I’m grateful for science, and medicine. I’m grateful for my experiment with face poison, aka flourouracil, a topical chemotherapy for precancerous actinic keratoses and some basal cell carcinomas. I was instructed to apply this cream twice a day for 30 days, with the caveat that if it hurt unbearably after two or three weeks I could stop. “If it hurts bearably, you can take a couple of days off and then finish out the course.”

I’m grateful I had friends who’d been through it to offer support. I debated whether to share photos of my face here, partly out of vanity and partly because some of them are pretty harsh. But I have heard of several people intending to undergo the same treatment this month, and I know there are others out there, so I offer the gallery above and words below with humility in hope of benefiting fellow sufferers.

The first week there wasn’t much sensation with the cream, just a sense of skin tightening, like a chemical facelift. Into the second week red spots started appearing and soon my face itched, and then began to sting. I started to apply vaseline and Aquaphor ointment between morning and evening applications of face poison. After awhile this didn’t do much to diminish the hot, tender feeling. It hurt to apply the cream, it hurt to apply the vaseline, it hurt if it dried out, it hurt to wash off vaseline. But it didn’t hurt unbearably. At the end of week two, I began to wonder, How much hurt is too much?

Because the effects were incremental, my tolerance increased incrementally. It was a classic case of the mythical frog in a pot of water. I learned that as a true thing, that if you put a frog in a pot of water and slowly bring it to boil, the frog won’t jump out because it adapts to the incremental heat increase until it’s too late, and it gets boiled alive; if you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water it will instantly jump out. I hated whoever did that experiment. Years later I heard it was just apocryphal, which was a relief, but also knocked the legs out from under a beautiful allegory: one that nonetheless that applies to my face and my perception of reality as I continued to gradually increase the amount of poison in my system. My awareness tunneled into darkness as a fever developed, but I didn’t notice.

I took a day off at three weeks, and the next morning my cheeks were swelling, so I took another day off. I wondered if I should start the cream again. The following morning, my cheeks and nose were sore deep in the tissue. I called the dermatology office, and they said, “If it’s swelling, we recommend you stop.” The next day, it was so bad that my cousin doctor suggested I might be getting cellulitis and could need an antibiotic. I’m grateful that the office had an on-call doctor on a Saturday evening, and that I happened to have some leftover antibiotics to start before I could get my prescription the next day. I’m grateful the pharmacy was open on Sunday morning.

All in all, I’m grateful I tried this process, and my skin overall is more smooth and clear of flaky patches and keratoses. There are a few spots I think could have benefited from another week of face poison, but maybe my doctor was right all along when he said he thought it would be easier for me to just get a few things frozen off every six months, and a Mohs surgery now and then. I’m grateful for my dermatologist; but I’d gotten fed up after my August visit where he biopsied three spots, froze two, and would have done more if he’d had time. I ended up with two Mohs surgeries in the fall, and those are uncomfortable and disruptive in their own way. I hope that the face poison has bought me a few years free of freezing and Mohs, but we’ll know more later.

Meanwhile, I’m grateful it’s over, and I can wash my face with hot water again, and scrub it with a washcloth, and moisturize with cream that doesn’t stick to everything and line the sink with vaseline slime and grease my pillow so my face slides off. I’m grateful I can put on sunscreen and walk outside without feeling like a vampire at risk of sizzling in sunlight. I’m grateful for the kindness, curiosity, compassion, and humor my friends provided throughout this experiment with face poison.