2025 rolls in with the shadow of a pending biopsy. I forget about it for a little while. They make you wait so very long to confirm anything. I doubt that anything could be seriously wrong. What are the chances of that, at my age?
The chances are low, but you only have to lose once.
It’s melanoma, and it goes deeper than the biopsy. They say I have a 20% chance of stage 3 cancer and they need to operate right away. Perhaps I should not have taken all those twelve-hour hikes in the sun a few years back. Crumbs. Better text my family.
The surgeon tells me that my right ear is already five millimeters shorter than my left ear, and if they do the surgery this way, I’ll lose another five millimeters, but if they do it this other way, there will just be a soft spot. Heck, I don’t want my right ear to be down a full centimeter. Guess we should just go for the soft spot.
And suddenly I’m in the operating room, and they are playing Dreams by Fleetwood Mac for me, and just like that the lights go out.
***
I wake up, a little fuzzy, high on fentanyl. Amusingly, as I boot back up, I recite prime numbers and source code, mostly javascript and HTML. Apparently my soul is a webpage. Sarah puts Sandy on my lap.
Annoying, I must wait another week to see if I’m dying. They have to test the lymph nodes they cut out of my neck. It is horrible to wait like this. I spend my days reading PostgreSQL source code to distract myself. Embarrassing, after all, for one’s soul to be implemented in HTML.
I’m okay.
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