The few weeks until I saw Mr W went by quickly and without any real concern. I was now in the system and had the experts looking after me so I was in the best hands and besides, this whole thing was only precautionary. I met Mr W back at Bath Clinic and it was a very similar meeting to that with Dr A. He was equally relaxed and put me at ease straight away. He took a look at the mole on my foot and then stripped me off and had a feel of my groin, armpits and neck, which he seemed happy with. I got dressed and we sat down to confirm that he would need to cut the mole out of my foot and would do that under local anaesthetic a couple of weeks later with the results following a week after that. Everything he said was pretty much the same as my GP and Dr A but with one exception; he didn’t use the word precaution once. His general message and tone was the same as the others but there was a definite lack of that 10 letter word that had seemed to have wrapped snuggly and comfortably around the process before. Surprisingly, I wasn’t at that stage too concerned about that, although with hindsight I’d obviously been concerned enough to pick up on it but I wasn’t scared. One thing that seemed to be true of Mr W when I very first met him and has been confirmed in the time I’ve spent with him since is that he’s doesn’t say things for the sake of saying them. He’s not blunt, harsh or insensitive in any way at all but by the same token he doesn’t seem to sugar coat things just to make the message easier to take. On reflection, I like that about him. He says things as they are and as a result you know where you stand.

Over the next 2 weeks while I waited for the mole to be cut out, I managed to persuade myself that Mr W’s lack of the word “precaution” was nothing to worry about. Just the guy’s style and this would all be sorted in a couple if weeks.