I hope your doctor has checked out that lesion on your thumb there, Capt.; folks who have spent a lot of time outdoors exposed to the sun's ultraviolet rays are at a significantly higher risk for some nasty skin cancers than the more indoorsie types. What you describe there sounds a little suspicious to me. Lately I get weird little things like that all the time, but fortunately my elder Brother is a skin Doc (Dermatologist) practicing in Augusta, so we don't waste any time having him check them out. So far a couple of them have been wicked tough to pronounce, but none of them anything to get exited about, which is certainly a relief.
He does have some horror stories, though - like the teenaged girl who showed up with a "funny spot" under her hairline which her Mom didn't know about until it started bleeding. Despite Dan's quick diagnosis and referral to the experts down in Boston, within 7 months she was dead. Nothing to monkey around with, to be sure!

The circulation in my feet has long been mediocre at best, and we had vascular surgery a couple of years ago which helped some. Then last month apparently there was a blood clot and a chunk of foot just died off and proceeded to rot out; a chunk of skin about a quarter of an inch around simply collapsed into the hole left by the decomposing flesh, and it felt like a red-hot poker was jabbed into the side of the right foot about an inch; the whole leg burned and throbbed all the way up to me belt - buckle, and I couldn't stand or walk enough to do my job at the lantern factory. Only with the help of some high - octane painkiller pills left over from the last tooth extraction was I able to sleep a few hours a night.
I told the Doc that it wasn't all that bad, as there did not seem to be maggotts crawling in and out... and it seems that they actually do use "sterile" maggots to debride or clean out serious wounds, as they will eat only dead tissue and leave viable, living tissue alone much more precicely than any Surgeon can. Now how one goes about "sterilizing" a maggott is beyond me; seems like a contradiction in terms, don't it? Actually I'd be open to going that route; one of my Civil War Ancestors was wounded at Cold Harbor, VA in June of 1864 and forced to lay on the Battlefield for 3 days before they brought him in. It is speculated that the maggots may have actually saved his life by cleaning out the dead flesh in his wound before it could get infected. An Uncle who survived Nazi POW camp told of the Prisoner Doctors & Medics who would intentionally expose wounds to the flies to infest them with maggots for the same reason, and it no doubt saved a number of lives.
Our Doc seems to think that my lesion is healing well enough (although way too slowly for me) that such drastic measures are probably not neccessary, and besides, he tells us, it really grosses the Nurses out!

Well, time to take a final hit of prescribed Percodan (a pretty serious narcotic, we're told)and hit the rack.

Sometimes, drugs can be GOOD!

Peace and Healin to ye, Captain! Since then I've been