hey thanks for joining us Gil you have this thing that your wife noticed on
your back what did she say it looked like or what was going on with it she
just mentioned that it was your regular a little dark and to have you look okay
so we'll take a look that and see that indeed it does have a symmetry and an
irregular border and also is larger than six millimeters so those are all things
that we use as criteria to decide it should probably be removed you know if
we hit three of those certainly we should take a look at it and it's
different from other lesions on your skin when we look at you I'm using a
combination of lidocaine and epinephrine with some buffer some sodium bicarbonate
buffer that helps it to not sting quite as much use a four millimeter punch
biopsy instrument that allows us to get a a little cylinder of the tissue for
analysis and I should go over the abcdes of skin lesion evaluation so I'm going
to get the major portions but I want to get all over this tail here too so I'm
going to go right where they connect get a little bit of both so in assessing
skin lesions to see if they are concerning for skin cancer and worthy of
biopsy is kind of an alphabetical system the abcdes a asymmetry and this one has
a symmetry it goes off with that tail up on one side you know you look if you
split it down the middle you know down the middle this way or down the middle
this way do the two halves look like mirror images of each other and this one
they don't so asymmetry is a B is border irregularity and this one's border is
irregular with that tail going off there
put that in the little simple container here C is color not uniform so there's
like variation in the color from one part to another this one doesn't really
have that so much D is for diameter a diameter greater than six millimeters is
concerning or the size of a pencil eraser and this one is larger than that
it's about 12 meters 12 millimeters from here to here in E evolving size shape or
color any changing anything that's especially its changing rapidly we get
concerned this one wasn't changing but it does have three points for the
symmetry the border irregularity and the diameter greater than six millimeter
okay and then the orientation of this particular punch is more left-to-right
or horizontal so I'm going to put my suture in kind of a top to bottom
you still okay Gil yeah okay let it out then don't want to go quite that far
we'll just go over here there we go
put it in and close it up and we'll have the results in well probably next week
so to probably get a phone call from our office telling you most likely the
results are benign if it did happen to be a malignant melanoma if it's still in
the skin and hasn't broken through the basement membrane we would do a larger
excision to take out the lesion and four millimeters around it all sides in the
shape of an ellipse if it were deeper than that
we'd referred to a dermatologist and we do want to get that suture out in Oh a
week to ten days okay so how was it it was it wasn't painful it was good okay
comfortable okay so we'll get the results in seven to ten days and let you
know and see if we need to go another step or not yeah hopefully it's just a
benign mole kind of like the other ones you have on your body this would just
happen to have those features to it but we do encourage you to look for those
ABCDE features that we went over and I'll give you a little printout of that
too okay hey thanks for joining us if you like
videos like this make sure you're subscribed to the channel and if you
want to see this plus some behind the scenes stuff from the Auburn Medical
Group you can become a patron through patreon and until next time Guil myself
dr. Marc Vaughn telling you to stay in good health