I had a skin cancer cut out of my shin almost a month ago. It hasn’t been a fun month. The skin cancer looked little. The hole left behind isn’t.

It’s been painful since the night of the surgery, when I took a couple ibuprofen, because I hadn’t had the foresight to get anything stronger. I was told, “It might hurt.” I wasn’t too concerned. 

I was awake pretty much all night.

It had snowed all night, too, and one of the last things the doctor told me was, “Treat yourself like a princess. Sit on your couch. Do not shovel.”

But when I dragged myself out of bed the next morning and almost screamed when I put weight on the wound leg, then hobbled to the door to let my little pooper out, I discovered the snow was higher than his little legs. And he doesn’t shovel.

I shoveled enough to make it through that first hurdle, and my brother, Pete, came by a little later with some extra strength Tylenol and his shovel.

After a few more nights of extreme pain that ibuprofen and extra strength Tylenol didn’t touch, I made sort of an emergency visit back to the doctor who performed the surgery. It was supposedly infected, and I started taking antibiotics.

A few days later, I woke up after a couple hours’ sleep feeling worse, and called Pete, who took me to our urgent care center. That place and the people who work there are awesome. I left there feeling better, if still in pain, and a few hours later returned to the St. Andrews campus for a scheduled visit to the wound center.

Now it’s been a couple weeks of three visits a week to the center, a week and a half of it involving a wound vac machine attached to me 24/7. The wound vac is generally considered a great approach, with a huge success rate, but it wasn’t achieving the desired effect on me.

Now we’re trying out an alternative approach: Honey.

There’s a patch of honey (I kid you not) and a big band aid on the stupid wound, and so far it appears to be a soothing, hopefully helpful way to treat the wound.

I’d heard a little about honey being kind of a sweet miracle natural healer, and I knew it had been used on wounds during wars, but it never occurred to me that it’s being used to help heal wounds in this modern age of technology.

According to woundresearch.com, “Honey has been used as a wound dressing for thousands of years, but only in more recent times has a scientific explanation become available for its effectiveness.” I won’t attempt to translate that scientific explanation to layman's terms here, but it’s pretty amazing.

Not only does the honey expedite the healing process, but according to WebMD, it protects against damage caused by bacteria, and “some honey also stimulates production of special cells that can repair tissue damaged by infection.”

The patch being used on my wound is called MEDIHONEY, that uses a medical-grade honey from the Manuka plant, native to New Zealand.

Between the soothing patch of honey on my leg, the yummy, adult gummies for hair, skin and nails, which were recommended by Marilyn Gorneau, and a half-clean house, things are looking up as spring approaches.

I’ll still have to deal with changing the honey patch, using all the little packets of cleansers, gloves and sterile gauze that the wonder women from the wound center packed up for me, but it’s doable.

Betsy Pitcher, local house cleaner extraordinaire, gave my kitchen, living room and bathroom a badly needed scrubbing over the weekend. I’m a bad housekeeper in the best of times, and this stupid wound thing hadn’t helped in the effort to keep this house in working order.

I honestly can’t decide which I’m happier about – the stupid wound on the mend, hopefully, or my house getting a thorough cleaning. Probably the wound thing, but …

It’s been a long road to recovery, and I still have a ways to go, but today I’m feeling like there just may be a light at the end of the tunnel.

Let the healing begin.