Stitches come out, results are back, is it cancer?

Nope. Hooray! Thank goodness for that!

The whatever-it-was on my face was a weird-looking form of pre-cancer called lichenoid solar keratosis. If you look at the three pictures at the top of this page, mine looked exactly like the one in the middle. Same place on my face, too. Sometimes they can become cancerous, but it hadn't reached that stage yet. Glad it's gone though.

They took my stitches out (which really didn't hurt at all, it just prickled a bit) and Chris Adams (my plastic surgeon) said that the cut has healed really well, and that I don't need to see him again. Yaay! Thank you Chris!

I got him to take a couple of pictures of the cut with the stitches in, and another after the stitches were gone. I've just taken a closer look at them (in preparation for putting them online - and I have to say I totally didn't realise how long the cut was. Yikes! Hope the scar won't be too bad!

Now I just have to put "paper tape" on the cut for the next 6-8 weeks to help reduce scarring, and I'll be all set.

He also said to me "You should wear a sunhat and sunblock for the rest of your life", which I think is good advice for anyone who lives here. I almost always do anyway, but (as I confessed in my first blog post about this subject) not always when I'm gardening. So that'll have to change. You can get moisturiser that contains sunblock so maybe I should switch to using that every day instead of my current moisturiser.

I asked the lovely nurse how Chris had done the cut, as I couldn't figure out how they had ended up with such a long neat scar when they had had to remove a round patch of skin about the size of my thumbnail, and she said it was "eye-shaped", which accounts for the length of the scar. So there you go. Now I know.

And yaay for me not having skin cancer!

Technorati tags: skin cancer, lichenoid solar keratosis, age spot, plastic surgery, New Zealand, health.