Melanoma I couldn’t spell yesterday, didn’t know much about it and thought it had a funny name—like a disease you didn’t take seriously because it was somehow related to a melon. Truth is I don’t really have to worry all that much because if you were to get a melanoma, you’d definitely want the kind I have—that’s what my doctor said. He should know,  he’s been an intern for a year, maybe even two. So I’m lucky, like I’m lucky I built his bosses house and it’s only three blocks away, like I’m lucky that I already had been thinking a lot about my life and how I needed to change and how things needed to be different, maybe this is really a sign about that and that things really do need to change and be different.

See, it’s not really about finding skin cancer on your body that bothers you all that much. First of all because by the time they find it, it’s not on your body. They cut it off, alone with a whole bunch of it’s neighbors that they didn’t quite tell you about when you agreed to have this funny colored blob taken off your body. Heck, I figured they just freeze it then knock it off with a nine iron. Just imagine my surprise when I took the baggage off for the first time and found they took a kiwi of skin off my shoulder just to remove a dot about have the size of your normal every day Hinsdale house fly. You know you’ve got to start figuring something was up with that, or when the doctor calls you one your cell and your office line and tells you that he would like to talk to you about your biopsy, but if you miss him he won’t be back to the office till Monday.  Well, forget that: the second reason changing doesn’t have all that much to do with knowing you had (since they say they took it off) is that your survival rate is incredibly good, especially if you have the kind I have, the kind that doesn’t spread. That’s such a relief really, and especially comforting is the fact that they want to take out some more skin, you know round it up to a tangerine or maybe an orange, because even though it doesn’t spread, it might.

July, 2004

So between it not spreading and taking out the produce department that once surrounded it you gotta figure you’ve got the thing pretty much licked. So licked in fact that they can tell you today your chances of living for the next five years. Incredible, really, a week ago nobody know my chances of surviving for five years and now not only can this doctor tell me, but he says there are a whole bunch of people that just got done figuring out if they cut away just a little more of the area where my non-spreading disease could have spread, well then they know for sure that I’ve got a precise 99% chance of living five years, which is good I think. It’s just not the 100% I figured on.