06-The Pimple

I could have sworn it was just a pimple. Well I guess it was, but it was the super pimple that wouldn't quit, and it wound up putting me in the middle of a gurney thrill ride through the halls of Orlando Regional Medical Center and changing my life forever. I'm jimpoling. This is my view from the middle. So I am the poster boy for skin cancer. I'm a fair skinned boy who has lived in Florida since nineteen seventy five, when if you said the word sunblock, people would say, what's that. Tanning solutions of the day were copper tone and maybe baby oil and iodine, none of which prevented my skin from turning as red as a stop sign. Now, when I say I'm fair skinned, let me tell you I am so white, I'm blue. I have to use spray tan or just to get up to white. I have no business being out in the sun without fifty plus sun block. I has suit and an ambulance on standby. Dermatologists far and wide have paid for their yachts and mansions just based on my business. My first trip to the dermatologists resulted in a surgery to land a regional medical center. It took about four hours and involved a squeam of cell carcinoma on my back and basal cell's skin cancer on both of my arms. Since then, I've had several more minor surgeries called mose surgeries for basil and squeam of cell carcinomas on my face and a melanoma on my back that was referred to as an insight to meaning it didn't spread anywhere, thank goodness. But hey, kids, that's not all. To top this all off, in two thousand and nine, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. My brother had prostate cancer, my father died from it. So when they asked about my family history, all the alarm bells went off. Panic and flailing of arms and gnashing of teeth ensued. The blood tests came out, the biopsies were done, and the diagnosis confirmed, so I had to undergo what's called break ee therapy, or they implanted radiated titanium seeds in the prostate. Now, all that said, all this was just nonsense compared to those going through chemotherapy for other cancers. My daughter had a double mastectomy for breast cancer and had to go through chemo and radiation that was horrible, and my little problems don't compare. I've met people at the Orlando Health Cancer Institute with far bigger problems than I have. So I know my place in the sympathy hierarchy, and believe me, it's not that high up. But by the grace of God and God given medical science, my prostate cancer is gone, my skin cancers are gone. So I have nothing to complain about. Well, I do have some minor things, just annoyances. Really, in twenty twenty three, I discovered a pimple on my left cheek. My wife gets annoyed when I call it that because it was not just a pimple. It was a pimple that changed my life. It really did look and feel like a pimple, but it wouldn't go away. So, knowing my skin cancer history, I want to see my dermatologist. I biaps hey yield it with squeami cell carcinoma. Still not a big deal. They can do their Moe's surgery and that'll be that. Well, not so much, by the way, Moe's surgery has nothing to do with Moe in the Three Stooges, although I have made that joke several times. I'm forever asking where Larry and Curly are. Some laugh, most are sick of hearing about it. What it is is outpatient in the office surgery where they cut out the cancerous area, then biopsy it immediately to see if they got it all out. If they got it all the first time, you go home. If not, they do it again and repeat the process until they have either confirmed that they got it all or they go to plan B. Well, welcome to plan B. After coming at me with the scalfel three times at the dermatology office, they finally came in and said that the super pimple had gotten the best of them and I had to go to the hospital and see a radiologist. Oh this didn't sound good, and it wasn't. So I went to see the radiation oncologist at the Orlando Health Cancer Institute in Orlando. After he reviewed it, and he said I had two choices, ar radiation treatments right away or wait and see if it goes away on its own. Well, I chose door number two. Remember this decision for later. So I went home, and about two weeks later, large bump about the size of a grape swelled up where the pimple was No, this didn't look good. It wasn't. They poked, prodded, and scanned me nine ways to Sunday and determined that my parodid gland now had the cancer and that's what was swelled up. The parodig gland is one of a couple of salvary glands that sits just in front of your ears. But this thing had to go. So I figured I was in for another in office surgery. Oh no, not so fast, cancer breath. My radiation oncologists, sensing that I was minimizing the seriousness of my situation, actually said to me, this is no longer just a skin cancer. This is the real deal. They brought in an honest