bcc
by Sherry S.

bcc

used to mean "blind carbon copy"
when I typed in an office coma.
Now it's become the smart acronym
for basal cell carcinoma.

I've lost track of my own.
They're not what I count.
The amount's not the point.
The point's how I got them.

The docs in Hawaii said, "Get lots of sun.
It'll help your psoriasis plaques."
Their islands shrunk faster
when sun blasted them,
but my sunburns peeled over and over.

Arriving near eyebrows, my first cancer said,
"Now you're forty. I'll start on your head.
I'm not melanoma, just basal cell.
Don't worry.  I don't plan to spread."

"iatrogenic" I've learned not to say
unless I want to be shunned.
Docs did what they knew,
and no one new better.
I tell myself that
and keep mum.

Psoriasis looks a lot like skin cancer.
There were biopsies.  Oh, how they stung.

If I could go back to the days of blind carbons,
before we were warned about sun,
when tans were so voguish and sunlamps were proffered,
I think now that I would have run.