My face was in my hands, in my lap, and I rubbed my eyes hard, pushing them back in. The dermatologist said: "We're gonna wait a second and then do that again."

"Oh, fuuuck" I mumbled into my knees; disoriented, exhausted, "You're kidding? Can we at least wait a few minutes until the pain...'

"No, no, no.' He said quickly, interrupting again. I'd never had a doctor interrupt me before and it worried me: even when I was telling him of the cancer's habit of going away and coming back, he cut off the last four words of all my sentences. "No, we need to do it while the pain is still there," He continued, "while you're used to it. If you wait for the pain to go away completely, then you have to start from the beginning. You don't want to drag it out." He picked back up the little blowtorch of nitrogen. "Are you ready?"

"They only did it for 30 seconds last time." I told him. I felt punched in the temple and sleepy after the first minute-long freezing. I mumbled, "Oh, fuuuck," down into my knees again and felt bad for cussing in front of the old guy, but dull pain controlled my faculties.

"Well that's why the cancer came back, because they didn't do the job last time." He said. "Now it has deeper roots and it's harder to kill and it might come back again even after this. Then we'll have to cut it out." I laughed a little thinking about 'we': "we'll have to cut it out". Yeah doc, me and you: "we'll have to cut it out."

He'd offered to cut it out before, when listing off my options earlier: "Well, there's a liquid chemotherapy we can apply. But it bubbles up pretty nasty and stays like that, doesn't heal for weeks."

"No, my father had that on his lips and it was…"

"Or," He interrupted. "We can cut the cancer out and stitch the skin back together. And while that will leave a white scar, it'll also get rid of some of your freckles." He acknowledged the option with a smile as if we both knew that my freckles were as unsightly as the cancer.

"No." I said calmly. "It took me many years to come to terms with my red-headed…"

"Or your last option would be to try and freeze it again. That'd heal quickly and do just as good of a job as anything else."

"Will it work this time?" I lifted my 100-pound head out of my lap. "It better not come back because I'm not going to have health insurance anymore in a…"

"Well, the last doctor you went to treated it as a pre-cancer and I think it should be treated with the severity of a full-fledged cancer." He promised: "If I freeze it again, it won't come back."

He blasted cold pain into the dime-sized, scaly red cancer on my temple. Not sharp pain; more like two hours of Chinese water torture concentrated into two, 45 second sprays, causing dull, headache inducing, tiring pain.

Through squinted eyes I stared ahead, trying to concentrate on a military head shot of the doctor on the office wall: his days as a young soldier. I traced the curve of his ear, slowly, ignoring the sting and throb, then his medals, counted them, fuuuuuck, it took forever. I studied the soldier's mouth then closed my eyes completely and pictured my father and the new lips he kissed me with when I'd rolled into the driveway for Thanksgiving last week.

When my father backed his face away from my cheek I thought he looked like a clown with his gray hair dyed tackily to his original brown (per orders from my mom) seemingly sitting independently on top of his head. And amidst the puddles of wrinkles dripping from his kind, 60-year-old jaws, were these big, shiny, pink lips.

"Are you wearing lipstick?" I asked him in the driveway of the condo.

"No, no." He touched them insecurely. They looked sensitive. "No, they're just a little swollen. I had skin cancer on my lips and they gave me this liquid chemotherapy and my lips bubbled up purple and disgusting. They were like that for weeks and I had to drive the bus with all those kids laughing and making fun of my lips and Mother wouldn't be seen with me in public."

"Christ." I said. She makes me so mad. "How shallow and horrible."

"Well…anyway..." He continued, not up for defending her image obsession as he usually does. "Now I have these brand new lips!" He smiled, proud. And by the time I was envisioning the way my father bent his new lips upward, in a smile as fresh and beautiful as any soft young girl's, the doctor was done freezing my own cancer and I slumped my face back into my hands and pushed on my eyes.

(click here to post your opinons on this s(h)ite. --- Ed.)