Frozen In Florida

As I drove to the doctor’s office yesterday the temperature sign above the bank read 92 degrees, but once I got into the office I was frozen.

Not all of me, you understand, just bits and pieces of me here and there.

The doctor applied cryosurgery to a number of actinic keratosis places on my arms, legs and face. That is he squirted me with liquid nitrogen to freeze various precancer growths which I’m sprouting like a field of mushrooms after a three-day rain.

Apparently as a typical Florida boy 50 years ago, I ran around for all summer every summer without a shirt, and sunlight damaged my skin but it’s not showing up until now.

The medical community calls such damage to the skin “actinic keratosis” which sounds so much better than “dirt warts”. They say it’s caused by sunlight, not by never washing behind your ears.

My doctor says actinic keratosis is a precursor to squamous cell carcinoma, which is a precursor to subclinical lesions, which are precursors to a metastasizing spread to the internal organs, which is a precursor to dying.

However, he squirted many of them with Raid or whatever was in that canister and zapped them all. Except for a few that he’ll have to cut off and biopsy at a future visit.

In essence, my health situation remains in the nuisance stage at the moment. There is no immediate danger of my dying. I’ll probably live for hours yet.

A bigger nuisance for me involves my progress proofreading the Christmas book. I read over each chapter in this manuscript dozens of times before I sent it off to the printer. Yet, in the proof pages I find typos on practically every page!

How can this be?

Perhaps if I learned to type… Yes, although I’ve earned my living as a freelance writer for 25 years, I’ve never learned to type. Amazing. Shameful but amazing.

25 years of writing without learning to type!

God must look after drunks, fools and writers.

Another odd nuisance is that the proof pages for the Civil War diary have not arrived yet. The post office tracking number shows the pages have been in Philadelphia since September 2^nd and have not moved from there.

The only thing I can figure is that some clerk in the Philadelphia Post Office is reading the whole book before he sends it on.

I hope he enjoys it.

Meanwhile, I’ll continue to proof the Christmas book, even though the temperature is 92 degrees outside.