Paging Clyde Bruckman

You may be a totally normal person, and therefore not sit around worrying about how you are going to die. But, as a super, super-pale person who spent one stupid summer in high school blissfully baking herself in a tanning bed at her gym while they piped in Train’s “Drops of Jupiter,” I have, for whatever reason, become convinced I’m going to get skin cancer.

My dad, who likes to be weird and mysterious, has been claiming for years that “the means of his death have been made known to him” (idk, in a dream, or something?), so he’s not concerned about it at all, and my mom is terrified of carbon monoxide poisoning, so her house has alarms in every corner.

Anyway, this might not sound like a lightbulb moment, but I finally made an appointment with a dermatologist and had my moles checked (for ages, I think I was doing that ‘I can’t take a pregnancy test because WHAT IF I AM PREGNANT’ thing), and my insurance covered it, and they went all over my body like they were looking for evidence of alien probes, and nothing looked weird, and they said to come back in a year and get it done again, and I felt…oh, wow, I felt bathed in relief. Like when you haven’t got your teeth cleaned in a few years and then you bite the bullet and get it done.

And then I asked if I could get a Retin-A scrip to prevent signs of aging, and she was all “here you go!” and my insurance covered THAT, so I got a ninety-dollar tube of goodness for five bucks, and temporary reassurance I wasn’t going to die immediately from skin cancer.

So, first, I think everyone should go get their moles checked and mapped, if you can possibly afford it, because it is absolutely tearing through young women in their twenties and thirties, and, in general, if you are really worried about a particular thing that might kill you, maybe there’s something real you can do to feel a little better about it. Give it a shot.