SURGERY (21 september 2004)
Today a medical story -- so if you have a weak stomach, you still have the chance to leave now ...
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Your skin needs fatty substances -- or it would become very dry. These fatty substances are produced by little bags in your skin that doctors seem to call sebaceous glands.
Sometimes the opening of these bags gets stuck. The gland being unaware of this obstruction, goes on producing the fatty substance, which accumulates within the bag.
The bag gets bigger and bigger. Eventually you'll have a bump on your skin ...
Some twenty years ago, I found one such bump developing on my head. I feared the bump would eventually become greater than my head. So I went to a surgeon, who removed my tormentor in an operation that took about half an hour.
He sent me home, clad in a bandage that made my fellow passengers on the train flee from me as if I had a disease that was worse than the plague.
A few months ago, a new bump appeared on my head. This time I went to the VU hospital in Amsterdam.
The whole operation took less than ten minutes.
And I was sent home without any bandage. Even my sweetheart initially doubted if I had really been operated on.
Does that mean the first surgeon was incompetent?
I don't know. I just know this one here was a very fast one.
When I told him about the bandage of two decades ago, he said it was a good alternative if one wanted to be pampered during the rest of the day.
Which showed that -- apart from being a capable surgeon -- he had a sense of humour as well.
