Jason Alan Griffin :: The Blog

Earlier this year I noticed what looked like an ingrown hair on the back of my neck. When it didn’t go away after four months, I went to a doctor. She gave it a light squeeze and said it was nothing to worry about. I’d had ingrown hairs before and I know that they go away after a few weeks. Unsatisfied, I asked for a referral to a dermatologist. The dermatologist looked at it, squeezed it and also said, it's nothing to worry about. He suggested, if I wanted, that he could take a biopsy and send it to the lab. That was what I wanted. So we did. I got the call back that it was, in fact, squamous cell carcinoma and I needed to see another dermatologist to have it removed. She dug a giant hole in the back of my neck. In order to ensure removing the offending tissue in its entirety, they also remove a ‘margin of healthy tissue.’ In my case, she wanted to remove 4 millimeters all around. Check out the hole in my neck, here. I was instructed to keep Aquafor or Vaseline on ...

I grew up in Santa Barbara and spent my formative years in the 70's. All I cared about was looking cool and impressing people. In the 70's it was all about feathered hair and suntans. Well, my hair was a disaster. I was cursed with a head of curly locks. Sure, people pay good money to have their hair curled, but that's not what I wanted. I wanted hair like David Cassidy; that flows in the wind and falls back into a perfect feather on the sides. Suffice it to say, I was a disaster on the hair front. So I had to make up for it with a deep, dark, glowing tan. Once again my genes were against me, as I hail from a hearty UK stock on my father's side and German/Dutch on my mother's. I didnt' have a lot of melanin, so I had to spend HOURS and HOURS in the sun just to get the slightest browning. As a kid, surfing, swimming, playing tennis and soccer, I had plenty of opportunity to get tan. And we believed back then that sunscreen was for sissies. In fact, we did...