Ow. And more waiting.

Spraying a jet of liquid nitrogen on the back of your hand stings a bit. That's good, though, because then it doesn't come as a surprise when they spray it on your cheekbone, right below your right eye.

"Seven seconds, it takes seven seconds. Let me know if you need a break..."

"I'm... good..." I gritted through clenched teeth, between mewling noises.

Then came the spot on my upper lip, just under my right nostril. You have a lot of nerves in your upper lip. That hurt like a sonofabitch. I've fallen asleep while a dentist was drilling on my teeth and that squirt of liquid nitrogen on my lip was the longest seven seconds I've experienced where I wasn't actively engaged in falling off a motorcycle.

It rendered the next blast, just under my left eye, positively anticlimactic by comparison.

I wandered out to the waiting room in a freezer-burned semi-daze. Brigid, who earned my undying gratitude by taking a day off work to hold my hand, asked how I was doing. I couldn't rightly say, because I wasn't done; next came the biopsy.

If you're looking for something fun to do this weekend, I can give a hearty disrecommendation to anything involving getting lidocaine needles stuck in your snout. They proceeded to scrape at the side of my nose to get material (read: my skin, which I use to keep the blood in) for the biopsy. My nose then did like noses do and bled like a fountain, requiring some extensive time spent with the electrocautery needle in an area that guaranteed a good view of the sparks and hearty whiffs of burning skin.

And...?

And...?

And now I get to wait "as much as a week or two" for the results from pathology. (The words I kept hearing were "basal cell"...)

Meanwhile, I have a bandaid on the side of my schnozz which I am under orders to not peek under 'til this afternoon. Given my general reluctance to look at my own blood, I asked if we could maybe give it another month or two, but no, the boo-boo must be washed. Joy.