to God's surgical oncologist and a dental oncologist. The surgeon said it needed to go into the hospital for an overnight's day and they would do facial surgery to remove the He said they had to cut all the way from my ear down to the middle of my neck so they could remove lymph nodes to see if the cancer had spread. Following that, I would need thirty radiation treatments. All of a sudden, this pemple turned into a big stinking deal. I guess clarosil is out of the question at this point. Facial surgery means they connect all these sensors to the nerves in your face so they can move them around while they're cutting on you to be sure they don't accidentally paralyze your face in the process. The surgical assistant scared the crap out of me when she told me that one of the possible ramifications of the surgery was that I might not be able to control my eyelid. My eyelid, but not to worry. They surgically implant tiny little weights in your eyelid so you can close it. Yikes, get me out of here. But that was worst case scenario and not likely to happen. I mentioned. They brought in a dental oncologist. I never even knew there was such a thing as a dental oncologist. But her job would be to remove four of my tea on the left side of my mouth, two molars on top and two on the bottom. Remove my teeth, my teeth. They heard me all over the hospital when I said that. Turns out that when they blast the side of your face with radiation treatments, any teeth that are in the way, and in this case, the aforementioned molars could cause what they call jaw necrosis, where the bone cells in your jaw essentially die. Holy crap, the news just keeps getting better and better. So the plan was to put me in Orlando Regional Medical Center o RMC for a day and do surgery to remove the parodigland and the four teeth. Oh great fun is to be had by all might I remind everyone this started with a pimple. So I go into the hospital. I hadn't been in the hospital for an overnight stay since I was in the eighth grade getting my tonsils out in Michigan. Now they don't keep you in the hospital for a ton's electomy. That's how long it's been now. For some reason, my hospital room was on the ninth floor of ORMC, but the surgery was to be done on the ground floor and one building over in what they called the ambulatory clinic. I think the operating rooms in the hospital were all booked up. But as it turns out, you can't get there from here. Well more precisely, there's no good way of getting from the operating room to the ninth floor of the hospital. They warned me ahead of time that they would need to wheel me down some narrow hallways to get from one place to the other, but they thought they could do it now. If you've ever been put under anesthesia for surgery, you know how surreal the experience is. To me. It's the closest thing to time travel I will ever get. I remember when I was heading into surgery for the prostate seed implants. I was put in this large room which served as both the surgical prep room and the postop recovery room. I remember seeing a child's hobby horse in the room at the foot of my bed as they prepped me for surgery. I don't know why it was there, but be that as it may. They hit me with the knockout juice, and the weirdest thing happened. The hobby horse moved from the right side of my bed to the left side of my bed, and standing beside it was my urologist who was to do the implants. I looked at him and said, are you ready to start yet? He took his surgical mask off and looked at me funny and said, We're already done. You want to do it again? Wise? Guy. Anyway, something similar happened with my pimple ectomy and teeth yanking surgery. I was in the prep room one minute, and the next minute I'm on a gurney speeding down the narrow corridors of the ambulatory clinic on my way to the hospital. Now, I'm pretty sure the orderly pilot thing my gurney had aspirations to be a driver in the Daytona five hundred. He's barreling down the hall, knocking into tables, chairs and people. Heart monitors and other instruments are falling off the gurney. Things are clanking, glass breaking, Women screaming, cab drivers yelling mothers are snatching young children out of our path. I think we almost hit a squirrel. Well, I don't know how a squirrel got on the hospital, but I'm pretty sure I saw it. Of course, I'm in a foggy anastesia induced haze, so I start laughing my head off. At least to myself, I thought the whole thing was hysterical. My wife, on the other hand, following behind and picking up the crap that was falling off the gurney as it mowed down everything in its path to get down a hallway that was never meant to be traversed by a gurney with a patient on it. Was completely horrified and totally traumatized by the whole experience and is seeking psychological counseling. So we