Fun for Me on the Old DL

What a huge thing to be forbidden trips to the Y, though I have devised this home workout you see on the left. (Yup that's me in the red fur and sure the knots were a little hard to get right but it all works great now.) And wow are the days deliciously long with no Y-trip to schedule into the old workday! Plus it’s really quieted me down to be sittin’ on the bench here with an incision that looks like what you see stitched into a football, only uglier; a wound you have to tend every day, unwrap and air out and poke with a Vaseline-daubed Q-tip and all.And so much for shorts and skirts with a dressing on my leg the size of a dinner napkin. I’m in so many pairs of jeans and long hippie dresses it feels like the 70s again. :-)Also I’m catching up on my sleep. I was in the bed ‘til ‘til 7:30 yesterday morning, a record for me. I did get up at 4am and make a quick tour of the house making improvements but that’s only because the leg hurts just enough to keep me in light-sleep mode.I figure I might try eating less since I can’t exercise. When I was on the table and the surgeon was  wrapping my leg with a super-tight Ace bandage I said “I heard when you have liposuction they put you in this all-over bandage for a whole month while your tissues get over the shock of being Hoovered half to death, did you know that?"She glanced up from her bandage winding to give me a bland noncommittal look. “I did know that. We do that here.”Only then did realize I was actually ON the cosmetic surgery floor of this famous hospital just because everybody just assumes the sky will fall if they they have a regular scar, even on their lower leg where no one is ever going to notice it. Who knew I'd be  in the cosmetic surgery unit? I mean it’s not like I'm Tina Fey after having her cheek slashed by some crazy guy that’s for sure.So I'm thinking hmmm .... Diet and exercise? Or the sucky thing and the body bandage after?  Diet and exercise or the sucky thing? It’s tempting to go with the latter but I figure with my home workout here and a little of what Jennifer Hudson and my WW pals call tracking I‘ll be ready for my close-up in no time  - from the knees up anyway. 

The Sisterhood

I don't mean to make light of it; I can’t think of anything scarier than being told you have real cancer, not like the basal cell kind that doesn't have the sense to move but just kinda sits there. That's all I have - or had anyway, until Thursday when the nicest surgeon in the world, serene and cool in a sleeveless dove-grey silk dress, cut a three-inch long slit in my leg and took it out. (Giant dressing! who knew?)I didn’t actually 'get it' that I wouldn’t be able to swim for two weeks, or shower. Or allow the area even to get even a little bit wet for 48 hours; that I wouldn’t be able do Zumba or Pilates or yoga, never mind jump on the treadmill or that funny Wave machine that makes you look like a roller-skating baby elephant.She and the nurse made me lie down flat, Then they draped the area with enough bunting for a Fourth of July bandstand. Then in went the Lidocaine“How come people don’t bleed more during surgery?”"Oh there’s some epinephrine in there with the Lidocaine. It constricts bloodflow."Subtly tied down or not I did a quick sit-up so I could take a look. Bleedin’ pretty good actually! (this is after all the cleanup.)I flopped back down fast but not so fast that she didn't see the look on my face.“So what would you be doing on a day like this if you weren’t coming here?” she asked cheerily, to distract me from the business at hand.My answer made reference to the fact that even now in America it is almost exclusively we women who act as caregivers to our elderly. “So much for equality there!” I said."I hear that! she cried. "I almost lost my mind over the fact that before we were married my man couldn't manage a simple RSVP !"I sighed happily and lay back on the table. There’s nothing that relaxes us women more than a nice little session complaining about our husbands. I mean heck, cancers come and go but the sisterhood you have with you always. :-)

