Farewell Cletus

I will post some pictures tomorrow maybe...blogger's picture uploading thing isn't working. In the mean time, I did upload them to Flickr, so beware - they're not pretty.

This time, knowing what we knew from last time, we were on the look-out for a changed appointment time. Clinton’s scheduled appointment for Friday was at 1:30. We got a call on Wednesday – could we come at 2:30? Sure. We got another call at 5:02 on Thursday (on Clint’s work phone), could we come at 1:00? So, apparently when you schedule an appointment with this doctor, you’re really only picking a day, not a time.

We got there at 12:55, there was another person in the waiting room with her mom and then a flood of like 4 more patients came in. They scheduled everyone for 1:00. Doesn’t seem very efficient, but ok. So the girl and her mom get called back, and then Clinton gets called back.

They laid him out in the room and had him take his shirt off. The nurse wiped his back with antiseptic and then took a bar towel-like thing and cut a hole in it to lay over the cyst. She actually cut 2 holes instead of 1 and instead of trying again, wadded it up on the counter and left the room.

Clint fell asleep on the table a few times. We heard out in the hallway, the doctor telling someone to go to the hospital immediately. “Just go straight to the hospital.” “No, you need to go straight there.” That’s a little disconcerting.

The doctor came in at about 1:30 and asked if we had any questions. He knows how to fold a bar towel and successfully cut only 1 hole in the one he was working on. He told Clint he would feel a stick and some burning. He injected some lidocaine in various spots around the cyst. He admired that Clint didn’t even flinch for the stick. He waited a couple minutes for the lidocaine to take effect. The area got all weird and puffy – like cauliflower - and he started cutting. He said “Wow, that’s bigger than I thought it was.” And after hearing about someone else having gone in to have a cyst removed and it was the size of 2 golf balls, that was a little scary. But within about 30 seconds (and one trip to the other side of the table to cut a little further) the cyst was out. It looked like a gumball or a more round peanut M&M - after you suck all the color and flavor off of it and it’s white…about a ½ inch diameter. Kind of shiny.

Clint asked what caused it, and the Doctor tried to blame me “Too much fat in your diet, your wife is feeding you too well.” “Hey, he had that when I got him, so that’s his Mom!” “No, I’m kidding, they don’t really know what causes them, but it’s good to have it removed, because they get bigger and bigger and can get infected.”

The doctor stitched him up. He has 4 or 5 stitches total, one painful stitch off the end of the cut and we were out of there by 1:45. He goes back next week to have the stitches removed.

His incision is still hurting him today, but it looks better and better.

Hasta la vista, Cletus!

Before

After