I’d rather be fishing, I tell you,” says Jean through a thick French accent as he gets comfortable on the exam table.

Last Christmas, a spot on the bridge of his nose began bleeding spontaneously. At first he and doctors thought his glasses were irritating the skin, but the sore didn’t heal for a long time.

As it turned out, the spot is skin cancer and he has come for day surgery at Surrey Memorial Hospital to have it removed.

“How’d I get this, doc?” he asks.

“It’s sun damage,” replies Dr. Adrian Lee.

He prepares a local anesthetic to inject into the area.

“Ooooh, that’s good,” flinches Jean sarcastically as the needle pokes into his face.

Lee has marked with felt pen where he will make incisions to not only remove the lesion, but where he’ll pull skin from to effectively sew the area closed.

Within a half-hour, Jean’s operation is complete and a row of dark stitches runs between his eyes and down one side of the bridge of his nose.

“Plus tard!” he says (a French exclamation of surprise) when he looks in the mirror.

Once healed, the doctor assures, the scar will barely be noticeable.

• • •

Lee is a plastic surgeon. Like others in his profession, he’s forever battling the stereotype of plastic surgery that American television and pop culture promotes. It’s a field that stretches far beyond facelifts, liposuction and tummy tucks.

Today, for example, he’s removing several skin cancers, repairing a cheek scar, cutting away painful excess cartilage from a senior’s ear, and putting the finishing touches on a breast reconstruction for a cancer patient. He does have to remove stitches from a recent eye job, but even that’s not cosmetic. The woman with the red, purple and yellow bruising, mostly beneath her eyes, had her eyelids reduced six days earlier. They were hanging so low they were restricting her field of vision.

• • •

Plastic surgery is a specialty well-suited for someone like Lee, who thrives on variety.

“We mould skin, bone, tendon,” says the doctor, who’s been practicing at SMH for the past nine years.

A typical day may see him excising a mole, injecting fat into a depressed scar, grafting tendon where some is missing or repairing a burn.

“As plastic surgeons, we do a lot of skin procedures.”

However, they also see their share of the unexpected.

Once, Lee was called to examine both sides of a fist fight – one fellow with a fractured hand and another with a fractured cheek bone.

“We had to make sure we kept them apart from one another,” he laughs.

Click here to view index of other stories in the Leader's Surrey in Focus: Health special edition.