Walk softly and wear a big hat

Years ago I wrote a column about my father’s skin cancer. Each time I saw him there was less of him there. The doctors had carved away so much of his nose and ears that he was slowly disappearing.

I thought it was a funny column.

I vowed at the time to start wearing a bigger hat.

I didn’t want to suffer the same fate, but wasn’t really worried because my father was an old man and I was still bulletproof.

Then last fall, my friend Johnny said he wanted to take a look at my ear. We were hunting pheasants, and had returned to the truck to take a break.

“Get a biopsy of that and send it to me,” he said. “It looks like a basal cell carcinoma.”

Johnny and I grew up together and have been friends for more than 60 years. He was an ear, nose and throat specialist in Seattle until retiring last year. He’d seen a lot of basal cell carcinomas over the years.

I just thought it was a sore that eventually would disappear. I’d been putting Bag Balm on it.

Johnny explained the procedure for removing the cancer, and said it was no big deal, but recommended I have the surgery done in Seattle.

I asked if it would be okay to wait until after the end of hunting season. He said sure, January would be fine.

We hunted for another couple of hours and the dogs flushed half a dozen roosters in front of me that all flew away unscathed. I couldn’t hit the side of a barn. My mind was elsewhere.

I was no longer bulletproof.

Barb and I got home a couple of days ago. She drove the whole way back from Seattle while I sat in the passenger seat and snacked on Vicodan. Doctors at Virginia Mason Medical Center removed the cancerous tissue and rebuilt my left ear.

The technology is better now than it was for Dad. All the new holes in me have been filled with excess skin from my saggy old face and neck. There’s as much of me as ever, I’m just strung a bit tighter.

I look forward to getting the plug and stitches out of my ear, to hearing again, to not feeling like someone smacked me upside the head with a baseball bat.

I look forward to fishing this spring, and hunting next fall, all sun-screened up, wearing a very big hat.

Parker Heinlein is at

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