My Day at Memorial Sloan Kettering

It’s 8:37 a.m. and I’m sitting in an out-of-the way waiting room in Dermatology (in the 53rd Street outpatient center). I arrived at 8 a.m. for an 8:15 appointment and I’ve already had the first layer of skin taken off my nose as part of the Mohs procedure necessary to get the basal carcinoma off my schnoz. Now I wait while they see how much cancer is in the layer they took off. If it’s still there, they go again. It took all of fifteen minutes, 10 of which was waiting for the local anesthesia to kick in.