Tomorrow i will have surgery on my pre-cancerous (hopefully) actinic keratosis growing on my lower right leg. The 0.5 inch diameter mass is about 3/8 in thick/deep and located over the left of the shin bone about 4 to 4.5 inches abov e the ankle. I t started about 4 months ago but didn’t get much notice until about 2.5 to 3 months ago. I called the Associates in Dermatorology in Orlando to set up an appointment with the Physcian’s Assistant in their Lake Underhill office only to find out that she was on an emergency family leave of absence. They said someone would cover for her and they would note that I wanted an appointment. About Thanksgiving or before they finally got back to me and said someone would be there on Dec 3rd. But I had a pre-existing conflict on that date. I called them again in early December with the intention of going to one of their other offices to see a Dermatology MD doctor and found they were completely booked throughout December. With prodding on my part, they made an appointment for me on Jan 7, 2011 at their Sand Lake office. My leg was huring by this time, kind of a burning sensation of pain.
Because by now I was overly fretting about this and losing sleep over it (middle of the night), I then made an appointment with my primary care physician to look at it in 4 days. He called it an actinic kerotosis and said it would get larger, then probably stop growing. He said it was probably benign but that there may be some cancer cells down in there somewhere. Also, he said it was infected (the cause of the pain) so he gave me an antibiotic.
He set me up with an appointment with a local surgeon that I’ve seen in the past, but this took another week. The surgeon confirmed what it was and that it was infected but the infection appeared to be receding. He wouldn’t do surgery until the infection was gone. Furthermore, he said he couldn’t do the removal in his office because the location and what he needed to do were too complicated. I would have to go into the hospital and go under mild anesthesia (twilight sedation) for a same day surgery. He tried to schedule it the next week, but that day was only one day before I was going up to Michigan for the holidays.
The next appointment was set for 03-Jan-11, but his office eventually moved it to Jan 5 instead. Surgery was set up at that appointment for Jan 13, but the next day I had to postpone it because I learned that the new contractor had set up an open house to meet old contractor personnel on that same day. So now surgery is scheduled for the 20th. On Jan. 5 i also went to Parrish Hospital and went through registration and medical tests: bloodwork, EKG, urine and a visit with a nurse who explained the surgery pre-surgery and what i had to do. The surgeon had me going off of warfarin on Friday Jan 7 and on a somedrug bridge until the night before surgery then back on warfarin the day after surgery and still on the bridge drug for 4 or 5 more days. I shifted all this by one week when I had to postpone the surgery, though. Sorry, I feel I’ve written enough for now.
