The mole again

Here's the scene from chapter 1 again. It's an example of how it might go, and I'm not promising it. I've given it the likeliest ending, which isn't the only possible one.

It's a Tuesday morning in September, and you're getting out of the shower. In the mirror you catch sight of the mole on your left shoulder.

The thoughts run as they always have. You should get that looked at. It's probably nothing. The surgery's run off its feet, and work is mad this month.

You hear them this time, and you recognise them. They're arriving within seconds, and every one is respectable. You know now that this is the signal.

You get dressed. At the kitchen table you write one line on the back of an envelope. "Today, 8.10, at this table, I ring the surgery and ask for a routine appointment about a mole." You think for a minute about your daughter's wedding next summer, and about the walking holiday you've been promising yourself, and about being around. At ten past eight you ring. You're on hold for fourteen minutes, and you unload the dishwasher while you wait. "I'd like a routine appointment, please. I've got a mole that I think has changed." They offer you a week on Thursday at ten to nine. You take it.

You put the phone down, and you feel lighter, which surprises you. Nobody has looked at anything yet, and the mole is exactly what it was at eight o'clock. But for the first time since March it's somebody else's job to worry about it.

A week on Thursday you sit in the consulting room with your shirt off your shoulder. "I first noticed it looked different in March," you say. "I'm worried it might be skin cancer." The doctor looks at it under a bright light through a small lens, for perhaps forty seconds. She asks a couple of questions. Then she says she's not concerned. It's a harmless kind, and it has the regular look she'd expect. She takes a photograph for your record so there's something to compare with. If it changes, come back. You're out by five past nine.

It took six months of ten past threes to get to a forty-second look.

That evening you take the screening kit out of the bathroom cabinet and read the leaflet, and the following morning you post it. At the weekend you ring three dental practices, and the third can see you in November.

It won't always end with "I'm not concerned". Sometimes the doctor will say, "I'd like someone else to look at that." That's the system doing its job, and you'll be glad you didn't wait until Christmas. But much more often than not, what you've been dreading for months will be settled by a short conversation in a small room. The relief afterwards is the lasting kind.

If you do one thing after closing this book, take the item at the top of your list and write the sentence. Put in when you'll book it, where you'll be and how you'll do it. Then, at the time you've written down, make the call.