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canyonwalkerA few months ago I visited a dermatologist to look at a few skin issues. One was a lump that was growing on the back of my head, the other was little sores, kind of like acne, that would occasionally appear on my forehead. The acne-like sores the doctor zapped with a cold ray to kill off whatever they were. The lump required surgery to remove. Oh, and I had a few skin tags. She zapped those with the cold ray, too. A few days later they died and fell off.
I don't have a photo of the cold ray, but here's what AI suggests it might have looked like:
I left in the AI tells, like the incoherent text in the caption box. At least in this rendering everybody has a totally appropriate number of hands and fingers.
The occasional sores on my forehead did what occasional problems do. They came back. Actually, I think it was different ones that emerged. Sometimes they're there, sometimes they're not. It's like a noise in your car that doesn't rattle or squeak when the mechanic takes it for a test drive. When I saw the doctor for a followup a few months later she introduced me to a new term. The occasional bumps/sores on my forehead were scaling.
Scaling. "Great," I thought. "I'm turning into a lizard."
She also used another term that was scarier than turning into a lizard. That term was pre-cancerous. 😰 The scaling on my forehead was actinic keratosis (yeah, that's another new term, too, but it sounds boring). It's a skin condition caused by long term UV exposure. If left untreated it has a 5-10% chance of turning into skin cancer. Thus the term pre-cancerous.
When the doctor understood how my scales appear and reappear she changed her treatment plan. Rather than keep playing whack-a-mole with the Cold Ray— though she did zap me with it in three more places for good measure— she gave me a cream to apply to my forehead for two weeks. The cream would hopefully kill off the pre-cancerous cells.
BUT WOULD IT STOP THE LIZARD METAMORPHOSIS?
WOULD THE PATIENT SURVIVE?
STAY TUNED FOR NEXT TIME...
I don't have a photo of the cold ray, but here's what AI suggests it might have looked like:
I left in the AI tells, like the incoherent text in the caption box. At least in this rendering everybody has a totally appropriate number of hands and fingers.
The occasional sores on my forehead did what occasional problems do. They came back. Actually, I think it was different ones that emerged. Sometimes they're there, sometimes they're not. It's like a noise in your car that doesn't rattle or squeak when the mechanic takes it for a test drive. When I saw the doctor for a followup a few months later she introduced me to a new term. The occasional bumps/sores on my forehead were scaling.
Scaling. "Great," I thought. "I'm turning into a lizard."
She also used another term that was scarier than turning into a lizard. That term was pre-cancerous. 😰 The scaling on my forehead was actinic keratosis (yeah, that's another new term, too, but it sounds boring). It's a skin condition caused by long term UV exposure. If left untreated it has a 5-10% chance of turning into skin cancer. Thus the term pre-cancerous.
When the doctor understood how my scales appear and reappear she changed her treatment plan. Rather than keep playing whack-a-mole with the Cold Ray— though she did zap me with it in three more places for good measure— she gave me a cream to apply to my forehead for two weeks. The cream would hopefully kill off the pre-cancerous cells.
BUT WOULD IT STOP THE LIZARD METAMORPHOSIS?
WOULD THE PATIENT SURVIVE?
STAY TUNED FOR NEXT TIME...
