November 2004 Archives

After a month-long elective, I got back to surgical pathology last week only to be handed a tray of slides that consisted of the worst, most horrible, most gut-wrenching case I have ever seen. A young person dying of melanoma.

I have started to form a list of the diseases that I don't want to get - mostly as a joke, to pass the time with my friend Patty, a way of mentally sorting different pathologies into emotional categories, so as to make them easier to remember. Up until last monday the things on that list, which was written on a paper towel and stuck to a wall with a post-it note, consisted of:

Things I Don't Want to Get:
- apalastic anemia (where your bone marrow basically gets wiped out by a mysterious unidentifiable cause)
- Naegleria Fowleri meningoencepahlitis (from a parasite that lives in stagnant fresh water that gets up into your brain when you dive into a pond and has a 95% chance of killing you within like 2 days)

And then I had to review the slides from someone close to my age. Awful. Melanoma is now officially on the list. It is horrible and insidious, and comes back when you think it is gone, years and years later. It dives deep. It hides out in small lymp channels for years, only to resurface as deadly, uncurable full-body disease.

Shit.

People, get your moles checked.