All Hail Étaín, the Irish Goddess of the Sun and Dermatology

Sitting in the surgeon’s recliner (when you are getting surgery in a comfy recliner, you can’t take it but so seriously), I knew that my time in this place was as inevitable as Kevin McCarthy’s embarrassment. 

When I got to the operating room, these were laying out on a table

The surgeon, a thoroughly charming woman who bonded with Stacy over her goat socks (pictures, not hair), chatted on like we were at a coffee klatch while she gouged a trench into the top of my skull with some sort of weeding tool for a tiny house, looking to uproot and yank out a slow-growing skin cancer.

Now, before anyone gets concerned, there was very little skin cancer left up there after the exceedingly aggressive biopsy. So here I sit here today, skin cancerless for now (more on that later), sporting a pathetic future scar hiding under a cute, minimalist tuft of cotton bandage sitting proudly upon the top of my head like an odd Shriner’s holiday hat.

But my date with dermatological destiny was foretold by my ancestry and my age (that is, the age I grew up in). As a half-Irish, half-Norwegian, part-Scot, I’ve got as much skin pigment as the next ghost. Among my people, sun lamps are also known as “lamps.” I once got a nasty burn leafing through a National Geographic magazine. I remember a long two-hour drive home from Virginia Beach, car air conditioner blowing full power on my blistering face, as my parents maundered in a sing-songy Scandinavian brogue, “It’s our lot, boy! Best suffer it like the little blonde leprechaun you are.”

My hair is – or was – extraordinarily fine (and not in a fine way), offering zero protection from the sun. I might as well have worn a tanning bed on my head from the age of 5. Then what little topside protection I had began deserting me as the hair fell out of my head and took root on my back, and what was left was just a tuft of cornsilk that had lost its will to live. I had a thin, translucent atmosphere hovering over the lumpy contours of my skull. I knew I was balding. I knew you knew I was balding. But I ended up shaving my head because I needed to be sure that you knew that I knew that I was balding.

Setting aside the inevitability of skin issues when someone with my complexion and coiffe grows up in the tropical climes of Richmond, Virginia, there was also the epoch of my UV exposure. For most of industrialized human existence, a milky white complexion was a sexy signifier that you were wealthy enough not to have to work outdoors. Then came the development of expensive but accessible global travel, when suddenly a sporty tan tipped off potential mates and rivals that you had the wherewithal to travel wherethehell you wanted for pleasure, including exotic locales (read: out of the Arctic Circle). Suddenly it was attractive for white people to be brown (obviously, it wasn’t so pleasing to white people if you were actually brown, because we (whites) were historically born not only without rhythm, but also without irony or shame).

This was the Dawning of the Age Aquarius, as well as the Suntan Industrial Complex. Empires were built on the broad shoulders of Hawaiian Tropic bikini models. Coppertone became the aroma memory that still transports an entire generation back to their happiest days. But for most pale teenagers and young adults at the time these institutional players were too meek. We went rogue, slathering ourselves with baby oil and other UV accelerants, then force multiplied the roasting juices by laying in the sun on reflective blankets. Even that wasn’t enough, and the “tanning bed” industry emerged, no doubt the second idea of a guy who initially tried launching the Russian Roulette Party Game.

Using all of these tools and more, we got that savage tan that would turn heads and…

…eventually land many of us in comfy recliners, numbed down to our ears while a chatty and very nice surgeon dug into our skulls like a gold rush prospector.

As I said earlier, though, the expedition was a success, and the skin cancer has been torn out root and bone. But when the doctor looked across the rest of the garden of my noggin, she noted the many saplings of actinic keratoses (precancerous growth) that will inevitably bloom in a squamous spring.

So now I need to apply a chemotherapy skin cream (seriously, that’s what it is) to my scalp, forehead, temples and (yeeesh) ears to remove those pesky precursors. The good news: it’s a 7-day treatment. The bad news: it very likely will blister and burn my skin to the point where it looks like I popped my head in the door at Chernobyl just to see what was going on.

So I’ll be holed up in my basement for the next six weeks. But it’s worth it, because getting numb in a recliner as I grow old(er) is something I only want to do at home.