Boxes of Flesh

The doctor told me he was 99% certain that the spot on the back of my neck—which had bled and irritated and invited questions from friends and still yet remained hidden from my own view—was skin cancer. I pressed him hopefully for clarification: “So, there’s a chance it’s not skin cancer.” 

“I’m 99.99% confident that this is skin cancer, but we’re going to take a biopsy anyway,” he said, turning away and preparing some items on a nearby tray. Never had a man expressed so much mathematical certainty about my body, which was now nearly naked and on display for a room of increasingly numerous onlookers. The first doctor had called in another, and then another, who took notes on a small clipboard but said nothing. The second doctor, perhaps ten years older than the first, proceeded to examine me just as the first had: using his gloved hands, he grabbed bits of skin and fat and made little hmm and mmm sounds as he poked and prodded my chest, sides, my butt, my thighs. The third doctor, the oldest of the three, nodded sagely and continued to make scribbles on his clipboard. 

This was not the first time I had been stripped down and grabbed in a room of men who were evaluating my body, but this was the first time that my evaluators weren’t naked too. The second and third doctors—neither of whom were introduced by name—left me alone again with the first doctor. He was handsome, dark-skinned, fit. I couldn’t help but wonder how many pale, chunky cancer-bags like me he had to size up and dismiss every week. 

He allowed me to dress again and he proceeded to numb my neck. I closed my eyes while he punched a hole in my skin using a device that looked like an industrial crafting supply. He gave me a doggie bag of Vaseline, bandages, and pamphlets on the dangers of suntanning. He said he’d call me in a few days and we’d take it from there. I checked my email, looked for missed calls on my phone, but nothing came. 

The wound took time to heal, and my husband dressed it every night. We didn’t have a hand mirror and it was impossible for me to set up an array of reflective surfaces to get a live look at it. The pictures he took with my phone didn’t seem to reveal its true nature, color, size, and shape. Some days he thought it looked better, other days not so good. It’s probably the angles, the lighting, I thought. I didn’t really want to look at it anyway. It was easier to ignore it, to pretend there was nothing there at all.  

Three weeks passed after the doctor ghosted me. It was comforting to believe that no news was good news, but I was getting alarmed by the prospect that my cancer had been growing while the hospital had completely forgotten to tell me. I called the dermatology office and left a message. Days passed before another doctor called me and told me that yes, it was cancer, but just basal cell carcinoma, so it was at least one of “good” cancers. Yes, your body is flawed but I’ve seen worse.

I would need to wait until April for my surgical appointment. That would be another three months, and all the while I’d worry about this patch of undesirable flesh on my neck, visible to everyone but me. 

My date with the scalpel was scheduled for 7:30 in the morning. I wore an old white t-shirt, something that could be easily discarded if it got stained with blood or surgical dyes. Over that, a beat-up blue and white plaid flannel that had a button missing on the left wrist. Its label was “Faded Glory”—the house brand of Walmart. I had slept for barely four hours and I looked like a wreck.  

The surgeon would be performing a procedure called Mohs surgery. She would cut out a hunk of my cancerous neck skin and send it to an on-site laboratory for staining and imaging, a process that would take an hour at least. If the sliced bit of skin contained the entire carcinoma, I would be free to go. If the sample showed cancer cells around its margins, then that would mean more skin needed to be cut, stained, and examined. The process would be repeated as necessary. Most of the day would be spent waiting and wondering what the guys in the lab would say about the part of my body I would offer them a glimpse of.  

The first cut was meant to be a deep one, but after the initial local anesthesia I felt only a bit of pressure as the surgeon did her work. When the skin was excised, she electrically cauterized the wound and I smelled my own body burning. The nurse bandaged me up and I got up from the chair. On a tray, I saw a transparent box with two chunks of bloody skin in it. “Is that mine?” I  asked, eyeballing the gobs of meat. “That’s all you,” she told me. 

