MOHS Waiting Room

And plenty of waiting goes on here...the MOHS surgeon, Dr Peng, whizzes from one patient to the next in his red tennis shoes, assembly line fashion. He removes small amounts of tissue and sends his patient in a temporary bandage, off to the special MOHS waiting room to await a pathology exam. This usually takes about an hour. Layers of tissue are taken out and examined until there are ‘clean margins’. This is usually done when the cancer is on the face to avoid removing any unnecessary tissue, although it has never been the case with me. I may have fried myself  on Southern California beaches as a teenager, but I've always been careful of my face.

I could have left to get lunch and come back in an hour, but since it was raining outside, I decided to stay in the waiting room.

The special MOHS waiting room is only slightly less depressing than the regular one. Chairs filled with bandaged people line three walls. The 4th wall has a television playing exercise videos with the sound off, a fridge with ice packs in it, coffee, tea and snacks. There’s a rather dismal selection of two year old magazines which nobody reads and a small bowl of hard candy. The WiFi is almost nonexistent and the flower arrangement in the corner looks like it has been dead for years, or never lived in the first place.  I  complained to Dr Peng about the  the dreadful renditions of popular tunes played on the violin into every room.  He seemed happy to turn it off saying he'd gotten pretty good at 'tuning it out'. Good for him. It's still going through my head.

Today’s visit took a total of five hours, about 20 minutes of which were spent with Dr Peng. And I was one of the lucky ones. After waiting an hour and a half in the special MOHS waiting room,  I was called back in, declared ‘clear’, stitched and bandaged up and sent on my way with instructions not to ‘overdo’ it. The man pictured in the thumbnail told me he was waiting for his third trip back in. 

I was happy to get out of there...