It is now about a year since this famous and very experienced but arrogant skin surgeon did a MOHS on a 1mm barely visible basal cell carcinoma I had on my face, only 1 layer deep. Each day I continue to have to look at a 3-4 mm red intermittently inflammatory area on my face at the site of the surgery, that does not permanently go away, in addition to a depigmented area of my lip where for unclear reasons he put a final suture and quickly pulled hard and heavenward on the lip with just one hand, increasing trauma to that area.
I had heard of his arrogance and reluctance to listen to patients about when things do not go as expected but foolishly thought I would still be best off going to him. When my DH had a pus-like reaction to sutures on his skin cancer wound a few years ago when he had his skin cancer removed, this important doctor had gotten very annoyed when DH had insisted on seeing him and not just his lower trained nurse assistant who did not at all know what to do and pretended nothing was wrong. He had then ?punished my husband for intruding on his time by aggressively digging out the offending burrowed in sutures from beneath the skin as quickly as he could with no anesthesia or empathy for the pain or attempt to minimize it, presumably so he could hurry up and move on to procedures that would earn new revenue.
But like a fool I went to him anyway because he is famous for MOHS and I figured I could handle a conceited doctor as long as he was skilled and had good results getting rid of cancer with minimal facial scarring, which I thought likely for my tiny lesion. He was brusque, arrogant, accusatory ( I have a complicated medical history), and argumentative on his pre-op day when he first met me,
and his manner on the surgery day was even worse than at pre-op, e.g., bizarrely and surprisingly asking me while I was in the dark under the sterile surgical drape what kind of suture he should do to close the wound and when I said I honestly would need to know more information to decide what kind, he had said that HE was the doctor so HE would decide. I asked why he was then asking me, if he had already decided, and he then sarcastically and condescendingly patronized me by first-naming me, calling me "sweetie" and patting me on my shoulder ( apparently he had apparently forgotten it is chronically sore) .I am an older professional woman, not a child or a senile 95-year-old, so in this day and age to be treated like a naughty child is disgusting
He did not do my wound check a week post-op, a medical assisant saw me and removed the sutures. She did not acknowledge my concerns , and did not even take a picture to show the doctor, even though I reminded her that my history included some risk factors for infection and healing problems, and just said I would have discomfort and numbness for six months ( half my face was numb and painful and remained distorted and hard to talk out of and hard to eat for two months, then was only numb, and meanwhile the inflammatory red bumps kept popping up).
As the doctor and staff clearly had shown no interest in proper communication, when it was clear I was not healing normally, to avoid surging my blood pressure and stroking out dealing with him, I quickly went to another surgeon to try and deal with this recurrent problem. That repair-job surgeon has behaved politely and done the best possible to get to the bottom of and mitigate the inflammation, and eventually biopsied my lesion to make sure there is no residual cancer, and there is not. But it is likely going to be permanent scarring and an unsightly red bump, and I have gone from someone who never wore makeup or lipstick to having a choice between starting to do so now, or having an obvious distracting lesion for my clients to stare at, and an area of lip depigmentation.
My tiny skin cancer is indeed apparently gone, so I will give him a couple stars for that, but ilikely something any low budget skin surgeon could have gotten rid of, and without the aggravation of his hurried and lord-of-the-manor style (not to mention his confused and inflated billing practices).
Perhaps if he does cash-pay cosmetic procedures he is more careful, spends more time and is more polite. I had no option to cash pay and get extra attention to be "special" because I have insurance, and this is a boilerplate procedure, so I was relegated to the doctor's assembly line cash cow MOHS mill. Perhaps he is also better if he deals with cute young women, or important male movers and shakers or pals, maybe then he is more careful and pleasant, so YMMV and maybe depending on who you are, you will love this guy as long as your insurance pays, but I obviously will not be back. To be clear, I am not at all implying any malpractice, just disappointing mediocrity of results in my case, and what I observed was arrogance, rushing, disrespect, and not listening to my (and previously my DH's) concerns. read more
