Here’s a look at a medical sewing project of mine that I’m sure you’ll find icky and hope you’ll also find cool. After a series of these Frankensteinian surgeries, I’ve accepted my pink-skinned, cancer-prone heritage (and confessed to roasting in baby oil as a teen), but the bandage-free healing process definitely turns heads.

Skin, being on the outside, is both grosser and harder to hide than our other organs when it becomes afflicted. When my own particular bumps come off, it’s sometimes for vanity and sometimes because they are cancerous or are expected to become so. But in none of those situations is there ever any possibility of avoiding the question, “What happened?”

I could answer, swaggering, that I wiped out on my motorcycle, but bumping into my bathroom cabinet is about a million times more likely.

I hate doctors' waiting rooms—the out-of-date magazines, the neutral wall colors, the crowds of sick people—and I've been in a lot of waiting rooms lately. In the last 60 days, I've seen the general practitioner, endocrinologist, weight-loss doctor, dermatologist, and dentist. I've also given blood (twice) and been to several labs.

What I really hate about waiting rooms is the waiting. I'm not naming names, but certain members of my medical team do not make their scheduled appointments—ever.

With one physician, a quick checkup can take up two to three hours—and all but five minutes is waiting. This doctor actually has three waiting rooms. You can estimate how soon you'll see him by your progression through the rooms. At each stage a nurse takes some information, and you move along to the next waiting room.

Movement does not necessarily mean progress: The closer you get to the patient room (where there's another wait, of course), the older the magazines get.

I would expect this kind of treatment if I dropped in, but these appointments are often made weeks and months in advance.

Occasionally, the scheduling systems work. Consider my appointment Monday morning with the dermatologist, my first visit. I showed up for the 7 a.m. appointment on time, got through all the paperwork, and saw the physician by 7:30 a.m. That passes for excellent in my book.

I usually have the same experience with my dentist, who also schedules early morning appointments. I don't even know how old the magazines are in his office because I usually walk right to the chair.

Most of the time, I'm just happy if I see a doctor within an hour of my scheduled appointment. Over the years of visiting so many waiting rooms, I've learned a few tricks:

I did it: I ran an entire half marathon—and beat my goal time! Saturday I joined more than 5,000 other runners on the boardwalk at Coney Island at the start of the Brooklyn Half Marathon, and 2 hours and 16 minutes later, I sprinted across the finish line.

I started the day with yogurt, toast, and peanut butter, and boarded the subway with my sister and two friends. We followed a horde of other runners off the train and down to the boardwalk area, where we stripped down to shorts and T-shirts and tossed our baggage onto buses. It was chilly, but perfect weather for running—in the low 50s and overcast.

The course was divided into three distinct areas, almost like we were running three different races. Here’s a quick review of each section.

One of my favorite comfort foods is scrambled eggs. I love eggs pretty much any way you can prepare them, but scrambled with toast is what I crave when I’m not feeling well, think I’m not feeling well, or just need to give myself a good dose of food love.

The other day when I went out for brunch with my girlfriends after a long run, I needed some major comfort food for my achy muscles and bruised ego from not being able to keep up for most of the run. After I ordered my scrambled eggs and whole wheat toast, I noticed that most of my friends ordered egg white-only options.

I told them that without the yolk, they were missing out on most of the important vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients in eggs, like vitamin D, zinc, and lutein. They reminded me that the average yolk packs 210 mg of cholesterol. I shot back that dietary cholesterol is not what raises blood cholesterol, it’s saturated fat, and egg yolks are relatively low in saturated fat. Moreover, studies show that people who eat eggs don’t necessarily have high blood cholesterol levels. 

When I read a major report about eggs and choline being linked to a reduction in breast cancer, I dashed it off to my egg yolk-averse friends.

Senator John McCain is trying to explain why buying your own health insurance is better than a national health-care plan, and he even suggests it’s a nice alternative to comprehensive company plans.

Well, I’ve got a close friend who has been through one terrible disease and now is dealing with another. And the only good thing she has to say about her ordeal is: "Thank God I have insurance." Because if she had bought her own or used a tax-deferred savings account—the dual prongs of McCain's health-care policy—everyone who knows her would be hosting fund raisers to pay for her six figures' worth of drugs and doctor's visits.

The basic idea of the McCain plan is to give tax credits of $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families to choose their own insurance. As McCain’s website says, “Families will be able to choose the insurance provider that suits them best and the money would be sent directly to the insurance provider. Those obtaining innovative insurance that costs less than the credit can deposit the remainder in expanded Health Savings Accounts.”

The test of insurance is how good it is when you really, really need it. And it's often lousy when it comes to plans working people can afford.

If you’re like me, the only thing more depressing than a cluttered mess at home is the thought of cleaning up the cluttered mess.

Apparently in Scotland, however, housecleaning and any other kind of physical activity actually prevents depression. Maybe it's the lousy weather—anything is better than staring into the North Atlantic gray. In any case, a survey of nearly 20,000 Scots suggests that people who participate in just 20 minutes of any type of physical activity each week—even things as simple as walking, housework, or gardening—have a 13% to 20% lower risk of mental health problems than people who, I guess, are functionally inert.

