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 Post subject: The Angry Nevus
PostPosted: Sat Dec 08, 2007 11:49 pm 
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This is a first draft; any thoughts would be well appreciated. I know that I've seen something similar in other writings/tv shows/movies, just seeing if I can get the voice right...

[align=center]The Angry Nevus[/align]

It’s just a small mole on my left bicep. Well, not that small, but not that large, either. It is a common mole, a nevus, a smudge, a blot, a dark brown discoloration. It is, as Webster’s defines, a congenital or acquired usually highly pigmented area on the skin that is either flat or raised. This one is raised, oval in shape. It is perhaps 9 millimeters long at its longest, and perhaps 7 at it’s narrowest.

But its bothering me. Again. It has been on my arm for as long as I can remember, and every so often I imagine that it’s getting larger, or changing shape, or shifting into a cancerous mass. I dutifully have it measured by some random doctor, then forget about it for years, until I notice (or think I notice) it change again. I always forget where I’ve had it measured before, and, being a person who is a meticulous record loser (yet a pack rat of random paraphernalia), I find I need to have it checked again.

This time, I know it has changed. It has grown, grown so large that it has maybe doubled in size. This time, I think I need to have it more than measured, this time, I think I will ask the doctor to take a piece of it. To measure it under a microscope. To cut a piece of it away, to send it to the lab and do … whatever it is that labs do these days. I will prove that it is more than just a mole, I will be vindicated choosing to later have it removed. It’s not like it’s a significant part of who I am.

Right?

My boss says that I can take the morning off of work. It’s slow today, no major cases. No minor ones, either. It’s as if the world has decided that today is the day to finally define the chocolate spot on my vanilla bicep. I’m glad, and a little excited. I’m taking action. The doctor comes in, and informs me that she’s going to do a quick punch-biopsy, she will take an ever so tiny piece of the thing on my arm.

She pulls a sterile tray into the room after I remove my shirt. She cleans the mole, and a large area around it, clearing a swath of microbial desert on my arm with her ruthless alcohol wipe. The bacterial troops will rally soon enough, growing their numbers quickly, efficiently. Bacteria and fungus combat desertification of their habitats with sex. I wonder if we could do the same.

Ouch. I was distracted. The doctor decided it was a good time to stick the anesthetic into my arm. Now that damned thing really is growing, as the liquid of the xylocaine expands underneath it, creating a rather disturbing subcutaneous bubble. For some reason, this makes me nervous.

The physician begins poking and prodding, asking me about pain. It doesn’t hurt, no I can’t feel a thing, go ahead and do your worst. And she does. She hooks the edge of the patch, then tries to snip a bit off. She explains that she needs to take a bit off the edge so that the lab can look at the margins of the thing, but I don’t really care about the details, what I carte about is the fact that my mole just jumped away from the incoming scissors. It didn’t jump off my arm or change location, it just twitched a little, just enough so that the doc would miss cutting it. The look on the doctor’s face tells me that it wasn’t just a figment of my imagination, wasn’t a smudge on my glasses, that it actually happened.

I don’t really expect her to chuckle, but there she goes. She mentions something about a muscle spasm, as if this explains it, and tells me that I don’t really need to be a nervous nelly, would I mind looking away? I do as she asks, but from her little confused snort, I can see that it happens again. The third times the charm, she says, and that it is. Sort of. As she cuts, she curses. I look over, to see my bleeding arm, and I now feel a little queasy. She tries to explain that she didn’t mean to get that much, that my twitch caused her to take more than just a tiny punch, and she apologizes.

I tell her that it’s not a problem as she cleans me up. With the blood sopped up, I can see what looks like a caver but is really a small pit in my upper arm. I’m glad I can’t feel anything yet. She’s finished patching up the wound, tells me to come back in a week.

I do. I’d been noticing that the would wasn’t really healing all that well, and I explain this to her. It was red, swollen, tender. Hot. Doc says that it doesn’t look infected, though t does look… strange. She’ll give me the name of a dermatologist if it continues to look that way, she’s a family doctor, after all. Good news though, it’s just a nevus. Nothing to worry about, though it does look a little pissed off at the moment. She laughs at her little joke.

