Still there?

Two days after our little family returned home to Des Moines from their Thanksgiving visit, I still had a doorknob-sized "bump" just above the lymph node extraction area. It didn't hurt. It wasn't a protuberance through my clothing that would cause small children, who feel the need to point out all sorts of "abnormalities" to friends and strangers alike, to exclaim, "what is that thing?!"

Bump? What bump? But I knew it was there and I kept revisiting it, trying to determine if it was bigger, smaller, gone, still hanging around. It was definitely still there. But, bigger? Smaller? I couldn't tell. Without measuring it, how would I know if it had changed in size -- unless it did so in some exaggerated way. If I went to bed with a doorknob and woke up with a grapefruit, I'd definitely know. Not only that, I'd probably be some future medical textbook example of lymphatic fluid run amok.

I was just appreciative that the aforementioned lymphatic fluid decided to throw it's going-away party for the lymph nodes in the same real estate the lymph nodes had once occupied, rather than moving on to the arm and leaving me with an inflated limb that looked like it was stolen from someone three times my size. Something that noticeable would cause even small adults to exclaim, "what on earth is that thing?!"

My son Scott, when he was about 18 months old, sat on the doctor's table for a routine exam and eyeballed the doctor's stethoscope while the doctor and I had a conversation. Finally, out of patience, he reached up, held the stethoscope in his little boy hand and, with all sincerity, expressed his curiosity thusly: "What is the hell is this?"

I had a three-day wait until my follow-up visit with the surgeon on Wednesday. And my first order of business would be to display the bump-what-bump and ask, "what is the hell is this?"