Day 316, eyelid, FOPAL

Monday, 10/14/2019

Started with a run, and was once more surprised by the chill. Next time I must try to remember to put on a sweatshirt. At 9:30 I headed out for my appointment with an opthalmic surgeon to have the “lesion” (as my appointment referral calls it) on my eyelid biopsied. The surgeon was a charming woman who looked at the 3mm white bump on my eyelid and explained all the different things it might be: a cyst, an unpigmented mole, or a basal cell carcinoma. If it is the latter, I don’t need to worry about metastases, basal cell tumors don’t metastasize, which is a bit of a relief.

She recommended removing it today. She would try to remove a 1mm margin of tissue around it, so if it proves to be malignant, the pathologist may report that it has been completely removed. If it is malignant and not fully surrounded by normal flesh, there will be further work to excise the remainder.

The procedure was about as minor as surgery can be. I laid back in a chair; she anesthetized my eyelid (“little pinch now”), and there was a little pressure as she fiddled around for a couple of minutes, and that was it. I’m left with a little divot in my eyelid.

She cautioned me that the anesthetic would wear off in an hour and I might have some pain. I didn’t. She said it might bleed, but it didn’t. I have a tube of erythromycin to dab on twice daily. That’s it for care; “eyelids heal really quickly”.

This was my first “procedure” as a bachelor. The familiar details, like waiting in the waiting room, being given a sheaf of paper with post-procedure instructions, and so on, brought back all the many, many exams and procedures that Marian went through last year. It wasn’t comfortable to remember those.

I came back to CH for lunch, then went to FOPAL. To my surprise, there were no boxes of books stacked by the computer section, as there normally are on the Monday after a sale weekend. So instead of culling and pricing, I just sorted for three hours. During that time we took delivery of a donation from a recently-deceased Stanford professor: forty boxes of books. I may go do some more sorting later in the week.