Annals of Modern Medicine So the thing is, I may have cancer.

I don't mind writing that, because it's not a serious cancer, just a little skin thing, a small scaly patch smaller than a dime on my right forearm. It suddenly appeared on my arm about a year ago, and changed color slightly at different sunny times (and not in a good way). A friend who's a dermatologist frowned when she saw it, and I wound up making an appointment with another dermatologist she recommended, Dr. David Colbert, 5:15 last Tuesday.

Plus, I also had a little bump on my arm that my friend identified as an angioma, a benign tumor consisting of small blood vessels. (It looks like a little red dot.) I am too young (or so I like to believe) to have little red dots on my skin, except for the chicken pox which afflicted me at age eight, so I wanted to get that looked at as well. This is what happens when people of English descent take up scuba-diving.

I arrived at Colbert's downtown 5th Avenue office at 5:00, as suggested, to fill out the pages of paperwork that precede any modern visit to the doctor, one third of which is insurance info, one third of which is background health stuff, and one third of which is solicitations for cosmetic surgery—Botox, chemical peel, etc. It took me about two minutes to fill that out, and then I waited.....

...in what was surely one of the swanker doctor's waiting rooms I've ever experienced. A converted loft space with huge windows, blond hardwood floors, leather chairs, and two laptop computers on a glass desk so that you can check e-mail while you wait. The browser history had the last four days of visited sites preserved—someone was making reservations at a luxury resort in the Dominican Republic. Then I got creeped out by how people didn't realize or care that anyone could see what websites they'd been on and erased the history.

I sat in a chair to the left of the model with absolutely perfect skin, to the right of the slightly older model whose skin was also basically perfect. No angiomas that I could see. I had stumbled into the modelicious den of a hipster doctor.

Ho-hum. About an hour later—the models long gone by now—my name was called. A young, clean-cut doctor named John Adams introduced himself and said that Dr. Colbert was running late—his train was delayed—and so we should get started. I thought it a little odd to make an appointment with one doctor and see another, but let it go. I'm a go-along-to-get-along kind of guy.

The doctor sat me down on a reclining chair in an office whose front wall consisted of frosted glass—although the top part was clear, and I could easily see into the windows of the building across 19th Street. I wondered if the people across the street, when they got bored, checked out the models visiting the dermatologist.

Dr. Adams was a nice guy. We both had lived in Adams Morgan, which when I was there was considered bohemian by D.C. standards and was definitely dangerous. He used to go to Perry's, the sushi bar-cum-disco on 18th Street that kept me up on weekend nights when I lived at 1841 Columbia Road for $800 a month. We chatted about Washington for a minute. (There's really a Whole Foods in Adams Morgan? Things have changed.) He asked what I was there for, and I showed him my arm. He frowned too.

Before I really knew what was happening, he had injected me with two needles and reclined the chair. A biopsy for the scaly patch, apparently, followed by stitches. Then I smelled something odd and asked Dr. Adams, "Is that me burning?"

"Mmm-hmmm," he said. "Just a little laser." To remove the angioma. It was sort of an unpleasant smell.

Would have been nice if he'd mentioned that, I thought to myself, but again said nothing. Best not to disturb a doctor with a laser.

I wondered if I would ever see David Colbert, the doctor with whom I'd made my original appointment.

My arm sufficiently zapped, Dr. Adams turned off the laser, put a couple of bandaids on me, and had me make another appointment—with him, not with Dr. Colbert. A $12 co-payment and I was on my way.

Biopsy results come in next week; I'll keep you posted.









Dr. David Colbert:
Theoretically, my dermatologist.  ¶ 8:57 AM