Mr W duly arrived and carefully took the dressing off. What I was left with looked like something out of a horror movie. It was bizarre. I could see the inside of my foot as if looking at it through a window. The graft area was an oval about 10cm long and 6cm wide at its biggest. What I really hadn’t expected was that the skin graft itself is such a thin layer of skin that it’s see through. It’s like cutting a big chunk out of your foot and then covering it up with a sheet of cling film. I couldn’t tell if the graft had worked or not but Mr W was happy. He said it looked great. Not the word I would have used but everything is relative I guess! There was a quite obvious bulge in the graft area. It was whiter than the rest of the wound and I asked if it was a bone. I was told that it wasn’t bone, it was my big toe muscle. I must have looked like I didn’t believe Mr W as he then continued to justify his statement. “If I push it then your big toe will move. Look.” And he started to push the muscle in my skin graft area and proudly watched my big toe move. I decided right then, with Mr W pushing my big toe muscle to make it flex quite involuntarily, that in future, anything Mr W said I would greet with the most believing and accepting face I could muster.

The skin graft area was so disgusting to look at that I couldn’t help but take a few photos on my phone. It’s fair to say that I got mixed reactions from people that I sent the photos to.

The foot was covered up again but this time just with a dressing and bandage rather than a full cast and I was sent back to the sofa for another fortnight before the results of the lymph node biopsy came through.

While I waited for the results of the SLNB, I was a bit of a regular at the Bath clinic outpatient’s unit as the skin graft on my foot needed quite a bit of attention to keep the area clean and regularly change dressings. Despite this attention, the foot still got infected but luckily with no detrimental effect to the overall recovery. The nurses there looked after me fantastically and were all absolutely lovely. During one visit to the clinic to get my foot looked at and dressed properly, I had an absolutely classic Manuel from Fawlty Towers “pig-e-on” moment. I was being seen by a new Doctor, who was in the UK for a year as part of his training. He was a Hungarian guy, very nice and friendly. Now his English was significantly better than my Hungarian, but he was not fluent. I kicked off my flip flops, put my legs up on the bed and carefully took the dressing off my foot. He looked at the large area where the WLE had taken place and seemed impressed with the wound. He asked me what happened and I told him that I had a mole removed. He looked visibly shocked. “A mole?” he said. I confirmed that I’d had a mole removed and he shook his head and muttered the word mole several times almost under his breath. I was a little confused as to his reaction, although it became very clear what was causing him such amazement a few moments later when he said, “a mole bite your foot?” I managed to suppress my laughter, well almost suppress my laughter and explained that I hadn’t been attacked by a short sighted, subterranean mammal, I’d had a skin growth removed. He was not in the slightest bit embarrassed, in fact he simply nodded his head in a confident manner which somehow seemed to suggest that he had known all along that a mole couldn’t have bitten me and I was an idiot for making him think such things.