Mohs surgery scheduled three months out…
Three months. No kidding.
Despite the reassuring words of my surgeon, three more months where I could not help but wonder: How fast is my cancer growing and spreading in the meantime?
Three more months to realize that he said there’s a 99.9% chance that everything will be fine. 99.9%… pretty good odds… but not 100%.
And then I wondered if he knew it would be three more months until I saw him again… three full months for things to change. I never asked the surgeon about the risk incurred by such a wait time because I never expected it would take that long to find a slot on his schedule. And now my head is filled with a fresh batch of dark thoughts, which includes a very simple question: Would you choose to play a game where you had a 1 in a 1000 chance of dying a slow, painful, disfiguring death? And a full quarter of a year to think about it?
And that’s not all…
In the very same timeframe that I am dealing with this “easy” cancer, I’d already had half of my colon removed due to colon cancer. I was already under surveillance for Lynch Syndrome. I was already bracing myself for a recurrence of colon cancer or for another GI or GU system cancer to be discovered. I already had a sebaceous carcinoma excised from my chest with the expectation that the next lesion is likely to pop up any day.
Anxiety on top of anxiety on top of anxiety.
And all to what end, I am compelled to ask.