Today it was time to eradicate all those little precancers that we of Anglo-Irish descent tend to accumulate, so I went to the dermatologist for the Blue Light Treatment.

 I forgot that the Blue Light Treatment lasts an hour and a half. First they put a substance on you that smells like an exploded still on the Ozark Plateau. Then they leave you in a darkened room to fidget for an hour. Then they sit you in a chair and wheel you inside the Blue Light Machine, which looks amazingly like Robocop’s mask.

Then they go away. The machine goes hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, only softer. Most of the light is yellow but there’s definitely blue bars above you and to your sides.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

It starts to get warm. They give you a little fan but, being a he-man type male, I only used it once. The rest of the time I was counting “One Mississippi, Two Mississippi…”

For seventeen minutes and forty seconds.

Sometimes the nurse comes in to tell you how much time you have left, kind of like Leslie Nielsen:

ONLY ELEVEN MORE MINUTES!

Hmmmmmmmmm. 

Three hundred twelve Mississippi, three hundred thirteen Mississippi…

Panic begins to set in. The machine’s supposed to shut off automatically. What if it doesn’t? What if the nurse’s boyfriend is breaking up with her over the phone and she forgets about me?

Phew! She pops in:

ONLY SEVEN MORE MINUTES!

Seven hundred thiry-eight Mississippi, seven hundred thirty-nine Mississippi…

Your face feels like copulating fire ants. 

Leslie Nielsen is replaced by Robert Duvall.

Then, thank the Good Lord, the machine goes dark. They give you lots of post burning tips: Don’t go out in the sun, refrigerate Vaseline for pain relief, use sunscreen, don’t stand under a napalm strike. They give you two prescriptions for an ointment and a steroid for pain.

They want you back in January.