For 50 years I marched around the woods marking trees. My daughters’ friends thought I was a forest ranger, which would have been less pay but more fun, but the correct terminology is Consulting Forester. Every day I would gear up in tall work boots and long sleeves, fully prepared to take on the enemy of every forester: snakes and ticks. I saw my fair share of both. Thankfully I never became the victim of a rattlesnake, and the ticks were more of a nuisance. Maxine was convinced they needed to be burned off, maybe that was her Watermelon Pond influences, so often times the tick removal was more damaging than Lyme disease.
But there was something much worse than both those things which never occurred to me at the time. This thing would not only cost me money in the long run, but also my time and half of my face. I’m talking about the sun.
I asked my daughter to write about this topic because all of this was on my mind as I waited in the dermatologist’s fancy holding room FOR AN HOUR the other day. She asked me why didn’t I ever wear a hat? Well, if your job is to look up at trees and assess the condition of such, then having a ballcap just got in the way. She asked why didn’t I wear sunscreen? Because I was born in 1929 and sunscreen wasn’t a thing. I’m not sure why sometime around the 1940s, as our grandfather’s skin turned into leather, we didn’t realize the sun and cigarettes were doing quite a bit of damage. Believe it or not, during that time a leathery-skinned man was en vogue? Remember the Marlboro Man? It should have included the tagline “welcome to skin cancer.”
Showing my ignorance, I assumed that the entirety of the dozens of people in Dr. Nash’s waiting room were there for skin issues. You can understand my confusion as I looked around and saw a few flawless looking women who not only did NOT have skin cancer but could’ve been on a poster for the Barbie movie. Why were they here taking up my place in line? My daughter said “oh dad, those ladies are here for fillers?” What??? That was a more confusing sentence than last week when she told me getting a baby in your slice of king cake meant good luck. She explained that somewhere behind those magical doors that we were all staring at, craning our necks to mercifully, finally, hear our name get called out, that practitioners were doing lip and face fillers for cosmetic procedures. She said they’re called Aestheticians, and I said well they need to move to the back of the line. I have skin cancer, and while they’re worried about looking old, I AM old, 95 to be exact, and an hour of my life could be one of only a few left.
Then, and this is what I wanted my daughter specifically to mention, some other lovely looking dressed up ladies came in with briefcases and a fake smile and marched straight up to the counter. My daughter whispered, “pharmaceutical reps” and I almost lost my marbles. I have to wait in line behind them too? I questioned if any of this was even legal. Can you really make an old man with skin cancer wait in line behind young ladies delivering free samples and cupcakes? This is exactly what’s wrong with this world. We are distracted by every shiny new thing when an important serious matter is waiting in the wings. Waiting to be noticed.
All of this could be because I’m not a patient patient. I’ve always thought that “patient” was the wrong word for all of us going to see the doctor. My daughter said I sound grumpy, so I’ll end with the sign I saw on the wall of the bathroom: “Due to new privacy regulations we aren’t allowed to call in patients by their name, so could the lady with hemorrhoids please follow me?”