The Old Bait and Switch

I always got a great tan. Tanned legs like you wouldn’t believe. As a kid at summer camp I used to tell the new campers my father was black. They knew my mom was white because they saw her every day as the camp’s director, but I was safe with that fib about my dad. I knew they’d never meet him, anymore than I ever had, that guy with the map-of-Ireland-face and the blue blue eyes. Anyway it explained the tan, which I loved for how glamorous it made me feel.I guess that’s all light-skinned folks ever wanted from a tan: that “wow” moment when they entered a room.Tanned skin was once the sign of an outdoor laborer, but when most jobs moved indoors it came to signify leisure. Then they really came into fashion in the early 1920s, just after World War I and the great Spanish Influenza of 1918 -1919. Americans wanted a return to “normalcy,” as Presidential candidate Warren G. Harding called it, and so they elected him. Maybe they  just wanted to forget death and go out in the sun a while.Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, living in Paris in those years, journeyed to the South of France as often as they could for the purpose of “browning ourselves,” as Zelda wrote. Later, in the big love scene in her novel Save Me the Waltz, she describes the moon “cradling the tanned face” of her heroine. More glamour!Right on through the 60s and 70s the message remained clear: a healthy tan was a great thing. Certainly Coppertone made millions with that ad showing the waistband of a small child’s bathing-suit bottom being tugged down in back by a frisky pup, revealing how pale she was under her clothes; how burnished where the clothes didn’t cover.They called it a tanline; in Playboy centerfolds it was as erotic as anything else on the page.This is the world lots of us grew up in.The summer before college I lifeguarded at a city pool and patrolled all day under the sun. The soles of my bare feet grew as tough as horse’s hooves and my skin turned a dark mahogany brown.Then the next decade found me sunbathing on the hot tar roofs of various apartment buildings in quest of further bronzing. And of course like everyone else I wrapped tinfoil around an album cover and held it under my chin, the better to reflect the sun’s rays onto my face and chest.Eventually in the 80s, I began to hear more about sunscreen and I used it. I think. Sort of.Anyway I was using it last week when the call came from the dermatologist’s office to say “the biopsy we did on your leg? It came back positive. Basal cell carcinoma.” A surgeon will excise it next week.I asked this kind nurse practitioner if she had any advice for me as I await the scalpel.“Wear a hat. Wear sunglasses. Use sunscreens with an SPF factor of 40.” (She said an SPF any higher than that was fear-mongering.) “And for heaven's sake, steer clear of the ones with an SPF of 15. They don’t protect you at all!”“How about the Coppertone with an SPF of 4 that I’ve been using?” I asked, mostly to get the laugh.I got the laugh all right. She didn’t know I was speaking the truth.No one is laughing now, I can tell you, least of all me. Who said it first? We really are too soon old and too late smart.

If It's Cancer We'll Call You

I was just at the dermatologist’s  to see about a red patch I've had on my leg for some months now. “Hmmm,” smiled the person who saw me there. “I THINK this is nothing but let’s be certain. Would you mind if we did a little biopsy?”“Not at all,” I smiled back. She ducked out and was back in a jiffy with a wee digging tool so precise you could use it to tease apart every layer of dough in a pan of baklava."Will I have a scar?" "Maybe a teensy one.""Because it’s OK. I mean, I have a million scars on my legs.""Oh yeah?""Yup, and a story for every one. This one's from the time I sneaked out of my cabin to meet a boy from the camp down the road, this one from the time my sister freed me from my nap to go to the drugstore with her for candy… I figure what's another scar at this point”“Ha!” she said, even as she expertly popped out a tiny divot of flesh and dabbed at the blood. She studied me from head to toe then, first examining my whole front before flipping me like a pancake to study my back. "No cancerous growths here that I can see!" she sang."Yay!" I sang back. “Any other questions?” "Actually, yes. This past winter I got these little bumps. They're gone now.”"On your upper arms? Like little pimples?" There's a name for them!” she said, whipping out a pamphlet called Dry Skin and Keratosis Pilaris. “You can use this cream,” she added, writing its name on the front.I opened the pamphlet, the last page of which showed somebody's hand covered in a painful looking ‘glove’ of scaly white skin.  "Whoops!  Don't look at THAT picture!" she cried, reaching to fold over the page so I wouldn’t see it.Too late. “The poor soul!” I said as she turned to flash out of the room again for some bandages and the list of wound care how-to’s.“We see worse!” she called over her shoulder, and that comforted me too for the blunt truth of it: that she and her health care colleagues routinely ‘saw worse’ in us all and forgave us anyway in our human imperfection. “You can get dressed now,” she said when we were finally done.“Ok,” I said jumping off the table. “And you’ll let me know about the biopsy?”"Sure!” she gaily cried as she sailed out of the exam room. “If it's cancer we'll call ya! If not, we’ll write ya a letter!”  Now THERE was a sunny health care professional. I loved her, whether it's a little skin cancer among my living layers of phyllo dough or not.

what IS this thing?