I am a writer, so I often think in metaphors. This time, the occasion was the six hours I spent in a dermatologist’s office having successive slices of tissue removed from my leg in order to excise a nasty little cancer. In between rounds of slicing, the tissue goes to a lab to evaluate whether clear cancer-free margins were obtained. If not, another layer of tissue is removed and the process repeats until there’s no more cancer.  I am at the age where cancer scares of all
