are dead (if you’ll pardon the expression) giveaways. Many years later this particular heritage also manifested itself via Dupuytren’s Contracture which is sometimes called Viking’s Disease amongst other things. Another lady specialist who fixed this up for me only saved my left hand from becoming a permanent heavy metal horns symbol and thereby preserving my (marginal) ability to play the guitar. But Mr Dupuytren’s another story. Back to my skin.
Leaving the UK to live in Australia when I was eight was a blessing in disguise (which my mother still hasn’t seen through) from every angle except for, in my case, the sun. Don’t get me wrong – I love the sun, not least for the fact that it keeps us alive and will continue to do so for another 4 billion years give or take unless the most recent 12 year time frame for irreversible climatic catastrophe and atmospheric mayhem predicted by the IPCC and supported by those doyens of atmospheric physics, left wing journalists and humanities students, comes to pass. All of the others haven’t so their odds of getting it right are increasing even if temperatures and sea levels aren’t moving other than by utterly normal fluctuations. The sun is only my enemy when I expose my extremely combustible skin to it which makes me sound rather vampirish. Thankfully that particular quirk of my genome hasn’t kicked in yet because I prefer sleeping at night rather than swooping on unsuspecting bare necked tottie.
As kids we weren’t aware of the long term effects of extended sun exposure so we grimaced through the sunburn, peeled off the dead skin, took our shirts off and did it all again. It’s not my fault if in neighbourhood football games I was always picked on the “skins” team and never the “shirts”. I still remember lying face down on a bed in my mother’s aunt’s ramshackle house in the then sleepy village of Byron Bay, with blisters all over my back and a plague of insects swarming through the house. The next day we had to tie my mother to a tree to stop her hitchhiking to Brisbane Airport to escape from this Stephen King nightmare and back to the civilisation of Timperley, Cheshire, England.
I survived however but just as the Soviets supposedly planted sleeper cells in the US during the cold war, I had my own sleeper cells which decades later have been waking up. And this is where my life-saver lady comes in. She wasn’t the first to stick a scalpel into me but certainly the most frequent over recent years. After my GP at the time tired of squirting liquid nitrogen at various blemishes on my person, he referred me to a specialist dermatologist who soon after went off to do research and gave me to an associate, the aforementioned lady. I have been to see her many times over many years and I never escape from her surgery unscathed. She is always scraping, digging or cutting, hence the reference to bloodied appendages, above. I’m a bleeder, what can I say.
Occasionally, if the cutting part is a bit tricky, she’ll send me to a plastic surgeon. Here was me thinking plastic surgeons were only there to straighten actress’s noses or make their tits bigger. But no. One did a job on me that required a degree in ear lobe origami. Another did a much more basic job on my back that left a 50mm scar. This and other rather smaller scars randomly scattered over my torso and appendages proved quite an attraction for one of the theatre nurses. The conversation went something like this:
Nurse – Another scar eh?
Me – Yeah, looks like it. Still it won’t be lonely.
Nurse – No but there’s nothing wrong with a few scars.
Me – Come again?
Nurse – Yeah, scars are sexy. Girls like a few scars on a bloke.
Me – Doctor, can we get moving here.
The point is, had those sleeper cells been allowed to wake up, scratch their balls, have a few beers and generally hung out, they would have eventually morphed into something infinitely uglier and much more dangerous. So the trick is to eliminate the cancerous bastards before they even know their short life’s objective which it to make my life shorter. And my guardian angel has been doing just that for years now. Had I adopted the same attitude as a number of people I’ve known or known about who couldn’t really have cared less until it was too late, I’d be a footnote in history.
The good news is that after reaching peak extraction a few years ago, we’re now down to the residuals. Anything that looks ever so slightly suspicious is ruthlessly dispatched to the pathology lab minus its previous mode of transport i.e. me. Three monthly checkups inevitably resulted in surgical follow-up. But eventually three months became six and yesterday I was told we are almost at the twelve month stage. She’s a lovely young lady to whom I literally owe my life and while I would like to think there will come a time when I don’t have to see her again, there won’t.