Stalled Blog Posting

The following Blog posting has been sitting in my “draft” folder for a week. It’s a Blog post about getting a wart removed. I’m not going to apologize for it, though I should: I’m just going to go ahead and push “publish”, and we can all get on with our lives. Kate’s Blog posting is much more interesting, and has fewer grossnesess.

I went to the dermatologist and had a wart removed yesterday. The wart was on my right forearm, and wasn’t very nasty, but it’s been on my to-do list ever since I noticed it three years ago, and I finally got around to finding a dermatologist, checking the insurance, and making the appointment.

I should have gone sooner: it was REALLY cool. Doctor Drew McCausland, in the West Chester Medical Building, turned out to be a pleasant, white-haired guy. He told me he “liked to kibbutz” with his new patients, and was struggling to find some stuff to talk to me about — then launched into a pretty interesting description of the shortcomings of his software, which will tell him how many pimples he’s seen by zip code, but won’t tell him which patients are the ones who have a history of canceling at the last minute. Every industry has its experts who make specialized software: Kate worked for Past Perfect, the most popular museum database, written in FoxPro by a retired telecommunications executive and his anthropologist wife. I just bought a copy of FTWO (For Two Wheels Only), which is basically a cushy Access database set up by a motorcycle rider to organize all your paperwork. Funny that doctors’ software overlooked such a big need.

Anyhow, Dr. McCausland shot a gob of novocain onto my arm using a little French pneumatic spitter. That was the coolest part: it was like a penlight with a piston, that shot globs of Novocain at high speed, so he doesn’t have to use a needle. Then he put my arm on top of my head and…

[Snip! Okay, that’s enough of that.]