The nurse took my phone number just in case I wandered away from the clinic during my long wait. By now I was even more exhausted and sloppy-looking than when I had arrived at the clinic, so intended to stay put in the waiting room, where only the other Mohs people would see me and the lump of gauze stuck to my neck. The waiting room was stocked with beverages and granola bars. I cracked open a Diet Coke and distracted myself with my cell phone, a tether of normalcy in this eerily calm, transitory space.  

Mildly concerned texts had come in from my husband, from my mom, from my sister.  Answering them back felt like an acquiescence to the strangeness of the surgery, the validation that this minor cancer was a real thing that I had to take seriously. 

It was Growlr that distracted me the most. Branding itself “the Gay Bear Social Network,”  Growlr is a safe place for men who are too hairy for Grindr and too fat for Scruff. All three apps operate on the premise of user proximity as mapped out on a grid of thumbnail photos: the closer that other users’ boxes are to your home square, the nearer they are in real space. These app grids are a mix of men eager to show their faces, men eager to show anything but their faces, and—the most mysterious of all—the empty profiles with a blank generic avatar. I mostly show my face. 

Someone familiar (let’s call him Rick, why not?) was showing as ten feet away from me that day, and active just 20 minutes or so prior to my viewing his profile. I recognized his face. We had viewed each other’s profiles for years on gay apps, all of which have some sort of rudimentary “who has viewed me?” stalk-metric. We had chatted before but nothing had come of those interactions: by our mutual profile declarations, we were not sexually compatible, and neither of us was ever that interested in the other—except in those lonely times when we felt that no one else was interested in us. To be on the gay internet is to always be aware that you are someone else’s option even if they never select you. To use a gay app is to see those same faces on the grid and to be certain that they’ve seen your thumbnail but have never bothered to look deeper than the surface. 

Rick’s profile said he worked with cancer biopsies, and here I was in this skin cancer clinic with an on-site imaging laboratory. I left the waiting room and walked down the long hallway to pass by the lab, which was visible through long glass windows. Inside, I saw two men in lab coats shuffling around from countertops to microscopes. One of them was clearly Rick. I knew he was tall—Growlr had told me he was more than 6 feet—though he looked different from the elaborately curated photo of his face, a selfie chosen from at least a dozen other versions of the same selfie. I was keenly aware that my own profile pic, a serendipitous portrait taken during one glorious summer dusk, was an overstatement of the pale careworn face that was currently peering through the lab windows at my accidental appmate.

“This may sound totally weird,” I messaged Rick after I sat down in the waiting room again, “but I think you may be working on my cancer biopsy lol.” There is no more useful punctuation mark than “lol,” a way to distance yourself from the interlocutor and your own locution at once. It wasn’t long before Rick replied, though in a waiting room time loses its cadence and rhythm:  “lol.” 

“You’re here for Mohs surgery?” he continued. I replied in the affirmative. He asked who my surgeon was, and I told him her name. “She’s good,” he said. “You’re in good hands.” I said thank you, told him how weird it was to talk to him here in this place. “Lol, yeah,” he  responded. “Are you taking care of my biopsy?” I asked. No, it wasn’t him, but his coworker, but Rick would let me know if he learned anything. I asked him for more information on the coworker who would be examining my sample. “He’s a bitch,” he said.

By this time, other messages had come in, as other users—some global, some local—began to notice I had become active on the app. Some messages were “Hi.” Some were “Woof!” which is the app’s default way of flirting or otherwise expressing approbation at another user’s profile contents. Some were notifications that another user had unlocked their pictures at me, inviting me to click on their profiles and see what had previously been hidden: sometimes faces, sometimes body parts. In this place where my skin had been sliced and was now under the microscope, bared chests and dick pics and naked asses came flying at me from men in Canada or Brazil or wherever. This was the closest to normal I was going to get. “Woof,” I replied back to some of them.  

