Over the last three months or so, I’ve been spending time with a local dermatologist. Fortunately, he’s not treating me for anything traumatic or catching, but we’re working through a pretty large number of skin tags that have annoyed me for years, but that I’ve never had the time, inclination, or, frankly, the ready cash to do much about. BlueCross is very clear that it’s the kind of thing they consider cosmetic, so anything done along these lines has to be fully out of pocket.

I would tell you that I’m not vain, but that’s obviously not entirely true. I have plenty of vanities, they’re just generally not the physical kind. Whatever else it may be, I’ve long considered my body just the meat suit responsible for hauling my brain around from Point A to Point B. As long as it’s managing to get that job done, it’s good enough. These little tags we’re working on now were starting to be an issue even in my general disinterest. 

So, for the last three appointments, we’ve been trying to kill them with blistering cold. That has met with some limited success. Looking at the progress to date, the doc wasn’t happy – and in honesty nether was I. So, today was the last round of that approach. In three or four weeks, instead of the fancy cryo gun, we’ll be going with the more old-fashioned lidocaine and razor blade approach. As I understand it, where freezing is more akin to using a smart bomb, the razor is more like stepping up to wholesale carpet bombing.

Just now, well into this process, I’m willing increase the pain threshold in exchange for a shorter duration of effort. Sometime towards the end of June, I guess I’ll subject myself to a bit of slice and dice for purely cosmetic purposes. It turns out, my vanity isn’t as well controlled as I liked to imagine.