More exercise brings more mental benefits: Sporty types are 33% better off than the couch haggises, according to the study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

However, these types of studies are tricky. For one thing, the bar is set pretty low—who doesn't do at least 20 minutes of walking per week? Really, really depressed people, that's who. It's the old problem of cause and effect: If the really depressed person rises from bed to tackle the clutter, will that make her or him feel better?

We have to keep these sorts of studies in perspective, in other words, but in any case there is a wealth of evidence that exercise does indeed improve mental health.

“Laboratory studies show that mood can be elevated following short, 20-minute bouts of exercise,” says study author Mark Hamer, PhD, a senior research fellow at University College London.

I was driving to a town in Colorado a couple of weeks ago and heard a teenage girl in the backseat of the car casually, laughingly accuse her friend of being "bipolar." Aha, I thought, another case of kids appropriating in-the-news health language for insult purposes. A relatively obscure (though horrible) mental illness had entered the hot soup of teen slang, probably via the whole Britney meltdown. 

It's a tried-and-true taunt technique: You have the thing my parents are whispering about (and, today, the Internet is screaming about). Twenty years ago, I heard young kids tossing around AIDS insults the way I used to deploy the term "cooties" when I was doing schoolyard battle. After AIDS, bulimia.

Now, we could all sing the old loss-of-innocence lament, because it's a long way from cooties to HIV, and even a long way from calling someone "mental" to calling them "bipolar." But we live in medicalized times, and kids know the times they live in. Imagine the barbs they may sharpen out of the advertisers' alphabet of modern ills: ED, HPV, RLS, and on and on.

I read a news item today reporting that only one in three U.S. doctors communicate with patients via email. We doctors were accused of lagging behind other professionals in online communication.

Well, I am one of the physicians already communicating with patients via email. Like everything else about the digital world, it has its benefits and its drawbacks. I fully agree that simple things, like prescription refills, routine lab reports, and so forth can be handled best by email—often, these do not even require the intervention of a physician.

It's when we get into questions about health problems that email can be problematic.

I returned from a holiday weekend at home to find an email from a patient waiting for me. It had been sent late on Friday night. "Dear Doctor," my patient wrote. "I am very worried." He went on to describe bleeding, fatigue, and weakness. He asked me to call him when convenient. Then he ended the message: "I hope you have a good holiday."

Three days had passed. My heart was racing as I called his home phone number. Fortunately, he was still alive, but he had not sought any other medical help. I sent him directly to the emergency room and he spent several days in the hospital recovering from a serious intestinal bleeding episode.

When my wife and I bought our farm eight years ago, it seemed out of place for us. Despite growing up in rural Alabama, I know more about Gianni Versace than John Deere. Patti owns horses, but having livestock (or 1,200-pound lawn ornaments) does not make you a farmer. Neither does owning a farm.

In fact, most of the growth on our farm in recent years is due more to neglect than intervention on our part. Nature is reclaiming our eight-acre plot.

If owning a farm is out of character, gardening is anathema. Not only do I associate digging in the earth with constant adolescent battles with my father (whose idea of a father-son activity was often limited to early morning turns with a spade and hoe), but I have inherited my mother's black thumb.

I don't believe in skimping on good food, but my supermarket bill yesterday has forced me to confront my inner cheapskate. 

My weekly shopping bill is usually just over $130, with a few odds and ends picked up midweek and the occasional meal out. This week, however, the tab was almost $165—a 27% increase. I rechecked to see if we had bought something pricey like steak or wine. No and no. The escalation of food costs has made news virtually daily, and according to the Consumer Price Index, food costs have increased more in the first quarter of 2008 than they have since 1990—and there's no sign of them heading south anytime soon.

Some of my big-ticket items were cage-free eggs ($5), organic milk ($3.50), imported cheese ($4.50), artisan seven-grain bread ($5.50), and New Zealand apples ($6). And I don't want to give most of them up.

So I researched some ways of putting my grocery shopping on a diet without ruining my healthy diet. I refuse to either spend Sundays clipping coupons or head to big-box retailers, where you can easily save 30% or more on food items, so here is what I'm doing to trim some of the fat from my weekly shopping budget.

Make a List
According food marketing specialist Phil Lempert: "Surveys of supermarketguru.com readers show that list makers spend 40% less when grocery shopping." Now I hope I can stick to only what's on the list.

Brown Bag It
Unlike my mother, who loves to cook and prefers cooking to eating out, I am not much of a cook. However, the best way to s-t-r-e-t-c-h my food budget is to eat in more often. My takeout lunch is around $10, but I can make a sandwich or have soup and salad at home for around $2.

Shop Full
I'm usually pretty disciplined when I go food shopping, but when I'm hungry I wind up with a cart filled with foods that curb my carb cravings: snack bars, pretzels, and more crackers than I know what do to with. These convenience foods are among the most expensive in the supermarket and add little nutritional value to my diet. So next time I go shopping, I'll avoid temptation and go on a full stomach.