Quote:
Originally Posted by tophcfa
Subungual melanoma killed the great Bob Marley, very nasty stuff. Same thing I had under my thumbnail. Would’ve eventually killed me if not totally removed with good margins. I didn’t screw around, went straight to a melanoma specialist at Massachusetts General. The clowns in western Massachusetts wanted to send me to an orthopedic surgeon to have my thumb amputated. Glad I went to the best, it took her two tries, but she got it all and confirmed it hadn’t spread with a sentinel lymph node biopsy. You can’t beat Mass General.
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Mass General is great for non-emergency stuff. Maybe their ER has improved since I had to go there. I lived a half dozen blocks away, on Charles Street, when I came down with a really scary fit of deep wet lung-coughing, congestion, sweats, clammy skin, and difficulty breathing. It was winter and I had to walk all the way down, they did the intake paperwork and stuck me in a partitioned area behind a curtain on an exam table. After a half hour of just sitting there, I opened the curtain and asked what was going on, and they said they'd forgotten I was there. Twenty minutes later a doctor finally showed up, heard my breathing, said I had bronchitis and to go home and rest and drink water. No x-rays, no throat culture, no nuttin.
Got to the school doctor two days later and was diagnosed with walking pneumonia and said I should've gone to the hospital. I was given home-quarantine for the rest of the week, some prescription meds for the symptoms, and then I was able to go back to classes.