The Good News From The Good Doctor

I have a great family doctor. She's just friendly and thorough and very caring. I'm not the only one who knows this...as evidenced by the two-month wait to become an established patient. (Once you're established, though, sick visits are almost always same-day.)

About ten days before Christmas, a mole I'd had on my back for years suddenly went kind of crazy. Without going into too much detail, I'll say that it went through a lot of changes very fast and, in the end, just looked bad.

Then the last day of my job approached, and my health insurance coverage was, for a time, not guaranteed. In a bit of a last-minute panic, I called my doctor's office on the morning of New Year's Eve and talked to them about the mole. A few hours later, the good doctor was conducting a small, in-office surgery removing a nice-sized chunk of my back, making sure the mole was completely removed along with a decent margin around it. About 20 minutes (and 8 stitches) after that, I was on my way.

Wednesday of this week, I went back in to have my stitches removed and found out that, instead of a potentially-nasty skin cancer, I had had a small, irritated hemangioma. Lucky me!! (Seriously...I'm not being sarcastic.) Moreover, although hemangiomas can be quite aggressive (and difficult to remove because of their high blood flow), the margins of my excision were "clean" meaning that crazy clump of blood vessels is likely done with forever.

Is niice!