Adoring a photo, annoyed about my skin

Diane, Callen, and Joe at the dock

I love this photo. I think I should get it framed. It is better than a posed photo. If I feel down, the delight in Diane's and Joe's faces will make me smile. The delicious feel of those tiny, soft hands. And of course the dock in Wellfleet. Everyone agrees the extra hour to get there is worth it. The playground nearby. P-L-A-Y-G-R-O-U-N-D. Spelled out in case it wasn't going to happen.

Back to reality, I got the results of the visual field test that I thought my left eye had failed.

I passed the test after all. It goes to show you something. I’m not exactly sure what it is. Well, actually, I do know but I’m not sure how to fix it because it might be a personality trait. The tendency to catastrophize. The doctor was super nice. She said that the experience of taking the test is subjective. Some people hate it. Some think they failed but they didn’t. Some don’t mind.

She said I had very nice tears. I didn't know whether to thank her or not. It reminds me of not knowing whether I should say thank you when I was bald and people said my head had a very nice shape. I'm pretty sure I said thank you to be polite, but I didn't have anything to do about it.

Tomorrow I get another Mohs surgery. It is on a tiny spot on my neck. The larger darker one that I feared was melanoma because it looked different was really “just” a squamous cell on the skin. The one on my neck is invasive, but, again, invasive in the skin, not into my body.

The dermatologist showed me an enlarged photo of my neck and pointed to the spot. I nearly fell off the table. “That’s how my neck looks???” I said, or maybe I just gasped. If polka dotted necks were in, I would win a prize. I think I'll go re-read Nora Ephron’s “I Feel Bad About My Neck.”

I used to be more concerned about the procedure. Now I’m mostly annoyed about missing tennis. I’m going to squeeze in one more day, tomorrow morning, at the Canoe Club. Then my nice chauffeur is going to drive me to Boston, which is twice in two weeks because last week I went to see one of my dermatologists, followed by a few hours at the place where everybody knows my name, the Kraft Family Blood Donor Center, where I get the light treatment on my blood.

The consensus is to try to go every three weeks instead of every other week because I seem to have reached a plateau. I’m stuck with the lumps and bumps and the “band” along my abdomen but Dr. Liu (Stephanie) is pleased because you can pinch the skin on my thighs (yahoo!) whereas when this problem (graft vs. host of the skin) started, my thighs were rock hard. You might want that for your abs but not for the rest of your skin. If we hadn't taken action, I might have ended up with a new problem: scleroderma, or hardening of the skin. And that would not have been good for my tennis game.