Posted this in the colonoscopy thread because I decided to share ALL of my recent medical history in one post...
I have some larger moles on my back so my wife suggested that I go to her dermatologist for a checkup so I ended up going a couple of weeks the checkup and to get a skin tag, aka Pigmented Seborrheic Keratosis, removed near my upper eyelid. Also got something checked out on my forehead that turned out to be Basal Cell Carcinoma. It appeared a few months ago but I didn't think much of it because it was pretty small, translucent bump right in the middle of my forehead. The dermatologist seemed a little more concerned when I told her it had bled a little bit a couple of weeks back (maybe I scratched it or something? Can't remember). She wanted to get a biopsy done on both the skin tag and whatever this thing was on my forehead. Got the results last week and the skin tag was benign but the forehead thingy wasn't.
I need to schedule a Mohs surgery to take care of that. It's pretty small and was barely noticeable but I'm glad I got it looked at.
I'm sharing this not to scare you but to prepare you and to make sure you communicate well with your doctor. I had a skin tag sized BCC between my eye and temple. They told me the Mohs would take thin layers off, etc. Well the surgeon was a different doctor in the same practice. We get in there and he's working for a while and I'm wondering what he's doing. He gets done and tells me they're going to check the tissue out to see if they got it all. A little while later the nurse comes in and she's looking at things and I've got my cell phone out. She says do you want a picture and I say ok. She takes a picture and hands me my cell phone back and I look and I've got a dime-sized hole in my face that's pretty deep. I was in shock

. A little while later the surgeon comes back in and says good news, we got it all, and I'm like no s##t m##f###ker, of course you got it all

. I was really upset and called my doctor later in the day to ask about it. Her nurse called me back and said that since it was nodular (as well as superficial) they had to go deeper than just superficial layers. That was in August and I've got an appt. with my regular dr. in February to check things out and I'm going to be sure to let her know what I think.
In hindsight, I think what happened is that my doctor had scraped a layer of skin off with the skin tag sized BCC and left a dime-sized red mark on my face. The surgeon colored in that entire area with a marker and said does this look right? and I said yeah I guess, that's where it was, thinking he was going to slice thin layers on that spot. Then he proceeded to remove that whole section of my face


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