• Unless notified otherwise, you can drive yourself to and from your surgical appointment, as you will be awake during the procedure.
• Once you are in our office, the surgical site will be cleaned and then numbed with local anesthesia.
• Your provider will then cut into your skin to remove the skin cancer.
• Next, the surgical site is closed by stitching or gluing the skin together.
• Lastly, our staff will place a bandage over the site and provide cleaning instructions (link to cleaning instructions handout).
• The entire surgical procedure typically takes less than one hour.

After the surgery, our office will send the skin specimen to an outside lab for evaluation by a dermatopathologist, an expert on the microscopic evaluation of skin cells.   Our providers typically can inform you within two weeks whether the skin cancer was fully removed during the surgery.  If you have not received a message from our office within two weeks following the procedure, please contact our office (insert contact link) to let us know.

For most of or surgical procedures, you can expect two weeks of downtime that includes refraining from swimming or being in standing water (hot tubs, pools, lakes, oceans).  You may need to return to the office for a suture removal or other wound evaluation following the procedure.

If you have been diagnosed with skin cancer, contact us (link) for an evaluation and to discuss whether surgical excision may be an appropriate treatment.