What was possibly thirty minutes and certainly one full Diet Coke passed. Rick had an update for me. The surgeon would have to take another pass with the knife, but he seemed positive that that would be the end of it. I thanked him and waited for the nurse to come and tell me the news that this gay backchannel had already provided.  

The second surgery went slightly less smoothly than before. The gauze was stuck fast to my hair with tape and blood. What finally got peeled off looked like a gory mess. The room was uncomfortably bright with the late morning sun. It was approaching 11:30AM, and I was exhausted and wanted to go home. I waited some more for the surgeon, who at this point was probably getting in a quick lunch. I was hungry but I didn’t want to have an appetite. I looked out the window at the hospital wing that was under construction, and saw some workers down there lined up at a food truck waiting for their lunches. I kept imagining my own flesh, packaged in that clear plastic bento box.  

The surgeon came back from her break and told me what Rick and the nurse had already let me know: there was still cancer on the margin and there would need to be another pass. “Yes, OK then,” I said, which is how you say “lol” in real life sometimes. Another slice and burn and gauzejob, and I was back in the waiting room, now dazzled in the afternoon sun, now more filled with the sounds of construction workers jackhammering outside.  

The occupants of the waiting room had shifted: the old man with the bandage on his face was gone, the old woman with the bandage on her leg had moved into my old seat by the electrical outlet, and now a middle-aged guy who had no visible signs of surgery had appeared. I tried to optimize my distance, to get more than ten feet away from everyone in this awful grid of chairs.  

We all looked down at our phones, away from this bright alien place with its apocalypse food stash.

Rick messaged me. “How are you feeling?” I told him I was as good as I could be after having my neck sliced open twice. “Lol,” he said. An hour passed, maybe, before he messaged again: “I think you’re going to go home soon.” I thanked him, and told him I was grateful that he kept me company in this place. I asked him if he helped all the gay patients this way. “Lol no.”  

I was brewing up a coffee pod when the nurse came to escort me to the patient room. She confirmed what Rick had guessed: the cancer was gone and I would be leaving soon. The surgeon had one last procedure: in order to stitch the wound, she would need to cut along the length of my neck, pull the sides of skin together, and then truss the whole thing up. I felt like a roast turkey, an old boot, a pair of ill-fitting jeans. “You’ll notice it will be bumpy for a while,”  she said. “And when it flattens out, all you’ll see is the scar.” She bonded my future scar shut with purple skin glue and the nurse piled on one last mound of gauze. The surgeon filled out a prescription for Tylenol-Codeine and prepared a printout of wound care instructions, and then she was gone.  

I messaged Rick that I was going home, and he told me to take care of myself. I walked past the laboratory, but I didn’t see him in there. I would have to let him remember me by my profile pic, and my stained deli-thin slice of cancer skin. We might see each other online again, and that would be that. I walked out of the double doors of the dermatology surgery suite and into the main lobby of the hospital. It was mid-afternoon and the place was full of patients, visitors, and staff. People glanced over and looked at my neck, and then they looked away again. 

That night I removed the final wad of gauze and tried to catch a glimpse in the mirror of the jagged purple ridge that ran from the nape of my neck up behind my left ear. As ever, the mirror was no help. I angled my cell phone at the wound and snapped photo after awkward photo. I tried with flash on, and with no flash. I tapped the screen in random spots to adjust the focus, sight unseen. I must have taken dozens of them before I gave up, filling my camera roll with gratuitous neck pics. Later on I would take those painkillers, let them distract me from the dull ache that had started to throb in my head, and stare down at the grid of flesh on my phone to find the perfect version of my wound.

Michael P. Williams is a librarian and Associate Editor of Boss Fight Books, a documentary-style nonfiction series of books. He is also the author of Chrono Trigger, volume 2 in the Boss Fight series. He has published shorter nonfiction in The Appendix and The Atlantic, and will be featured in forthcoming anthologies from ૧૦:૧૦ Press and Bone & Ink Press. Michael lives in Philadelphia, and is on Twitter as @theunfakempw.