get up to the ninth floor and they wheel me into the room and brought the gurney up even with the hospital bed. Their plan was to pick me up and move me over to the bed, But after the perilous street race we just had with the gurney in the hallway, I wasn't prepared to have Mario Andretti and his pit crew here man handled me, so I crawled over to the bed by myself. I heard one of them say, hey, look he did it by himself. Yeah, well you were waved in by the checkered flag. Time for you to go to Disney World, dude. So going into all this, they gave me a laundry list of these totally horrific side effects I might expect from the surgery and the radiation treatments, including but not limited to, half my face would be known for a long time time. As I'm writing this podcast episode, it's been one year since that surgery, and I still have no feeling in most of my left cheek and ear. The surgeon told me ahead of time that I would never again have any feeling in my left ear lobe because they would have to cut the nerve to that in order to get the gland out. The surgery was successful in removing the gland and the lymph nodes. The biopsy on the nodes came back negative and no eyelid damaging nerves were disrupted. They said, mouth sores are a big problem with head and neck radiation therapy. So I had about a dozen bottles of lytocane all lined up in the medicine cabinet. I had to rinse every hour with this one thousand dollars of bottle stuff called moogard that is formulated to prevent mouth sores. Hey, it worked. I had never got any mouth sores. Part of that, though, I can attribute to I think proton radiation. There are a couple of types of radiation. Traditional radiation, which for head and neck cancers, can cause all kinds of truly horrible side effects as it radiates your entire head and blast radiation in places where you really don't want it. Another type is more rare and it's only available at a handful of medical facilities in the US, in fact, the world, and that's proton radiation. Turns out that the Orlando Health Cancer Institute, the hospital at which I am being treated and just ten minutes from my house, just so happens to be one of those medical facilities. Proton radiation uses a giant forty five ton cyclotron particle accelerator that they had to actually construct the building around. The machine moves around the treatment room. Now, the advantage of proton radiation is it targets it to where it needs to go and nowhere else. This limits the side effects as compared to the traditional radiation. When I found out about this, I started campaigning for proton radiation. I mean, why wouldn't I. The insurance company turned it down at first, after all, it costs about fifteen thousand dollars of treatment, but much to my surprise and delight, they approved it upon appeal. You know what a space heater sounds like when it's running, the forced air coming out of it kind of a oh well, that's what it sounded like when I was in this thing. The mechanism that actually shoots the radiation into the side of my head sounded like a space here without the heat right up against my left cheek, about thirty seconds a day, every day for thirty days. Oh and remember when I said My radiation oncologist told me during my first visit with him that I had the choice of doing radiation right away or waiting to see if anything came of it, and I chose to wait. Well, it turns out that if I had chosen to start radiation at that point, it would have done no good. My doctor told me later that if he had started radiation, then he would have radiated in the wrong place. Smart choice on my part or maybe another god thing. Well, now it's over. I have to visit myologists periodically, dermatologist, radiation oncologists, surgical oncologist, dental oncologists, this ologist, idologist. But anyway, the cancer gone. Now I have to deal with dry mouth since the parotid salvary gland was removed and the radiation did a number on my taste buds, so nothing tastes right. As a result, I lost forty pounds. Heck of a way to do it. I recommend sticking with Jenny Craig by the way. So there I was in the middle of a medical crisis, from a bunch of minor skin surgeries to a prostate cancer scare and radiation seed therapy for that, then finally the skin cancer that turned into a real deal cancer that involved a runaway gurney and a thrilling hospital stay that would wind up changing the way I live and taste some scary moments that I really wasn't expecting. After all, I thought it was just a pimple. I'm jimpouling and that's my view from the middle. In the next episode, how would you like to be in the middle between a big shoplifter dude who had almost bitten through the boss's hand and the five foot five inch boss who's lunging across the room at him. You bit my hand next on my view in the middle