Doctor Robot

The past few days have been nothing short of odd and a bit stressful. The week started okay, but on Tuesday I had an appointment with a dermatologist regarding some skin issues on my fingers. What I thought was hard, calloused skin (two years ago) turned out to be periungual warts that hurt! Here is a link to what this is: http://www.webmd.com/skin-problems-and-treatments/periungual-wart. The word wart has such a nasty sound, and brings to mind ugliness, witches, and skin horrors. As I sat at the end of the day in the waiting room looking at the three spots, I thought “Can I live with this?” because I truly hate pain of any kind, even if doing so can cause less pain. A short 25 minutes later, they called my name!

I was introduced to a doctor that appeared to be a model yanked out of a men’s magazine and dressed in doctor clothes for his next shoot. He had the stereotypical styled blonde hair, blue eyes, and built body. He also seemed rather robotic like a new-age robot doctor who spoke in a monotone with very clipped sentences.

He looked at my fingers, said he could take care of them, drew purple circles around them, and left me with the nurse who proceeded to inject the fingers with anesthetic that plumped them up like tiny sausages. They let me lie back on the chair because I felt a little queasy about it all.

Robot Doctor came back in with a can of liquid nitrogen and a torch, or at least a long bendy thing that is used to burn. He started on my left pinky and said with no inflection, “you will smell your skin burning”. Sure enough a few moments later *smoke* came wafting up from my hand. As I lay back, blowing the smoke of my burning skin out of my face, I started talking to Robot Doctor, because in these situations I sometimes just start chatting especially when my doctor is a robot and having my skin burned is kind of nerve-wracking.

To my horror I realized I was verbalizing my thoughts and asking him if this terrible smell of burning skin is what a cremation is like when someone dies. He mumbled something like “probably” and kept working. I asked him if these skin problems would come back and he said “they shouldn’t but you never know.” Then I started telling him about a show on Discovery Health I saw where the guy had a skin growth that took over his whole body, and he never went to the doctor because it was some remote village of some country far away. At this point Doctor Robot paused from burning my flesh, looked me in the eye, and said “That doesn’t just happen in remote countries. People wait too long here, too.” Then he went back to burning. Yikes. After that I waited for him to finish my thumb while continuing to blow the smell of burning skin from my face. The nurse bandaged up both spots.

After the two fingers he grabbed his container of liquid nitrogen like a fireman ready to extinguish the flames and said, “Now I’ll freeze the other one. It shouldn’t hurt.” He sprayed for a few full seconds and it didn’t hurt- at first. Then as he backed away, it started to really hurt and I said, “Holy cow, that hurts!” He looked at me with no movements but to say, “You were just sprayed with minus 300 degrees; it will hurt as your skin heats back up. Go home, take some pain killer, and wear some bandages for a few days.” Then he opened the door and waited for me to exit.

It’s been a few days now. My pinky looks like a dog bit the right side off, my thumb looks like someone put a cigarette out on it, and my middle finger is blistered. I went home, took pain killers, and had a vodka drink.

The pain is still there, I don’t think any of the spots feel better, and they definitely look worse, but the memory of Doctor Robot will last forever for better or for worse.