When the day arrived for the biopsy operation I got myself up to the Bath clinic, signed the relevant insurance forms and waited in the outpatient’s clinic. I was soon called through and met by Mr W and a couple of nurses. I took off my left shoe and sock, rolled up my jeans and sat myself on the bed. I was given a quick run through of the procedure which would be a couple of local anaesthetics, a quick cut of the skin to take the mole out and a few stiches and that was pretty much how it went. The local anaesthetic bloody hurt but then it did its job. I decided to look away and had a lovely nurse stood next to me chatting away about all sorts of nothing, just to take my mind off things. No more than 5 seconds after Mr W said he was going to start I couldn’t help myself but glance down at my foot and I couldn’t believe it. There was a large elliptical hole in the top of my foot. Mr W was using an electric probe to kill the blood cells to stop the bleeding and on the metal, wheeled operating table was a 3 inch long and 1 inch wide flap of my skin with my now ex-mole sitting in the middle of it. This guy certainly didn’t sugar coat anything. He proceeded to stick 7 or 8 stitches in my foot and then while he washed his hands and one of the nurses put a dressing on my foot he ran through the next stage. The mole would be sent off and we’d have the results in a week. If it came back clear then there was nothing to worry about and everything was dealt with. “If” it came back clear? Where did the “if” come from? No one else had mentioned an “if”. This had only ever been sold to me as a precautionary thing that had one outcome and that was that in a couple of weeks I’d have a letter confirming everything was fine and everything else would carry on as normal. Now Mr W had introduced a completely alternative scenario that I was simply not expecting. He went on to spend 5 minutes running through the procedures if the results were not what we wanted. Suddenly he was talking about a wider local excision (WLE) which involved cutting a much larger area of flesh out of my foot to make sure no rogue cancer cells had spread from the initial site. Cancer cells???? He talked about using a skin graft taken from my thigh to seal the wound of the WLE. At the same time as the WLE they could carry out a sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB) which involves identifying and cutting out the first lymph nodes in my groin that the blood cells hit when they travel up my leg and do a full microscopic biopsy to see if the cancer had spread that far. There he was talking about cancer cells again! Both of these procedures would need to be done as soon as they could if the results were bad. Where had all this suddenly come from?

I took in as much information as I could and I was surprised even at the time about how calm and relaxed I was, given what I was being told. I kept telling myself that this was just an “if” situation and none of it may end up being relevant. I asked a couple of questions about the skin graft, the WLE and the SLNB. I then asked how long the current stitches in my foot would be in for. Mr W said that they would normally be taken out in approximately 10 – 14 days. However, if we’re doing the WLE and cutting out all of that flesh anyway in a couple of weeks then there’s no point in taking the stitches out as they’ll come out with the WLE operation. There was a moment of silence as Mr W’s words hung in the air before he seemed to frantically try to cover down what he had said with, “if, of course the results come back as bad, which I don’t necessarily expect them to.” Too late. You can’t un-hear something. He may have been just outlining the options but in my mind, he was already planning the WLE and SLNB. No wonder he hadn’t used the word “precaution” in talking about taking out the mole.

In a bit of a daze, everything was wrapped up and with a handshake, Mr W was off. I put my sock and shoe back on and hobbled out of the room and back to my car. I called Kathy to let her know that everything was fine and sent a few texts to those expecting an update and then I sat in the car and tried to dissect the conversation that had just happened. The words rattled around my head for ages. It was at that precise moment that I wish life came with Sky+ and I could rewind the conversation to analyse every word to work out if Mr W was being cautious or he’d just dropped a major clanger. Was it his approach of preparing for the worst and then being pleasantly surprised when the result was much better? Or did he know from looking at the mole or seeing it from the inside that this now wasn’t just precautionary.

I flitted between the 2 options for the next few days and whilst the official line was always that he had been cautious, secretly I tended to move more to the side that he knew bad news was on the way. It’s strange and may seem naïve to others but to this day I can’t actually say with any certainty which of the 2 scenarios it was. I’ve never asked Mr W. I don’t know if he even registered what I had noticed and if he had made a mistake then I can’t imagine he would admit to it. Even if he did, there’s nothing to be gained now so best to leave it as one of my own little imponderables.

The operation had taken place on a Thursday morning and I spent the next few days on the sofa at home with my foot raised and being waited on by Kathy and Emma. I spent the occasional 10 minutes Googling “malignant mole” and similar terms and found out a little bit about the situation if the result was bad. Nothing scary, just keen to understand what I’d be faced with if the news wasn’t what we wanted. I was pretty chilled with it all really and not in any kind of a state. I hobbled into work on the following Monday and managed to get on with things as normal while I waited for the results to come through a couple of days later. I’d been told by his secretary that hopefully Mr W would give me a ring to let me know the results were all clear and that would be that.