Invasive Mass

I hope this isn't too much information for the interwebs, but I have had three things removed from my body in the past two weeks: two moles and a lipoma. Isn't that just lovely? The moles, as you might suspect, were excised because they looked a bit odd and could have been cancerous. Thankfully, the biopsy came back negative. The doctor who cut these out of me is an unpleasant, curt person who takes joy in slicing into human flesh. I've had moles removed before, but usually the person doing the removing is kind and at least aware of the fundamental unpleasantness associated with, you know, slicing off parts of one's body. Not Dr. Kim, though. I think he really enjoyed it.

The two moles came out in literal hole punches. I was not in a position to view the actual procedure (more accurately, I didn't even attempt to view the procedure), but he used two Medieval tools to extract the moles. The first was a small cookie cutter type object that sliced a perfect little circle around the mole--deeply. The second must have been a clipping device of some sort that he used to sever the, erm, "cookie" from my body. I never got a good look at these instruments, so I'm only guessing how they worked given the resulting wound and the bizarre, tugging sensation that apparently accompanies having a small hole punched into a numbed extremity.

Horrifically, one of the moles was on the bottom of my foot, and it looked positively gruesome upon later inspection. Dr. Kim was definitely not thinking straight when he attempted to suture the wound on my foot, because the stitches popped out by the end of the day (I had to walk, didn't I?), leaving a bloody sock and a ghastly, cylindrical vacuum right where my heel meets the arch. After limping around for a week, all is well now, thank jeebus.

After that lovely experience, I subjected myself to more of Dr. Kim's wonder medicine yesterday. I've had this obnoxious, not-small lump in my back for the past several years, and he's the only doctor that has ever agreed to actually get rid of it. I don't know why it isn't considered cosmetic surgery, because apparently the lump (a lipoma) is utterly harmless and the procedure not medically prudent. To cut the lipoma out, Dr. Kim made an inch-long incision on my back and then proceeded to coax the blob out into the open. And by coax, I mean pummel. He prodded and pushed very hard, and the experience was extremely awkward. I couldn't feel any pain, but the thought of knowing that a golfball-ish sized blob of fat was being squeezed out of a slit in my back coupled with the sound a straining man and the shocks of a cauterizing gun was disturbing indeed.

The psychology of having a part of your body removed isn't something I've thought about much in detail before this experience, but now that I have, I must say, it's paradoxical. It was both nauseating and satisfying, the horror of having flesh taken away being mitigated by the human obsession with getting rid of toxic, bad things on our physical bodies. I'm not sure how good of an idea this procedure was, because the scar will likely be big, and the healing process slow. Nonetheless, a primal part of me was definitely satisfied by having this invasive mass plucked cleanly out of me.