Year ends with a cancer scare that offers a valuable lesson

All I want for Christmas is a smooth forehead.

The story ( as I know it) is that in 15th century Japan, shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa broke his favorite chawan, a type of tea bowl. He sent it to China to be repaired, only to have it returned with ugly metal staples.

When a man loves a teacup, he wants it to be perfect. So, the shogun asked a local artisan to salvage it. The artist took the porcelain and filled its cracks with a mixture of lacquered resin and powdered gold. Rather than ignoring its flaws, he gilded them.

Thus began the art of kintsugi ( golden joinery) or kintsukuroi ( golden repair), in which craftspeople repair cracks with gold, silver or platinum. Rather than mask the breaks, they celebrate them, thus making the once broken cup into a kind of jewel. Art books call it wabisabi: finding beauty in the imperfect.

And speaking of imperfect ... I’ve learned this wisdom: Any doctor visit that has the word “biopsy” in it is not a good doctor visit. Thus, when my dermatologist started scraping my forehead and putting bits of it in a jar, I knew this was no ordinary acne.

“This is what happens when you live as long as you have. The human body was not designed to work this long,” she philosophized.

She called less than a day later with startling news: “The lab results came in. It’s cancer. I’m referring you to a surgeon. Let’s do this right away.” Speeding through checkout lines in hospitals is never a good sign, but by the following Thursday, I headed to UCSF on Divisadero for surgery.

Let’s call the surgeon Doctor G. This is the woman to know if you’re gonna have someone slice your face open. She walked in, all smiles, and said, “Basal cell. This is the best kind of cancer you can get.”

While she was getting her needles and scalpels ready, I looked up the condition on my phone. Doctor G was right: the Skin Cancer Foundation wrote that, when detected early, the survival rate for it is 99%. On that same page, however, I learned that 1 in 5 people will develop skin cancer by the age of 70, and that more than two people die of skin cancer in the United States every hour.

Her associate, Doctor M, walked in and asked casually, “Oh, is this your first cancer surgery?”

This was not like going skydiving or getting a tattoo, where the first thrill is always the best. I asked what the odds of coming back for round two would be. “Forty percent,” she said.

They gave me a local anesthetic and went to work. Three hours later, Doctor G smiled, “We got it. Now we get to sew you back up. There will be a scar, but don’t worry. I’m going to match it up with your wrinkles.”

I had discussed the surgery with my husband, Brian, before it happened, but not with my sons, Zane and Aidan. Thus, when I walked in the door with a pressure bandage the size of a golf ball, they gasped. When I filled them in on my melanoma melodrama, however, I wouldn’t say they were blasé, but they were both back on their iPads within seconds.

That’s the thing with this type of skin cancer. It doesn’t rise to the level of tragic films like “Brian’s Song” or “Love Story,” thus leading me to this conclusion: Avoid the minor tragedies; it inoculates your children to the big ones.

The bigger lesson is: Don’t be stupid like me. Wear a hat, stay in the shade, and put on sunscreen.

This Christmas, I am grateful. I am cancer free. A lot went wrong for us this year in the outer, outer, outer, outer Excelsior: disasters in high school, rescue dog surgeries and a COVID scare. There are dents on the Kipcap, cuts on the kitchen cabinets, stitches on Buddyboy’s legs and now an especially big wrinkle on my forehead.

But for all that’s flawed in our family, we’ve learned to gild those scars and find beauty in our imperfection.

“Oh, is this your first cancer surgery?” This was not like going skydiving or getting a tattoo, where the first thrill is always the best.