The extra two feet

The other day I had a mole removed from my back, and despite being a moley girl, it was my first excision.

​Well, that's not entirely true. I got a couple weird ones lanced off with a laser and biopsied (one itched, one was a bit big - okay, I know, gross!) but the back mole was the first I've had surgically removed. And I did not know surgically removed entailed stitches running the length of a golf pencil down my back for a pea-sized mole. Or that I would have strict orders not to work out or "lift heavy objects" for two whole weeks.

"Real talk: How serious is this two-week thing?" I asked my coworker, a Swedish-looking blonde who said she gets abnormal moles cut out all the time.

Her cavalier attitude vanished, surprising me when she answered, "It's serious. Listen to your derm. I took a walk around Castle Island once and came back to blood streaming down my back."

(She must have been aggressively swinging her arms to rip the stitches like that, or bumping uglies with the Asian tourists taking pictures of subpar kite surfers, because that just seems crazy. A walk?)

But she insisted, and so did another friend, a fellow moley girl.

So here I am, unable to lift groceries (I could, and I did), unable to work out (I can't, and I won't) and asking Mike to change my bandages only to have him yell at me for losing the "care kit" the dermatologist gave me faster than I could say, "Aquaphor." He had to tack like 10 tiny little Band-aids to my back, and he cursed my irresponsibility the whole time.

"Sorry," I said, as I let the Band-aid wrappers waft to the floor rather than pick them up and place them in the trash.

"Just...just go the extra two feet," he said, leaning down and dropping the plastic wrappers in the ceramic trash bin.

He says that all the time, usually when he's pointing to something I thoughtlessly discarded, like water bottles on the floor of the car, or Dunkin Donuts cups sweating on the counter for a full day when the trash is literally beneath that same counter.

"Two feet, that's all I ask."

I shrugged sheepishly. "Sorry."

I would hate me so much. But I'm working on it.