I am lucky enough to have private health insurance through work and I made use of it in arranging to see Dr A, a dermatologist at Bath Clinic within a couple of weeks. Time passed pretty quickly. Whilst it was easy to work myself into a bit of a state about having the lesion cut out and sent off for testing, I always had the leaflet about the lesion that the initial GP had given me. This acted as something of a safety net to me. Whenever I felt worried I just took the leaflet out and reassured myself that this whole dermatologist situation was just precautionary, probably a result of the increasing blame culture we now live in with people being sued left right and centre. I was fairly happy that in a couple of weeks the whole situation would be over. I would have a small scar on the top of my left foot, enough to win a little bit of sympathy and a couple of days on the sofa but I would have a clean bill of health and nothing to worry about.

As I went to meet Dr A at the Bath Clinic, I was pretty relaxed about everything and even more so when actually I met her. She has a very calming way about her, possibly something that’s needed when she spends most of her days meeting people who have worked themselves up to be nervous wrecks. We had a brief chat and then she took a look at my foot. She agreed that the lesion needed to be cut out but was still talking about this just being precautionary. She said that she felt the skin wasn’t too tight on the top of my foot for stitching to be a problem but said that wanted to send me to see Mr W who is a plastic surgeon who she works with a lot as there may be a need for a skin graft if the skin could not stretch over the incision they would make.

Dr A then stripped me down to my boxer shorts and gave me a quick once over. She was scanning for any other dubious looking moles but found nothing of any concern. She then had a little feel behind my knee, in my groin, under my armpits and in my neck. I wasn’t too sure of the reasons behind this at the time but happily let her do her thing. I now know that she was searching for any indicators of problems a good couple of steps ahead of having a mole cut out of my foot. If the mole was a nasty one then it would almost definitely be malignant melanoma, a very dangerous and fast moving skin cancer. If melanoma is allowed to do its worst then it starts on the skin but then spreads down into the body and hits your blood stream. Once in your blood, the melanoma cells are ferried very quickly around your body and ultimately can set up camp in one of a number of your major body organs. If it gets that far then there’s not much that can be done other than slow down the cancer growth. The prognosis at this stage is poor, life expectancy is spoken about in months rather than years or decades which is how I would prefer my time on this earth to be spoken about. Anyway, the reason for feeling these 4 parts of my body is that this is where your lymph nodes are located. These are a series of small glands that blood passes through as it spreads around the body. The lymph nodes act as a filter, extracting any foreign cells, isolating them and ideally then overpowering and killing them. However, what can occur is that the lymph nodes do their first job of filtering out the melanoma cells but are then unable to overpower and kill them. Instead the melanoma cells multiply within the lymph node until the node is swollen and solid with a cancer tumor. Dr A was jumping a couple of steps ahead to see if there were any danger signs elsewhere already. Luckily she was happy with what she had seen and felt. She arranged for me to see Mr W at the beginning of January and I was sent on my way.

I left Dr A’s office in very much the same mind set as I had gone in. Part of me had hoped that she was going to say that my GP was over cautious and it was nothing to worry about and didn’t even need to be cut out. But part of me was worried she would take a look and reach for the scalpel immediately. As she did neither I was pretty relaxed with things. Could have gone better but could have gone worse. Either she or Mr W would cut my mole out, send it off for tests as a precaution and give me the rubber stamp that everything was fine and I had nothing to worry about.