It's gotten to the point where I can't process this internally any more, so here goes.

My dad has skin cancer.

Which, if you're going to get cancer, is the sort of type to get, really. You can usually just dig the mole-y melanoma-y thing out, and do a bit of follow-up chemical treatment stuff, and voilà! good to go. One of my former bosses went through having skin cancer in her younger years, and you'd never know it. Healthy, upbeat, fine...

Nevertheless, the 'c' word is a fucking scary one.

It's even fucking scarier when it's happening to someone you know and love. It's even scarier when, during a follow-up appointment, the doctor notices ANOTHER spot, digs it out, and sends it off for biopsy. And then he's doing a little more looking, and oh, look! there's a third spot. And it's in a place where my dad had skin grafts as a kid, making the skin, well, not entirely skin-like, complicating removal.

So, yeah. I get home, and my dad has new stitches and bandages, and we all avoid talking about it over our pleasant, picturesque family dinner, and I get in the vehicle so that my mother can drive me back to my apartment and this is the news that is casually dropped as we're backing out of the driveway, as I'm waving goodbye to my father.

We're still waiting on the results from the second biopsy, but in the meantime, I get to sit here and fucking wait again.

I thought I'd already cried about this as much as possible. I thought I'd exhausted all the tears, all the worry. I thought I'd talked it over with enough people that all my fears had been mostly allayed.

Apparently I was wrong.