The Skinny on Skin

File under: More interesting than  Frozen Fish Fight.

I'm sitting here with a painted toe. Not a painted toenail, mind you, just a partially painted toe. 

You see, I've been painting the inside of a closet today (long story), and after showering and scrubbing all of the paint off of my hands and out of my hair, I dried off only to find that I still have a couple of swaths of white on my left foot. I don't really know how it is that you can get paint (well... at least water-based latex paint) all over yourself and actually have it all come off without really any work.

Which made me start thinking about skin in general. (Fair warning--I may make a few comments that could get a little "ewww," but at least there won't be pictures.)

I had a mole clipped off of my shoulder a couple of weeks ago. And I've had a great first-hand (or is it first-shoulder?) view of the whole healing process. At first it was pretty boring. Then, about 8 days in, I had my first surprise: instead of it getting pink and the hole closing up, I woke up one morning to find it kind of creamy white, and a little... well... moist. That freaked me out a little, so I called the doctor's office and was reassured that as long it stayed a "natural" color, I was fine. So I put the bandage back on and went back to my day.

And over the past few days I've been thinking about the whole "skin is the human body's largest organ" thing. How cool is it that you can get a fairly large chunk of your skin taken out and yet it grows back? I mean, if someone puts a dime-sized hole in your lung, you get a collapsed lung. A dime-sized hole in your stomach and you have to deal with ulcers. But a dime-sized hole in your skin? You just put a bandage on it and wait for it to heal.

As of this morning, when I was preparing to drive Christopher to the airport (he's headed out of town for a week to kind of chaperone a friend who is on a business trip), I noticed that my dime-sized hole was beginning to turn a very nice skin-toned pink. My hope is that by the time he's home next Monday I'll just have a dime-sized scar--no hole and no bandage.

Oh. And I'm hoping to be completely non-paint-covered by then, too.