Being Educated By You Guys, Being Examined By My Dermatologist, Being Affected By My Medication

 Here I stand, hat in hand, humbled before you. Turns out that I knew very little about PSA tests. I had NO idea that men are not advised to get them after the age of seventy unless they want to. At that age, results can be misleading and appear to indicate cancer when there is none there or to not detect a cancer if there is. This can lead to excess testing, unnecessary treatments, and anxiety. 
Also, and this one is tough to hear, a limited life span. However, according to what I've been reading, if a man is in good health and the odds are on his side for a longer lifespan, and he wants to, he can opt to get the test. One more tool in the toolbox, I suppose.

So. I'm sure that is very oversimplified but I believe those are the basic facts. And, this I did know- there are many different types of prostate cancers, some of them quite aggressive (the kind Biden has) and some really are not and don't require treatment. This reminds me a great deal of breast cancer. There are types that call for all the guns- surgery, chemo, radiation. And there are types that simply are not going to kill a woman. Or at least one type. And mammograms, like the PSA, are notorious for showing things that aren't really there or making benign things look possibly dangerous or entirely missing things that are, and almost every woman who has gotten regular mammograms has gotten at least one call-back over the years which- talk about anxiety producing! BUT, older women seem to get diagnosed with breast cancer at a higher rate than younger women. In fact, 20% of breast cancers are diagnosed in women 75 or over so there's no cut-off age for us and our testing. 

Enough of that. 

This is a picture of the room I waited in for the doctor to come and check me for skin cancer today. Yes, it was that annual appointment that I was convinced could not possibly have been scheduled correctly and yet, it had. 
I do not mind going to the dermatologist. Not sure why. Probably because I've never been diagnosed with skin cancer AND they neither weigh you nor take your blood pressure. At least mine doesn't. Also, my dermatologist cracks me up. He has the driest sense of humor. Today when I was standing before him and he was doing a full-body exam as decorously as possible, he asked me to point my right toe out and move my leg to the side. Which I did. It almost felt like a ballet move.
"Nicely done," he said. Haha! 
I showed him two places that have bothered me for awhile, never quite going away entirely, and often being itchy. He said they were pre-cancers and he burned them off. No big deal at all. He also wants me to use some kind of cream on my upper chest to get rid of some precancerous stuff going on there. He could burn it off, he said, but that would leave a glaring white spot which many women do not care to have in that area. I told him that my décolletage has not been very attractive for a long time so he could burn it all off for all I cared, but he said he preferred I used the cream. Unlike the cream I used on my face about fifteen years (or possibly twenty-five years) ago which basically burned off all of my facial skin in a long and protracted period of pain and blood and scaring the hell out of small children in the grocery store, this stuff only requires five days of applying it twice a day. 

So I am good for another year unless something scary shows up and that is something of a comfort.

Zepbound update: I feel like I'm in a slightly different stage than I was at the very beginning of taking the medication, but I'm not having any  overt food cravings, and a fairly small amount of food is quite satisfying. My hunger level feels appropriate. I'm also eating different sorts of food. Well, many of the same foods but none of the really empty calorie ones. And I don't want those. If there was a cake in this house I doubt I'd be interested. 
Brownies might be a different story but that's neither here nor there. I do feel that if there were brownies (the good ones, not that crappy ones) around, I still wouldn't be tempted to eat them. 
Weird. But rather wonderful. 

Tonight's dinner will be leftover soup which Glen insisted that he'd love to eat again. It was delicious and will probably be better tonight. I am making a loaf of bread but the ingredients are whole wheat flour, oat bran, and a little white flour along with salt,  yeast, and water. It's a good, chewy, sturdy bread and I feel no need to put butter on it. As a soup dunker, it's excellent. And I have, so far, experienced absolutely no side-effects to the medication. 

The hawk is back again. Here's a very bad picture of him. 

Or her. I really should do some research and observation before I start blithely misgendering the creature. 

I have no way to gracefully end this post so I'll just say, as usual...

Love...Ms. Moon