The Mole

I started to tell this story to a couple of friends online last night, and then realized I needed to save it for a blog. It's not as emotionally deep or exciting as my last three tales, but it's a story of my childhood so this is the right place for it. Especially as yesterday escaped without an entry for some reason.

From birth, I had a mole on the top of my head. It's a good place to have one, I guess, hidden under all that hair. For fourteen years it sat there, forgotten and neglected, until one day my mother decided that it looked larger than usual and sent me off for the doctor to give his opinion. Our family doctor at the time was a man who was rapidly approaching retirement age, and his eyesight and dexterity were visibly failing. Nevertheless, he took a look and declared the mole needed to be removed.

Surgery was scheduled at a hospital some fifty miles away, and as my mother was working that day, her cousin Constance volunteered to take me instead. She had a daughter of her own, six months older than me, and was a rather Bohemian spirit and fun to be around. She had recently divorced her second husband (my father's brother, and no, we're not "from the south"!) and was living with the man who was to become her third - and current husband. He was a mysterious figure, crippled with multiple sclerosis, and always hidden upstairs in his art studio. I spent just a few moments at their house before we set off for the hospital.

I was a little surprised to learn that the operation would take place under local anesthetic only. I was asked to lie on the operating table, face down, and turn my head to the left. The numbness hit my skull and for a long time, all I could feel was the tugging and pulling as the surgeon removed the offending lump from my scalp. Finally, I was asked to sit up. I slowly raised my head from the pillow and almost fainted at the sight of the huge pool of bright red blood that now stained the once-white bed linens. No-one had bothered to tell me how profusely head wounds bleed, I guess.

Once I was expertly cleaned up and recovered, we started the drive home. I think Constance sensed that I needed a cheery distraction so as she drove through the Ashdown Forest, she pulled off to the side and asked if I'd like to have a brief driving lesson. I'd never been behind the wheel of a vehicle before and was a little intimidated at starting out with her rather old Austin Mini Estate. With minimal instruction and a lot of false starts, I managed to make a few circuits of the roadside clearing in the forest before coming to a trembling halt. It would be another three years before I would get behind the wheel of a car again, this time with a qualified instructor by my side.

Once the recommended healing time had passed, I went back to the doctor so that he could remove the stitches. Remember what I said about his eyesight? Yeah. He did manage to find and pull out a few of them, but after a couple more return trips each time I discovered yet more knotted black thread on my head, my mother gave up and between us we extracted the remaining sutures at home as we found them. The resulting scar ended up being larger than the mole, and the biopsy concluded that it hadn't been growing at all.

We changed doctors very soon after that.

(This was the same doctor who, when my mother was rolling on the floor in agony with a menopausal migraine and told me to call the doctor to say she was dying, said to 12-year-old me "No, she's not" and hung up.)