Mole Person

I was eight years old when I first became convinced I was about to die. 

Someone said something, but I don’t remember who or what. Maybe a kid at school said, “Hey, weird mole, you freak! You’re uninvited from my birthday party.” Maybe a family member said, “Did you know your great grandmother had melanoma and then they had to cut off her scalp and replace it with skin from her thigh? And then she DIED! That could be you!” 

It doesn’t matter. Whatever it was became the perfect thought for the parasite that lived in my anxious and sensitive little brain to leech off of. 

It was all my fault. I knew I hadn’t been slip-slop-slapping enough. I knew I had been too casual about the strict code of no hat no play no fun today. But I kept it to myself. Dying at home, I figured, would be easier than having to deal with hospitals and doctors, et cetera. Recently, I’d had a blood test that concluded in my fainting into a table and splitting my head open. I figured my inevitable cancer treatment would involve more of that kind of thing.  

So instead, I sat around and waited to die.   

And I am still waiting.  

In the fourteen or so years that have since passed, the number of moles on my body have increased exponentially. Moles that I am extremely preoccupied by. That I examine constantly in the mirror. 

I’ve become kind of a compulsive googler. I once read a Wikipedia page that said being a hypochondriac takes ten years off your life. Now I’m really worried I might be one.

On bad days, I find myself in bottomless internet spirals. I lie awake in bed until the early hours of the morning, googling things like mole or melanoma?, itchy mole bad?, youngest people who have died of melanoma? I find myself on subreddits for young people with cancer thinking, why wouldn’t that be me? 

If you’re convinced you’re on the brink of death, it’s hard to focus on assignments and LinkedIn and getting a real job someday. I read this Substack about this girl who sent like 100 emails to strangers and then achieved her dream career. This is the kind of thing I could never do. I’m too busy with all my Google searches! I’m going to be stuck at my shitty job at the underwear store forever!

There is all of this criteria which you learn when you Google this stuff as much as I do. The ABCDE’s of melanoma, the Ugly Duckling Sign. These are the things I evaluate my moles on instead of going to see a qualified professional. 

A = Asymmetry is BAD.  

B = When a Border is jagged or irregular, that’s BAD. 

C = Being more than one Colour is BAD.  

D = The Diameter is bigger than a pencil eraser? Believe it or not, that's BAD. 

E = If the wretched thing Evolves? Well, that is actually BAD as well. 

This raises many questions for me, such as, is perfect symmetry possible in nature? How different does a shade of brown have to be for it to count as a different colour? When was the last time I used a pencil with an eraser? The moles are going to kill me. 

The Ugly Duckling Sign says that a melanoma will likely stand out from all of the normal moles around it. Frankly, this rule pisses me off. All of my moles are unique in their own special way, therefore failing and killing me. The name also pisses me off. My disgraced (suspected) melanoma is going to grow up to become a beautiful swan? What the fuck? It’s trying to kill me!  

My therapist, my mum, the rational sliver of my brain, have all said many times that if you go and get a skin check they will almost certainly say you are fine and you won’t have to worry about it anymore.   

And I have said, many times, I AM CERTAIN THAT I AM GOING TO DIE.  

But at the same time I knew I had to do it. I’m not a cowardly eight-year-old anymore. I am probably fine. I might be fine. I could maybe, possibly, be fine. And so I made an appointment. 

The following days were horrible. Every day, I would stand behind the counter at work for hours, rehanging lacy undies onto coathangers and watching them immediately slip off. But in my mind I was at my skin check. And as soon as I stepped into the room, the doctor would say, “Wow, you are the sickest person I’ve ever seen!” And immediately call a helicopter to fly me directly to the finest hospital in the country, nay, the world. Where I would die three hours later, not surrounded by my loved ones, because everyone forgot to call them.  

And that scared me a bit. 

But what scared me more was how I imagined a skin check would be—standing in the middle of a fluorescently-lit doctor’s office, completely naked and standing like a starfish, while an unsmiling man wearing a surgical mask slowly circles me with a magnifying glass, not saying a word as he closely scrutinises my larger than size ten body for every imperfection (OF WHICH THERE ARE MANY).  

And I can just tell by his eyes that he’s completely disgusted by me. 

Then, finally, he speaks for the first time, 

and he says I’m not even gonna tell you if I think any of these moles look bad  

because 

you don’t deserve it! 

You don’t deserve anything! 

I’m not proud of you! 

And you’re never going to be able to send enough emails to get a good job! 

Then he shoots me  

in the head 

with a gun! 

And my last thought before I die is 

at least it's not from melanoma. 

Anyway, in real life the skin check went fine. 

What a let down.