Art and Health
I'm going to talk about the challenge I had this year for Inktober, a little bit.
I haven't really been public about it, because I did not want to field a billion questions and make a big deal about it if it turned out to be nothing. And the last time I had a health scare, people were super nosy about it, I tried to satisfy everyone who asked, that I was going to be okay, but people still wanted more information than I was comfortable giving in a public forum.
So I am going to talk about this here, and only here. So for Inktober this year I was dealing with a healing surgical incision on my arm. It was my inking arm, because while I am cross dominant and often draw with either hand, I do not own any left handed dip pens, mainly because I prefer to not get ink all over myself, and as an art form and drawing tool, ink is not left hand friendly without a lot of extra expense.
So the reason for the surgical incision was cancer. And as the biopsy found, it was a bad type of cancer. Superficial Spreading Melanoma.
This is a malignancy that spreads outward on the skin's surface, until one day it dives from the epidermal layer, to the dermis, and enters the rest of your system from there.
Now, I am pale, red headed, freckled to within an inch of my life, and see a dermatologist every six months because I also have (here's a shocker) a crap ton of shit wrong with my fucking skin. So we had been watching this one particular freckle for a while. Mainly because I have typical red-head "orange" freckles, and this one was brown, and large to begin with.
So for the last five years they had taken out their little scope thing and taken a good look at it and also the occasional picture to compare with later.
Well, sometime in June 2025, I was out with the fambly, and Bird said: "Oh! Your freckle looks like a little heart!"
I looked at it, and she was right, it was heart shaped!
Cool, right?
NO. NOT COOL, AT ALL!
it had never been heart shaped before.
A month later, it no longer looked heart shaped
So I was due for my next derm appointment in August and I made a note to mention that we might want to do a compare photo this time.
I told the doctor about the change in shape, he looked at it before I finished with story and said,
"yah, I can kind of see sort of heart... but really, to me, it looks like it's shaped like Paper Mario." I looked and it definitely looked like a silhouette of Paper Mario. I finished telling him that the heart she saw was gone in a month, and the Paper Mario-ness was new.
So they opened up my baseline images and compared, and then said
"Yup it's time for a biopsy."
I will spare you the aggravation of waiting three weeks for results (thanks, labor day weekend! My panic disorder and I really loved waiting through that, after not hearing anything for a two weeks)
It was bad, they said, but we caught it in time, they said, and we are sure we can get all of it, they said.
So to get all of it, they had to make a sort of circle around it and then like an eye shaped long oval around that to close it up in a straight-ish line.
The supervising doctor gave me a stay out of the sun lecture and I said,
"I DO stay out of the sun!"
"Everyone says that, but you really have to!" he said "I have been red-headed and freckled for 55 years, I have staying out of the sun down to a fucking science."
he said
"Holy crap you're 55?!?!" and checked my chart, "I thought you were mid 30's!!" "That's because I NEVER GO OUT IN THE FUCKING SUN."
He said
"Touché, you got me there."
I decided to trust him after that because he admitted he'd made an incorrect assumption, and I find that worthy of respect.
Anyway, I now have a, healing, 9 cm scar on my arm, to remove the freckle (which was about half a centimeter) and the surrounding tissue (to make sure they got a clean edge)
The post procedure biopsy says they got it all, the edge had no malignant cells in it.
But I now have to go to the dermatologist every 3 months instead of every 6, and they are going to be checking me over and cataloguing any sus looking skin stuff.
So that's what's been going on.
I was a little worried that I would not be able to do or finish Inktober because of the healing, it was tight and itchy and painful and my arm got super sore and tired easy at first. But I am pretty impressed I managed to finish. I don't think it was my best work, but I never do, so that's not new.
Updating this for reasons, more fun cancer story under the cut
So it was healing fine, and then one day it was not.
My first 3 month check up came and there was significant redness on the scar , right where the cancer, or, as I have been calling it, The Evil Freckle of DOOM™, had been.
They said it looked like there might be an ingrown hair (valid since it had been bandaged and scar stripped consistently since the removal) and possibly a little inflammation because of the sub-dermal stitches dissolving...
Two days later it looked like a giant blood blister.
a day after that it broke open and a little, off-white, thread looking thing oozed out of it.
Fam, I panicked.
BUT, they gave me an urgent appointment, and then bumped that up to today because someone cancelled.
Apparently based on pics I sent them, they were afraid they'd missed the "deep dive" part and it was reoccurring and metastasizing.
I am happy to report it was just my crappy auto immune disorder deciding it had had enough dissolving stitches and would now be setting up a histamine reaction and attacking it instead.
they said it is looking fine and the edges are not discolored or cancerous-looking and that now that the Stitch ( the gross thread that oozed out of me) has been kicked out?!?! It should be fine, but to send more pictures ASAP if it isn't.
My dears, let me tell you, there has never been as well a documented melanoma ever, I have so many pictures of this fucking thing I am going to turn it into a short animation of grossness.
