Graphic T-Shirt Friday

A couple of months back I decided to start my own tradition, a sort of weekly holiday, if you will. I call it Graphic T-Shirt Friday, or simply T-Shirt Friday (see, I had to add the "graphic" on there to be more specific). Today I'm wearing a shirt with Obi-Wan Kenobi on the front and the quote "That business on Cato Neomoidia doesn't count" on the back. I have quite a collection. Most feature characters and lines from my favorite movies and television shows, but I do have a couple of Rush shirts and this, my latest find:

My good friend Abby sent me a link to a website that had a list of "101 T-Shirts for Scientists, Science Geeks, and Nerds!" which has turned out to be a veritable cornucopia of excellent potential T-Shirt Friday attendees. Among my favorites are (the two Star Wars shirts are from another site):

And the most hilarious one, given the irony when taken in context with my recent surgery:

It got me thinking. When I come home from my mission and graduate school and land a job as a science teacher, I want to continue the tradition of rockin' t-shirts on Fridays. That is, I will if the school will let me... Heck, I'd stick with the science theme if they felt it was more academic. Either way, I'm going to be the cool science teacher.

Arrrrrrrm

A couple of weeks ago I went to the doctor for a pre-mission physical, and had a mole biopsied. I didn't think anything of it until we got back from our family vacation and had no less than six or seven messages from the doctor's office on the answering machine. I went in promptly the next day and found out that I was diagnosed with malignant melanoma (<--click link for information). My doctor referred me to a surgical oncologist who specializes in melanoma and I was scheduled for surgery to have what is called a wide excision. This means a football-shaped hunk of flesh would be cut out of my arm (the dimensions of excision being five inches long and a little more than one inch wide) and the remaining... ah, arm... would be sewn back together. Way cool.

Luckily for me, the melanoma was caught early enough that it hadn't penetrated very far into my skin. If caught early, melanoma is quite treatable. If not... well, I (and my family) am just glad it was.

In any case, it is all taken care of, and from now on I just need to be extra cautious regarding sun exposure, especially for the next two years.

I don't have a picture of my arm before surgery (yet. can you email it, Maryanne?), but here's one of me opening the mission call, and you can see the little dark spot on my arm where the biopsy was done.

Post-surgery bandages. Holy cow this wad of gauze was huge. I had to keep it on for two days, which meant I was forced to wear only stretchy t-shirts and was given pity looks from ladies at Costco. Check out my pajamas! I made 'em last week. I'll have to do a post of all the sewing I have been doing lately; it's quite extensive.

There, I finally got the bandages off. Some of the gauze stuck to the superglue they used instead of stitches.

This one is a good angle to illustrate the divot they left in my arm. Pretty wild, eh?

Because they removed such a wide piece of my arm, the skin that was stuck back together is now really tight. I don't have much room for movement yet, but it's supposed to fill in underneath and stretch back out over time. For now, I'm happy with my little shark bite.

Mission Call, Belated

Yeah, yeah, I got it a week ago and pretty much all of you know where I'm going already, but here's the obligatory post about it.

I'm going on a mission! To Rochester, New York! Funny thing is, the day after I turned all my papers in, I left with my family to none other than Rochester for a family trip (for some pictures from our vacation, you can head on over to my mom's blog: she hasn't done a whole lot about it, but there are some pictures from Palmyra). Yup. Little did I know that I'd be back there come November, complete with name tag and beige nylons.

Which is partially a lie - I will never wear beige nylons.

I digress. The point is, I'm serving a mission and I couldn't be happier about it. Rochester is beautiful and there is so much Church history there. It's pretty much the best mission ever, and I'm not even out yet.

That's a good sign, I think.