It really is April 2007 but have been busy with other things so will backdate this to fill in the blanks.
Luck would have it that we managed to get a few days off and a cheap ticket back to Oz for a few days. Lucky we did!
I grew up in North Queensland where it was as hot as Hades most of the year and nobody but station people and people wishing to be labelled as ‘pooftas’ wore any kind of head gear.
What that meant was that the sun was crisping our skin cells from a very young age. The net result is that Australia has the highest incidence of skin cancer in the world by a significant margin.
In the last twenty years, lots of publicity has made the general public away of this issue and skin specialists are a thriving profession. The disease is so widespread that most General Practitioners have cyclinder of liquid nitrogen beside the desk to give a patient a quick zap if needed. Neither party think this is strange at all. Most GP’s err on the side of caution as well so a significant number of potential nasty lumps and bumps are stopped in their tracks.
I’m about average. I already have had a couple of spots removed from my face. In the good old days, this usually meant surgery and skin grafts as they don’t fool around when they excise a spot (see below). Thanks to the wonders of science there is now a cream that if caught early enough negates the need of surgery. I’ve used the cream three times now. It makes the area look like raw hamburger meat and for about three weeks it feels like someone is constantly pricking you with needles but the final result is a no more cancer in that area AND without surgery or skingrafts.
Every trip back to Oz, I make it a point to visit my skin doctor to give me that once over. This time, there was a ‘don’t like the look of that, lie down, snip’, a call a few hours later, come back and some surgery to remove something the size of a pin head from my chest.
Now here is the scary part, it was the size of a head of a pin on my chest which meant I probably saw it every day in the bath/shower, and it was well on the way to becoming the reason I would be in a coffin if untreated. Shock!
Remember the size was about pinhead size, the scar is now about 10cm (4 inches) long and the piece cut out was the size of an elongated eye. They don’t fool around when then excise something. Here’s a hint – see your skin doctor once a year if you are an adult Australian.