Me and My Skin Tag

If you've ever been pregnant, you know weird stuff happens to your body.

Some people get 'roids and stretch marks. Others grow butt shelves. Still other tormented souls suffer from debilitating morning sickness (and really, there is nothing funny about that.)

With my first pregnancy, I got two out of three, plus a free bonus item:

A skin tag.

"What's the big dillio?" you ask. Lots of people get those! 'Tis a common blight o' pregnancy!

(No, I don't want a gold star, but I will take that last cupcake.)

The thing about my skin tag: It was on the cutting edge of my left nostril.

My NOSTRIL, people!

So, on top of all the other crappity-crap-crap I had to put up with as a short gestating woman, I was also forced to conduct most of my face-to-face interactions by either looking at the ground or strategically positioning myself in such a way as to obscure the travesty that was the left side of my nose.

Because, let's face it, there was no way you could have seen that thing and not taken it for, well, gold.

Strangely, in all the months that I lived with this pestilence, not one person went so far as to point it out to me.

Until I was in the operating room for my totally not in the birth plan emergency C-section.

(Why do you hospital people mock us poor, hopeful, pregnant women with the birth plan? Do you not know that the pregnant woman will spend preshus hours lovingly drawing up this document to the point where her husband will lie prostrate on the ground and beg, for the love of all that is holy, to please not make him help you decide between the Buddha statue or the stuffed rabbit as your focus item? Hours she could have used to debate the merits of the Diaper Champ versus its older cousin, Diaper Genie, while waddling down the aisles of Babies-R-Us, scanning equally useless newborn bathrobes into her registry?)

In the operating room, I met Mr. Anesthesiology Resident Dude.

He was a friendly, fun-loving guy trying his darndest to reassure a very neurotic pregnant women about to undergo major surgery that, no, she will not feel a thing, and yes, people make it out alive all the time.

Just before surgery commenced, but after my arms had been strapped to the gosh-diggy-darned operating table (The injustice!), Anesthesiology Resident Dude noticed The Tag of Doom.

Oh, you have a small something in your nose, let me just . . . (approaches with Kleenex).

All hell broke loose as my super-human pregnant lady strength took over and I broke free from the straps, rolling off the operating table into an immobile little heap o' hormones on the floor because duh! Epidural! Totally paralyzed from the waist down, people!

OK!

I didn't jump off the table.

But there was a blood-curdling scream and much gnashing of teeth, as well as name calling, before an oxygen mask was administered.

The V-meister was born without further incident, but the skin tag remained in all its fleshy glory.

Months later, I was still waiting for it to just go away.

It never did.

So one day, the P-dog removed it for me on our living room couch under some local anesthetic he had deftly administered after watching a couple episodes of Dr. 90210 and using a scalpel he brought home from work.

(The P-dog is not a surgeon, but he is second-to-none when it comes to back alley post-partum skin tag removal).