A Pain in the Concha

The basal cell carcinoma is gone, finally. Plot has to wear this tape on his ear for a week and refrain from heavy lifting, like vacuuming and washing dishes and bringing in the garbage cans. He is allowed to watch TV but can't get too excited.

Yeah, right. Like the admonition to ice the affected area for 10 minutes every 30 minutes for the next 48 hours. Probably not gonna happen.

All this for the tiniest little culprit, which his sharp-eyed dermatologist discovered in his concha (that's the bottom part of your ear) last year. And it still took a ton of preparation and equipment and nurses and a surgeon. We're talking maybe 1/32 of an inch? Once they see the bad stuff is all gone they have to take a little skin graft from under the ear and sew it into the hole they just made.

AND -- did you know that if they take a piece of skin that was in a spot on your body once exposed to the sun, that skin can develop skin cancer later, even though it's in a different place? That's why they used the underside of The Great Ear Lobe.

You can't beat the MOHS clinic at Kaiser. This is Plot's second adventure up there and, if spending a lot of time in the sun when he was a teenager is the indicator they say it is, probably not his last.

Now he can't hear very well, with one ear bandaged off, and he can't use earphones either. And then there's that issue he hasn't mentioned about what happened to his finger on Sunday when Ducknik needed an old and very heavy speaker moved out of the attic and down the stairs. After a few days the finger does not appear to be broken, though he probably should have gone in to have a few stitches put in to close the cute little skin tear.

And yes, Plotnik is well aware of what "concha" means in Mexican slang. Just remember that

"The concha of the ear is an irregular hemispheric bowl with a defined rim."

That would have been a difficult operation on him.