A Cautionary Tale

The blasting of the innocuous-looking spot.

It's thirteen years since I was diagnosed with probable CLIPPERS and like everyone else, I'm ageing, slowly and hopefully gracefully. The skin on my face is increasingly dry and irritated and as someone who is very fair-skinned I know I need to be careful with sun-exposure. Recently I noticed a small but persistent spot on my cheek and eventually decided to get it checked out. The doctor said that she could see I was taking Azathioprine and that my skin wasn't great, but she couldn't see a record of skin-reviews. I said that I was aware I had to be careful with my skin but I had never been invited for a skin-review. So that's how I found myself referred to the dermatology clinic in the local hospital under the NHS rapid referral scheme which is usually used when there is a cancer concern. The doctor said she was almost certain there was nothing serious present, but with my history I should be looked at quickly.

    The dermatologist diagnosed various keratoses, told me there was nothing to be concerned about, and then produced a liquid nitrogen gun and froze the original innocuous spot. You can see the evolution of it from almost invisible spot to a blister and then slowly healing skin in the picture. Now there is no sign of it.

    I'm taking a few seconds of your time in the hope it will remind anyone on Azathioprine or drugs with similar warnings about sunlight exposure and the need for skin reviews to take them seriously and hopefully head off any unnecessary unpleasantness.  Although I slipped through the original monitoring net, at least someone alert picked up on it when I subsequently did have a concern.

Read other articles in this series at Living With CLIPPERS.


Living With CLIPPERS by Bill Crum is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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