Damn Spot

I didn't like the looks of a spot on my forearm, so I photographed it and sent it to my dermatologist. He indeed said he would like to take a look at that, and I should get an appointment. I did. A month and a half out. Well, I'm used to that with Kaiser. I like them a lot but if you want to see a dermatologist or a gynecologist you might be waiting a while. You might have to wait if--as my friend Noah put it--you have a vagina, or skin.

I have both. Neither is in original condition.

I'm assuming my spot is not all that dire or they would have found a way to slide me in earlier. And I'm not particularly worried about it. It's suspicious, but I have this idea, true or no, that no one dies of forearm cancer. Dying of forearm cancer would be weird. Not as weird as that sports photographer who wanted to get the cool inside shot at the dog track and got his head lopped off by the mechanical bunny--that was really weird. Or the fellow buried alive after standing on a stepladder to administer an abruptly effective enema to an elephant. Also weird.

But as long as I have an appointment anyway, I'm going to give him a tour of the neighborhood. He's never been enthusiastic. Maybe he feels short of time. He never wants to see anything but the dot I came in with, and that just bugs me. There's at least half of me I can't even see. I'm only in there every couple years. Why can't he get a bright light and have a look around? It couldn't take that long. I'm only 5'3". I don't care if he has to hold a dainty hankie to his nose, as long as he does it.

Even if I could see it all, I wouldn't necessarily know what I'm looking at. When I met Dave, I discovered he had a set of the most baroque and alarming moles on his back, any one of which looked poised to take him down, but he never did anything about them, and they're still there, only forty years older. What do I know?

I also plan to point out my tick bite. You know, the tick bite I got in March. Still there. That sucker has stamina. I suspect maybe the little bastard left some spare mouth parts in there, and I hope-to-shout he never gets his mouth properly assembled again. Or perhaps the lump is some kind of egg sac, and one night when I least expect it, it's going to rupture and aliens are going to pour out of it like Huns over the steppes of Asia. It does have a sinister Vesuvius look about it. I had a nurse friend look at it, and she wasn't impressed. Well, she's a midwife, actually, but that's the same thing, and she's had to wrap her head around, and in some cases jam her arm all the way up, way worse things than this.

I guess if the good dermatologist is that pressed for time, I can get Dave to flip me over and circle anything suspicious with a Sharpie before I go in. But I don't want to. Three minutes in, he won't be able to stop himself from connecting the dots. This I know.

An Unsupported Argument

It is not enough to sift uncritically through the available medical advice sludging up the internet. One must weigh sources, review data, note controls or lack of controls, and check for ulterior commercial motives, and only then can you make an informed medical decision for yourself based on what you wanted to believe anyway.

So I was excited to read that bras cause cancer. My own relationship with underwear is fraught with woe and this news confirms my worst suspicions. I only wear a bra these days in order to not attract attention, in pretty much a reversal of my strategy as a younger woman. Supposedly the heat generated by a tight brassiere is conducive to cancer cell growth, and cancer cells appreciate a little shaping and support as much as the next cell. The underwire bra in particular is implicated, which doesn't surprise me in the least; the underwire is also responsible for unsightly ridging, occasional irregularity, acid rain, and world strife.  But the main reasons I believe this study has scientific merit are (1) I hate bras and (2) it runs counter to the advice of Miss Olive Pawley.

Mr. Guter

Miss Olive Pawley was the Dean of Girls at Yorktown Senior High School in the sixties. It was a terrible time to be a Dean of Girls. Even a few short years earlier, it had not been considered at all out of line for Mr. Guter, Dean of Boys at Williamsburg Junior High, to deal with the scourge of bangs on boys by butch-waxing the miscreants' heads into a gloppy pompadour in public. Such a move was not considered a fatal blow to self-esteem in those days; in fact, self-esteem had yet to be invented. But later in the decade, those in charge of maintaining order among the young were stripped of all such tools and weapons. Humiliation and coercion were out. Even the title "Dean of Girls" was soon to be abolished in favor of "Suggestress." Not only were girls no longer required to kneel and have their skirt hems inspected for proximity to the floor, but the dress code was done away with altogether. Sartorial anarchy reigned. Patched blue jeans and work shirts prevailed, and bras were out. Everything was out, and some of it was in motion. Miss Olive Pawley was appalled by this development which, she was certain, would ultimately tear down civilization as we know it and replace it with a soul-corrupting licentiousness. She was right about that, but not really on solid footing with the bras.

