At the time of starting this account (3 years before releasing this blog), I’m 35 years old, husband to Kathy for coming up to 5 years and Dad to the gorgeous 2 year old Emma. I have lived in SW England all my life and I have what I would call standard skin colour, neither fair nor dark skinned. As a family growing up, we spent 2 weeks on summer holiday every year, usually Mallorca and I don’t remember ever getting especially sun burnt. The slap slop of suntan lotion was standard procedure and afternoons in the pool or sea wearing a T-shirt were not common but also not unheard of as a kid. More recently things are the same with a couple of weeks away in the summer but nothing out of the ordinary. The occasional sun burnt back or shoulders and more recently my increasing bald patch but that’s about it.

Around May 2012, I noticed a brand new mark on the top of my left foot. It looked like a small bruise, about the size of a grain of rice. I didn’t pay much attention to it. What I remember as being a matter of weeks later and it had turned into more of a freckle but remained roughly the same size. I showed Kathy but as more of a passing comment rather than a concern. I remember thinking that people develop freckles, moles and warts all the time so I put it out of my mind.

Over the following few months the “freckle” got a little bigger but still no bigger than a “normal” freckle or mole. It was now almost entirely oval and a mid brown colour. I was about to say that I wasn’t worried about it but that isn’t true as I had done the standard thing of becoming Dr Paul overnight by simply spending 20 minutes on Google to diagnose exactly what was wrong with me. I searched for phrases like “new mole”, “bad mole characteristics” and other such terms. The first thing that this did was petrify me – obviously. Just the Google search itself threw up results from websites I didn’t want to be reading; cancer.gov, nhs cancer and Macmillan Cancer Research. Within minutes or even seconds I was reading about skin cancer and a couple of clicks further into my medical qualification and I was looking at survival rates and deciding what my chances were of living for the next 5 years! After spending a couple of minutes terrifying myself I snapped out of it and made myself go back to the beginning. I went back to look at what I had started looking for in the first place – the characteristics of bad moles. It seems that it is pretty standard to summarize the main characteristics of a mole you need to be concerned about into a simple ABCDE checklist.

A – asymmetry, being very irregular in shape.
B – borders that are ragged or notched.
C – colours of 2 or more.
D – diameter of more than 6mm.
E – enlargement or growth of mole over time.

My mole stacked up fine against the seemingly universally accepted bad mole check list;

A – My mole was perfectly symmetrical.
B – My moles edge was totally smooth.
C – My mole was a solid, single colour.
D – Whilst my mole was growing a little it was still less than 6mm.
E – OK, my mole had grown but everything that’s new must grow at some stage mustn’t it, otherwise it would just appear in a puff of smoke at its eventual size?

Added to my moles strong performance against the checklist, what all websites were also very insistent on was that the huge majority of moles are harmless. Most new moles appear in your first 30 years so I was just a bit of a slow starter. Another characteristic mentioned on the “to be concerned about” list was moles that itch but that didn’t fit in with the ABCDE check list so it got added somewhere in the next paragraph. Wherever it appeared on the list, mine didn’t itch either so another tick in the box. All of these positives enabled me to put it out of my mind for a while. It was still there and I noticed it most days when putting on my socks but I was now a qualified internet doctor and I’d given me the all clear!