Dr. Rebecca, Dr. Rebecca to the OR

Well Mark and I had quite the incident tonight. Mark has been known to get a skin tag or two, and when he wants one removed, he calls me in. So he had this one on his leg that was bothering him a lot. He had been asking me for a couple of weeks to cut it off. Well today he asked again. I told him when I was done working I would take a look at it. It was big, but nothing I couldn't handle. I'm sure most people might find this practice of cutting off skin tags gross, but I love it. I get my tools (tweezers, antiseptic wipes, and a pair of scissors that I set aside for his tags) and I go to work. Looking at this tag, it appears to be pretty big, and I am a little bit nervous to cut it. I tell him, no matter how much it hurts, don't yell. Cutting off his tags never involves a whole lot of blood, it really is no big deal. Well, as soon as I cut the tag off, man, the blood started gushing. I didn't know what to do, this has never happened before, I was not prepared for this. I quickly grabbed the box of tissue on my side of the bed to try to stop the blood, it would not stop. Knowing how much Mark hates blood, I was trying to play it cool, like it was no big deal, you know, all in a days work, but it would not stop bleeding. I was starting to get nervous, thinking he might bleed to death. After about 30 minutes of non stop bleeding I was thinking that a trip to urgent care might be in order, but I didn't want to say anything. Thankfully Mark said he might need to go to the Dr. as he was starting to feel week. I think Mark lost a good amount of blood. I could tell he was getting nervous, but I could see that the bleeding was slowing down. After about 45 minutes the operation was complete, the bleeding had stopped. Later in the evening we were watching TV and he was talking about how much blood he might have lost, and he looks over at me and says, "You thought it was great." I have to admit, it was sort of like my own private surgery show.