doogie howser says wear SPF 50

Since skin cancer runs in my family, yesterday I went for my annual skin check to make sure none of my moles have taken on a melanomic look to them. Actually, the truth is that it wasn't an annual visit, but more like a tri-annual (is that right?) visit because I haven't been to the dermatologist for a skin visit for more than three years, despite the fact that everytime a different doctor looks at my history (and since I had a baby a year ago, that has been quite often), they say "Wow, with your history, you should get yourself checked yearly."

But I digress... Sort of. Because it had been so long since I'd been to the dermatologist, I couldn't remember my doctor's name, and even though I looked in all of my old phone books and online at the clinic's site, nothing sounded familiar. So when I called for an appointment, they assigned me to whoever was there and that's how I met Doogie Howser.

I was sitting there in my underclothes and one of those gowns when the door knocked and in came a fifteen year old guy in a white coat. Seriously, he looked so young I don't know how he could possibly be the resident he said he was. It was such an odd experience because I'd heard my parents talk about how odd it was to have doctors younger than you, and I'm not so young that the situation couldn't have happened to me. But all of a sudden I was pretty sure I would not be able to lift up my gown to show this young guy all my icky moles on a body that has birthed three children. I never thought I'd care whether or not my doctor was male or female or what age, but I guess that's changed and maybe I'm old. Or just vain.

Eventually I pulled myself together because it had taken me three years to get there and I had pretty much talked myself into a nasty case of melanoma with a mark on my arm, so I pretended he was a seventy year old woman and tried to forget that I was wearing a nursing bra, and the only real rough spot was when he saw the scar below my ribs (from a previous excision) and said, "Wait, isn't your appendix on the other side?" Oh wait, maybe the rougher spot was when he said it was his first day...

But either way, I walked out with a clean bill of health (a nice, older doctor did a final check) and big bottle of SPF50.

Free for another year...