Perspective In The Cretaceous Era

I am a sometimes-expert on perspective, so when I found out that the tiny red lesion on my leg was actually the beginnings of skin cancer, I actually didn’t so much as blink.

When you are the color of an anemic vampire and half of your relatives have had numerous bits of skin removed, you actually grow up not so terrified of generic, eminently curable skin cancer.   

So, I asked the dermatologist - whose dry, acerbic wit oddly matches my own -  when do we operate?  It was the very next day, today, and the whole thing went so fast that I wasn’t even tardy for work.  The whole procedure took less time than I spend checking voice messages in the morning; with the longest time being waiting precisely 173 seconds for the shot to numb up the spot on my leg. 

Bandaged up, I departed the doctor’s office some 10 minutes later utterly underwhelmed and wholly unimpressed with myself.   I am still not special. This is because skin cancer runs in, out and through the fairer-skinned members of my family.  Like Gamma rays, only less deadly.  Having grown up in the Cretaceous Era of no sunscreen in southern California and possessing skin the pallid shade of an exhumed corpse, what did I expect? And I say no sunscreen because, back in Ancient Times, sunscreen had not yet been invented.  

I did handle the cancer news better than the last time, with the sum total of my initial reaction being, “Uh, oh, ok, when, how soon can I get this taken care of?”  My oncologist would not have known it was me, seriously.  I was oddly proud of that - the calmness of it all. 

It is so unlike me that I felt I had achieved a Zen state with respect to cancer.  And the dermatologist even gave me a bunch of cool samples for super sunscreen - SPF 85, no less.  Lovely parting gifts, along with the giant Band-aid on my leg, of course.  

Maybe I’m cool after all, I mused while stuck in traffic driving back into work, my leg still slightly numb, but not a concern for the first time in weeks.  I’ve grown rather fond of that leg, I thought; I am glad that, like my breasts, I’m going to be able to keep it.  

When I got to work, my work BFF happen to be in the hallway. 

“Everything ok?” she asked anxiously. 

Lord knows, I’ve put the good woman through enough.

“When do we do our lunchtime walk?” I replied. 

Apparently, my ho-hum perspective was not going to include slacking off on the daily exercise routine we’d created.

Still, I think my daughter may not appreciate my darker side, the one that views having been diagnosed with cancer, twice and with two different types in just two brief years, as just part of the gloom and dank that drips all over my Karma these days. 

“You have to be really nice to me,” I announced dramatically as I walked in the door last night.  “On account of me having cancer until tomorrow.” 

My pity party didn’t last very long, however.  Just a few minutes ago my daughter called me at work to check on me. 

“Did they get it, Mom, all the cancer?” she asked. 

“Yes, of course, sweetie!  It’s all gone and I’m just fine.  Awe, you were worried about me, weren’t you?” 

“I was actually wondering how much longer I needed to be nice to you.  Now that you're cured, you know what that means.” 

Yes, I know what that means.  It means that I’m back to being extraordinarily ordinary, all over again.