Five Good Things About Sunburn in February

You never know how the calendar is going to pan out: you make an important appointment for a wide-open week, and then the week fills in with crazy conflicts....



Because I - again - have cancer on my face (squamous and basal - I'm a double winner!), I made an appointment more than a month ago for blue light treatment. My dermatologist swears by this PDT (photodynamic therapy); I was willing to try it. But when I made the appointment for February 19, I could have never known that:

     - I'd have a horrid sinus infection (and by dostrils would be sore from blowig by dose);
     - We'd be smack in the middle of a series of zero-degree days;
     - An audition for "Listen to Your Mother Milwaukee" would come up two days after the treatment, and I'd want to try out.

The doc warned me that the PDT would make me look and feel like I had a sunburn, but I never imagined how it would hit me. The day after the blue light treatment, my face was on fire! and red! like a weird mask, with white eye-holes (from wearing goggles under the blue light). The fire in my face was especially severe around my poor beleaguered nostrils.

I called my doc and cried Uncle. She, good soul, prescribed some hydrocortisone cream (Her exact words: "Grease up!") and Tylenol 3 for the pain. That meant I had to drag myself out in the zero degree weather with my box of Vicks-scented Puffs beside me at all times, exposing my red face to the public (hoping I wouldn't scare small children), to fetch said meds. 

Oh yeah, and it was one of those harsh sunny Arctic-type days and I wasn't supposed to let the sun touch my red face, so I had to pull down my fuzzy hat, just holding up the front of it enough to see so I wouldn't get hit in the parking lot.)

Trying to look on the bright side:

1. The light treatment might kill the cancer - without surgery.

2. The doc told me that this treatment will erase my "fine lines." (What fine lines? I thought to myself when she said that. Then I went home and looked close in a mirror. Yipes! There are farmer's furrows on my forehead!)

3. My face was burning so hot that the zero-degree weather was soothing.

4. So as not to distract the judges at the audition, I remembered: MAKEUP! I realized I still had some makeup on hand that I used when I played a nun in "The Sound of Music" in our community theatre in 1993. It covered the red amazingly.

5. The fire in my face distracted me from the misery of my sinus infection.

I know how this guy feels!