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Photo Credit: Brian Dixon

By Ezra Dyer

A few months ago, I noticed a red mark on my cheek. When it refused to subside, I reluctantly concluded that I had to do something about it. Confronting medical mysteries, however minor, is always a fraught exercise. I have a few college classmates who somehow managed to escape medical school with MDs, and they’re full of stories like, “Yeah, a guy came in with a sore heel. Turned out he had heel cancer.” Then I ask whether they had to amputate, and the reply is, “No, no! He died.”

So I’m a little apprehensive when I ask a physician’s assistant to look at my mystery blotch. She’s a friend who works in a dermatology office, and I’m hoping that she’ll say I’m being paranoid and the only dangerous thing about me is my razor-sharp wit. Instead, she prescribes something called Carac and tells me to apply it to my face once a day, top to bottom.

In the interest of depriving my latent hypochondria of any new material, I don’t ask too many questions about what Carac is exactly. Her basic explanation is that the active ingredient finds cancerous and precancerous spots on your skin and destroys them. So it’s a tube of lotion that eats cancer and makes you look younger to boot. That’s exactly the kind of hassle-free miracle cure I expect out of you, Kendall Square bio-nerds. You keep cranking out hits like that, and I’ll keep pretending that it’s purely in the interest of science when you breed rats with human ears growing out of their backs. Like you don’t race those things around the lab.

I diligently apply the Carac for six days, and it’s such a benign experience that I wonder if it’s doing anything. Then, at around the week mark, the Carac begins its anticancer campaign in earnest, with multiple skirmishes erupting across the battlefield of my face. I develop sprawling red marks below my eyes, another by my mouth, plus the original blot on my cheek. “I’m so good-looking that I can afford to be a little less good-looking,” I tell people who remark on my increasingly mangy complexion. You want to know a side effect of Carac? False bravado.

By the eighth day, I know what it feels like to be a molting snake. As a bit of advice for would-be Carac users, you should try to plan your treatment for a time frame when you don’t need your face. Like, if you ever wanted to take a two-week vacation in a cave in Uzbekistan. In my case, my mug was rounding into a festive explosion of blotches and flakes just in time for New Year’s Eve, so my scabrous visage is immortalized in a series of group photos. In several of the shots, it appears that a nicely dressed band of partygoers decided to ring in the New Year in the company of a severely frostbitten baboon.

My regimen is supposed to run 10 days, and on Day Nine I break my self-imposed ban on Carac research. I quickly wish I hadn’t. After a quick trip to Google, I learn that Carac is classified as a chemotherapy drug, which is a jarring semantic leap from the way I’d been thinking about it, which was as a groovy moisturizer with some pep in its step. Also, the Carac user feedback tends to be, let’s say, less than glowing.

One particular guy’s photo diary is truly unsettling. He only applied the cream between his eyebrows and his hairline, but evidently this guy’s forehead spent 20 years working as an awning in Palm Beach. Icarus didn’t have this much sun damage. By the third week, this gentleman was sporting a look that I’d call, “Normal lower face, forehead of the Predator.” Assuming that the Predator just sat through an intense bout of microdermabrasion.

I consult my Carac-prescribing friend to ask how much worse I’ll get, and she tells me to hang in there—a lot of people freak out and suspend the treatment once their faces start to flare up, thus undermining the whole endeavor. “These are people who have sun damage and spots all over their face in the first place,” she says. “I want to say, ‘Try to deal with it, because you look like crap anyway.’ People are babies.” It’s safe to say that she subscribes to the Tiger Mom school of bedside manners.

Ultimately, I finish out my 10-day sentence and Sanofi Aventis’ fluorouracil cocktail does its job. When circumstances dictate, I’ll probably even use it again, though in the future I’ll take my own advice and time the worst of the facial outbreak to coincide with a Carac friendly vacation. I hear Barrow, Alaska, is nice from mid-November to mid-January. It might be cold, but it’s dark 24 hours a day.