FACE IT, I'M SCREWED

I hate January.

And it's not because of the icy weather or the post-holiday blues (OK, I admit, a reindeer-less living room is somewhat depressing).

No, it's because every year at this time I visit my dermatologist so he can count the brown spots on my body to verify that the number has not yet exceeded 10,000.

This year, to jazz up our annual tete a tete, he brought two medical students into the examination room with him.

Perfect, I thought, the gang's all here to behold me like a stuffed buffalo in the Academy of Natural Sciences.

You could tell instantly that the two twenty-something trainees were fresh from the classroom, still dazzled by Power Point presentations about impetigo and surface dermatitis. One student was a lovely young woman of Asian descent whose skin looked like delicate porcelain china, completely untouched by the sun's wretched rays; the other was a young man who seemed nice but vaguely uncomfy with the topics of basal cells or lesions.

So I sat shivering in my undies and paper-thin hospital thingy (I refuse to call it a gown; it's nothing like a gown, more like a tattered old house dress that your grandmother wore in 1962), while the two of them, and a nurse thrown in for good measure, observed carefully as the doc touched and inspected my external being, inch after humiliating inch, for signs of age marks gone wild, sun spots run amok.

As the doctor opened my flimsy garment to peruse parts of my structure that I prayed no human being would ever see after I turned 50, he summoned the two students to snuggle in for a closer look as he explained, "See, this is all from sun exposure." As opposed to what, I thought, too many moonbeams?

And I wondered if the pair of students were at that very moment considering leaving the medical profession or at least switching their speciality to something like research pathology, anything that did not require the minute investigation of acres and acres of live but thoroughly damaged skin.

When the doctor asked me to flip over on my stomach so he could review my other side for more possible disturbances, I contemplated whether I'd rather perish from epidermis horriblis than undergo another semi-naked head-to-toe examination.

But revealing my hinder side was not even the tip of my mortification, for the best was yet to come: the annual burning off of actual flesh with liquid nitrogen, a process known as cryotherapy, an incredibly cruel and somewhat painful method of melting away the facial marks that no amount of caked-on Cover Girl could ever conceal.

As my skin singed and I emitted a whimper of distress, I looked at the medical clan peering intently at my mug and had an eerie vision of myself lounging on an Ocean City beach in 1970, blissfully unaware of the misery, not to mention shock and awe, it would produce four decades later.

Finally, it was all over.

I bid the medical crowd adieu, went home, looked in the mirror and noticed the post-cyrotherapy blisters that were already forming on my ravaged face.  

Ahh, hunker down, kids, that's a sure sign that it's definitely January.

Happy 2013 everybody!