Visit
to the dermatologist.
I have terrible
skin. My hands have more liver spots than a typical eighty year old, liver
spots in a huge variety of shapes and sizes, colours and textures, some
ominously dark, irregular and even overlapping, and my legs are covered in what
I call ‘lizard skin’. This is due to sun damage that occurred when I was a kid.
I don’t think sunscreen had been invented back then and my mother, with her Mediterranean colouring, didn’t know what to do with a blue-eyed blond-haired white-skinned kid like me. So each summer I
burnt. To a crisp. More than once. I would wake up in the morning with the bed
sheets literally stuck to my tender red skin and lie there trapped, tears
silently sliding down my cheeks as I waited patiently for my mother to notice that
I hadn’t come down for breakfast and find the time to come up and gently peel
the sheets off of me. This happened every summer. Repeatedly. It was just the
way things were. My mother loved me but it never crossed her mind to put me in
a t-shirt. So now I have liver spots and lizard skin. I don’t mind terribly
that my skin looks horrible but I have carried a low grade worry about the
other possible effect of too much sun so long ago – skin cancer – for a long
time. Today I went to see a dermatologist for the first time in my life. I
figured that since I’m 50 I ought to start behaving like an adult and looking
after myself. The weather, of course, was freezing rain, with snow and fog and
other ugly stuff in the forecast as well, weather warnings up and down the yinyang,
but, having waited months for an appointment, I checked that my health card
wasn’t out of date, girded my loins, and gingerly head down the highway towards
the city. An hour later, stripped to my skivvies, lying on a paper sheet with
the dermatologist leaning over me, peering at me through a huge lighted
magnifying glass, I had a strip torn off me. Apparently my skin is fine.
Speckled, yes, and dry, but not, evidently, showing any signs of cancer. And,
according to the dermatologist, having her inspect me was a waste of my time,
her time, and tax-payer dollars. When I asked if I ought to book an annual
check-up I almost had my head bitten off. I was not to come back, I was told,
very firmly, if my only complaints were that my skin was showing normal signs
of aging. (Normal? Normal! Normal for an eighty year old, perhaps.) However, I
have to admit that, really, one could not ask for a more positive response from
a dermatologist. I go and see a dentist once a decade whether I need to or not.
I guess I’ll start seeing a dermatologist on a similar schedule. My actual
problems may lie more in the area of hypochondria, there must be a specialist I
can visit for that. I wonder if I can book an appointment during the summer….
