SPF Alert

 

There we sat – the sleepy, the marred, the (mostly) old – in the waiting room.

In spite of years of being in my classroom before 7:00 a.m., my skills at being anywhere by 8 in the morning are severely diminished.

Per pre-visit instructions, we all had our “go” bags filled with snacks, water, and reading material. If the waiting room had suddenly detached from the building and jettisoned to sea, we’d have been fine. We’d been warned to come prepared for a 4 to 6 hour wait.

One by one we were called in, and one by one we eventually each returned - one with a fat white bandage above her lip, another with a fat dressing near his ear, and then me, with my own 3" x 4" trophy right above the V of my collarbone. We settled in for the long haul of waiting.

Meanwhile, in a lab somewhere in the building, a pathologist pored over slides of our offerings and determined if we were good to go, or if one more section was needed.

Given the common age group, we were all obviously products of ABS, the Age Before Sunscreen. Regardless of Coppertone and Sea and Ski products, we’d all had too much sun in our youth, possibly with the added bonus like mine of a family tree solely rooted in the UK, where the melanin is thin and spotty.

How my doctor saw my tiny basal cell is beyond me with the forest of freckles, moles, and age spots that blanket my skin. Try as I might, I was never able to see it, even after the surgeon drew a circle around it and handed me a mirror.

It all went well, though. I finished two crosswords, made inroads into my book, updated my email, and put a dent in my snacks. Now I just need to deal with this itchy bandage for the next two days, after which I hope to hit the store for a more subtle Band-Aid.