if it's monday, it must be two surgeries.

i'm thirty-three years old, and my body has failed me. for starters, i have what's called a granuloma (basically a collection of angry acid reflux-related tissue) on one of my vocal cords. if you're not squeamish, this is what it looks like.

we'll wait for those brave enough to take the journey.

are you back? easy now -- those are vocal cords. although looking that up made me half-close my laptop lid for fear of being branded the coffee shop perv. anyhoo, one might surmise that such a hindrance may have the silver lining of giving the victim some measure of gravelly vocal sexiness. one would surmise wrong. or wrongly. kinda painted myself into a grammatical corner there. the point is that this thing makes me sound like i'm just about to cry, all the time. not cool.

so, aside from all the false heightened emotion around my house right now, i suppose it's not too bad. i have "the meds," and it'll get better. or it won't, and they'll cut it out of me.

speaking of...

what a segue...or segway...whatever. either is a great way to get from here to there.

so i had a smallish mole on my leg excised a few weeks ago (if you really feel a link would be appropriate at this point, and you can handle it, then check it out here). not a huge deal -- it was a little bigger than they like 'em to be, so they got rid of it. when the biopsy came back (should i really be getting biopsies?? i'm tellin' ya, i'm falling apart), there was no cancerousness, but the cell structure was a little fishy. the docs decided to be safe and take a little more of my body away from me.

so monday, i went in for a little of the ol' outpatient surgery.

again, no great shakes. they wore masks, i tried not to look. they were wonderfully friendly and when it was over, they complimented each other on how glorious a thing they had just accomplished. (you know, the usual.) they wrapped me up and i was out. i picked up a pizza for the fam on the way home, like you do. beautiful august late afternoon, pimpin' back to the car with my hard-earned dinner reward...

what's that dripping on my foot?

turns out i'm walking down the street, leg bleeding everywhere, like i was just the unfortunate target of the world's lamest drive-by. so i stop, gaping like an idiot at the blood now pooling in my four-dollar flip-flops. (well, the left one, anyway.) what the hell do i do now? the surgery ended forty minutes ago, and it's after five. for all i know, my esteemed physicians are hoisting Jager bombs at college night by now. more importantly, how am i gonna get home without getting blood all over my car?

thankfully, the missus keeps old rags in the back for just these types of things and i got home, staggered up the front steps, delivering dinner for my family like the hunter-gatherer that i am -- and positively terrifying my three-year-old:

(him, ashen-faced)"Daddy, are those all boo-boos?!?"
(me, wiping leg furiously) "No, buddy. See? Comes right off. Doesn't hurt."
(him, ashen-faced)

after (no joke) breaking my phone on the way into the house, i managed to get hold of the on-call resident, and following some weird phone tag, i was cheerily summoned back to the crime scene for -- wait for it -- another surgery. this is not a shocking plot twist for those eagle-eyed readers who caught the foreshadowing in the title of this post, but it's slightly gobsmacking all the same.

thankfully, two of the docs who were in on the first surgery had managed to not go home yet, and we skedaddled into the closed (and now AC-less) office to see what was exactly what. it was like freakin' field medicine: hot, sweaty, lots of yelling over the sound of the Life Flight copters roaring past every five minutes. all that was missing was anthony edwards and the Soul Glo guy.

dramatic, i know. i was there. anyway, the crack diagnosis was a blown stitch caused by an overeager blood vessel, so they opened me back up, took care of the lil' bleeder and then closed me back up. again. but not before i got a peek at the open wound. my God, it was nasty. it looked like the Eye of Sauron right there on my leg. i know...gross and evil. oh, and when i said "closed me back up," what i really meant was "closed me back up except for the big hole at one end that they left open so they could stuff gauze in there and make sure it doesn't get infected and that i have to go back, like, 4 or 5 times to have checked out so that they can then close me up with full confidence that my leg won't fall off." yeah, that was it.

don't get moles, kids.