I was not the type to be called into the Dean of Girls' office, as a rule, but I was summoned there one day so that Miss Pawley could have a go at saving my soul, using the only tools she had left. "I have noticed," she said, "that you are no longer wearing a brassiere, and I want you to be aware of the medical consequences. Studies have shown that the flopping of one's breasts against the thoracic cavity causes cancer."

Which, I knew even then, was ridiculous. Given their location, where else are breasts supposed to flop?

Her real concern, I suspected, was that the flopping of one's breasts against the thoracic cavity causes erections.

Her information had been unreliable in the past. It was she who warned us that the reason our parents did not want us to drive over the line into the District of Columbia was that it was the scene of a thriving "black market in white women." I did not and do not know what she meant by that, although it had enough poetic resonance to stick with me to this day. But I knew the real reason our parents didn't want us driving into D.C. was that we would hit the first liquor store over the line on MacArthur Boulevard where the drinking age was 18 and buy beer by staying in the car and sending in the hairiest boy with the most dependable baritone.

Well, I keep my own counsel. From what I can surmise, sun, bisphenol-A, charred meat, lack of sun, breasts, colons, stress, and bras all cause cancer. Drinking in moderation is beneficial. I'm ditching the bra and doubling down on the beer.

A Cure For Cancer

When I was much younger, I could get really good and sick and not read a thing into it. That's all changed. For instance, a couple months ago I developed a little strain in my front ribcage. On the one to ten pain scale it rated about a .005. Merely by spending my waking hours thinking about it, I got the little strain to show up on the back of the ribcage too, and got the pain level all the way up to .006. I could only feel it when I inhaled deeply. Naturally, I concluded it was cancer. Let other people ignore symptoms until it's too late; I'm going to be proactive.

I got a chest x-ray (normal, but what do they know?) and made an appointment with a doctor, and in the meantime I went to my massage therapist, Maria McLaughlin. She's scary strong, but she uses her powers for good. Still, I almost didn't mention the whole ribcage thing, because I was pretty sure it was cancer, and not part of her terrain. She listened, and peered at my midsection for a moment, and then rolled up her sleeves and told me she'd fix it. She wasn't even wearing sleeves. That's how strong she is.

I've been to a number of massage therapists over the years, and there are as many styles and methods as there are practitioners. It always feels good, but some of them aren't really giving themselves what I'd call a workout. Some of them just tap on you as though their fingertips were petals, or blessings. Some of them just massage your aura. Some of them even leave the room, probably for a cigarette, after laying warm rocks on you, which is perfectly pleasant if you don't think of it as the beginning of being buried alive.

But Maria is determined to set you straight, or make you swear up and down that she did. First she oils up. (It smells great, but I'm pretty sure it's bear grease; I believe I saw the unfortunate grease donors stacked up outside in the alley after she strangles them. Could be cardboard boxes, but I think it's bears.) Then she starts moving parts of you around to see how far they'll go before they snap off. Basically it's the same thing you do to the chicken to see if it's done. She waggles your leg around counterclockwise: first to nine o'clock, then to six, and by the time she's gotten to three o'clock, you've briefly glimpsed parts of yourself you'd only heard described by others.

As far as I can tell, Maria's plan is to remove your muscle fibers, one by one, from their moorings, straighten out your skeleton, and then re-attach the muscles when everything is all plumb and square. She pulls your musculature away from the bones and hangs it up somewhere nearby so it doesn't wrinkle. I would have thought the little muscles along the ribcage would be tough to spring loose, but she didn't have a problem with it; just got a grip on the spleen, wedged her knee on the liver and pulled upward on the sternum. Then she tucked the unattached muscle fibers under the gallbladder and did a half-hitch with an intestine loop to get them out of the way until she was ready to stick them back on again.

From there, straightening out the skeleton was a breeze. She only needed to whack at about a third of it, and threaten the rest, which fell into line out of sheer terror.

It's been a week. My cancer is gone. I swear it, up and down.