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Honolulu Lite
MY face generally looks like four miles of bad road, thanks to the various nicks, bumps and scars resulting from running warfare with two brothers while growing up. Face it,
skin cancer’s a
fact of life hereThere's even a knot on my forehead from my kindergarten days, of all things. That one I can't blame on my brothers. We were living in Morocco and I took the quick way down from a slide. The school had thoughtfully put the slide on a cement slab so I managed to land on my head in the only place in the Sahara Desert without any sand.
But my face this week looks worse than usual, as if I had been beaten up. There are several little scabby areas where the skin doctor burned off some pre-cancerous thingies (not the scientific name). It's been two days since the procedure and it looks worse now than ever. So I decided to stay home so I wouldn't have to keep explaining to people that I didn't get mugged.
I decided to go to the dermatologist after U.S. Sen. John McCain announced he had skin cancer on his face and had to go under the knife. They caught it early enough, before it could spread, but they could have caught it sooner, before it actually developed into cancer.
I'm religious about my health, being a devout hypochondriac, so I immediately made an appointment to have a complete skin scan. I had had one several years ago and I remember it was a great experience. I was a lot heavier in those days but the doctor said I looked marvelous. That was because she was a skin doctor and she didn't care how much skin I had, as long as it was in good shape.
THE doctor the other day found several pre-cancerous spots about the size of a pea on my face and one on my shoulder. They were areas damaged from the sun but not a major worry if caught at this point. The treatment is simply to freeze the patches with some sort of a dry ice concoction that shoots out of an aerosol can. It feels exactly like part of your face is being frozen, which means it burns a bit. But only for a second. Then it thaws out and you feel like part of your face has just been frozen and is thawing out. The whole procedure takes about 5 minutes. Later, the freezer burn marks turn red. In a day they start scabbing up.
The damage probably had been caused years ago, before the age of sunblock creams. Back in high school, the only thing we had to prevent sunburn on our faces while surfing was zinc oxide, an opaque white cream that made you look like a dork. So we didn't wear it much. As a result, our noses burned so bad that they peeled down to the raw, red underskin. And then that burned, too. It was extremely stupid of us to burn ourselves like that, but we were young and had cornered the market on stupidity.
Now we are paying the price. The doctor said this kind of skin damage, with these little pre-cancerous thingies (my word, not his) are extremely common in Hawaii because of the constant sun exposure. They are a particular problem when stupidity creeps into middle age and you don't go to get your skin checked. But if you are (or were) in the sun a lot, you should get your skin checked annually regardless of age. Skin cancer can quickly spread and become fatal, which we all can agree is a bummer.
So, this is my public service announcement for the week: Don't be a jerk, wear sunscreen and go get your skin checked. What's a few scabs among friends?
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
or send E-mail to cmemminger@starbulletin.com.
The Honolulu Lite online archive is at:
https://archives.starbulletin.com/lite