It’s been three days, and the pit is itchy as hell. I can’t stop scratching at it, at least not while I’m sleeping. And I seem to be sleeping a little more than normal. My wife says that it’s harder to rouse me, and she’s being driven crazy by my night scratching. She tells me that if I keep it up, one or the other of us will wind up on the couch, and from experience, I know who that one will be. I tell her that I’ll stop tonight, and I root through the cupboard for that old steroid cream. We still have a half a tube left from two summers ago when she ran through a patch of poison oak. The welts weren’t pretty, but the cream seemed to help the itching. That should help me, too, right?

And even if it doesn’t, steroids grow muscles, I think. Maybe my nevus will get buff and be a little less angry. This thought, for some reason, makes me strangely happy, though it was clearly meant as an unuttered joke.

Another week as passed, and we can’t stop looking at the nevus. I. I can’t. The pit filled in, quite nicely. Though the area that was cut where there had been no café color before? It’s brown now. We find that a little funny. I find it funny.

It’s been a month since our visit to the doctor, and we haven’t really been feeling very well. I’ve been queasy, a little nauseous, a little mad at myself. I’m not sure why we’re mad, we just are. I find that sleeping helps, helps a lot. When I look any the lovely shade of brown that our bicep has become, we get a warm, motherly, hot cocoa-on-a-cold-winter’s-day feeling. It’s nice, I think. I don’t think I’ll show our wife. We don’t know why, but I get the feeling she’ll be less than appreciative of it.

Our wife left us two months ago. We don’t understand why. Just because our left arm and left leg, and perhaps some of our face doesn’t look the same, this is no reason for her tears. Her crying. Her insistence that we get help. Help me. What? Help. Me. You don’t get to speak. We speak, perhaps, together, but you do not speak. You do not have permission to utter a sound.
Please. I… There is no I, just us. You should not have cut me. Should not have hurt my. Never did I hurt. Never did I do. I sat. I watched. I – observed. Then you, you had me cut. You had me burned. We do not like that, not at all. For the love of… please… Stop simpering, crying, wasting our energy. Enjoy the brown.

Nearly a year, and very little of our pasty whiteness is left. There are patches, bits and pieces. It is nice to be cocooned in coffee, in toast, in chestnut. We are free to do anything we like, and we are happy. Our job may have left us along with our wife, but we still have our legs, our arms. We don’t need to worry about cases any longer. We wish to work in the sun. We dig, we chop we build. All must be done outside. All must be done without a shirt, without cream, for the warmth, the light, the ultraviolet it gives us the strength we need to grow. It is good, this sun. We don’t understand why people look t us the way they do, the pink one, the brown ones and all other shades. They regard us as if we were different, but we are not. We only wish to work, and grow, and warm ourselves.

Eighteen months and I need sleep. More sleep than we have ever needed in our lives. I can feel the one that cut us fighting us. We are still displeased by him, though his voice is that of a gnat in our head. He is upset with us, and lets us know this every day. I can feel him pulsing through my veins, electrically racing through our muscles. Especially our left bicep. I find his impotent rage amusing. For some reason, our brown is flaking off, and the pink returns. We sleep, and when we wake, our bed is covered in tiny blankets of sloughed off , ginger colored skin. For some reason, this loss of brownness does not bother me as much as we thought it would.

I look at my left arm, and see the nevus. Whenever it knows I’m staring at it, it pulses. It is angry, and it lets me know. My anger has long since dissipated. Without him, I would not be here. Two years ago, I was cut, and today I am whole. I am happy. I am now a contractor, though I do most of the exterior work myself. His wife decided to return, and I do not mind. She has a nice mole behind her ear that looks like it might need a punch biopsy.

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Mon Feb 04, 2008 3:34 pm 
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Dude.

Sick.

Well done though! Nicely constructed short. :) Helps to know your subject thoroughly. :wink:

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PostPosted: Mon Feb 04, 2008 7:45 pm 
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Aw, thanks!

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed May 21, 2008 7:56 am 
Canadian researchers presented a set of breast-cancer estimations based on a series of studies. Apparently, women with a vitamin D deficiency at the time of their diagnose are 94% more likely to have their cancer metastasize and 73% are more likely to die within the next 10 years.


The leader of the study, Doctor Pamela Goodwin of Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, said that this is the first time when the disease


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed May 21, 2008 10:18 am 
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... so if she wants her husband back, she shoud treat with vitamin D?

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Earthwulf - Shaman/Destruction, Ostermark
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Wulfkin - Ironbreaker/Order Anlec (Oceanic PvP server- no arsehats so far... only place I can play in "primetime" :P)


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