My not-so-celebrity mole

So this morning I finally started the second leg of the 2005 Cancer and Heart Disease False Alarm Tour.

(The heart disease false alarm, you may recall, involved an irregular EKG that proved to be within the bounds of acceptable irregularity after a very-much-not-fun stress test last month. Today I went in for (what I plan on being) false alarm #2: a mole that had grown a brain and a mouth and some scabby little hands and therefore wasn’t looking like it had much of a future on the beauty pageant circuit.)

But when the doctor saw my scabby, ill-shapen mole thingie this morning, she shrugged and looked COMPLETELY unimpressed. (These beauty pageant judges can be SO harsh. Fortunately, little Scabby Abby has thick skin.) The doctor said the scabby thing was a very common, very benign something-or-other (it had a real purdy name I asked her to repeat three times so I could blog about it—because I’m THAT dedicated to my readers—but I still can’t remember what the hell it’s called).

It had taken more than five weeks from the initial referral to get an opening in the mole doctor’s schedule, and the scabby thing (the mole, not the mole doctor) had all but healed in that time. But while she (the mole doctor, not the mole) was ogling my dermis (which sounds naughty in a Deep Space Nine kind of way), she noticed a bunch of other moles that gave her considerable paws. (HA! Mole paws!)

So she decided to do a complete body check—which started with a complimentary wardrobe makeover! She handed me the appropriate couture—a chic sheath in aquamarine cotton muslin featuring pearly white spaghetti straps along a plunging peek-a-boo opening in the back—and once I was suitably dressed, she promptly had me take the damn thing off entirely and so she could begin her poking and prodding and microscoping of my complete dermis (including what she politely called my “bottom”).

Now, I’m so moley that I’m surprised she could even decide where to start looking. I’m so moley, in fact, that the producers of Celebrity Mole wouldn’t even let me be on their show because I’d be such an obvious giveaway. And because I’m not a celebrity. And because I never auditioned.

Anyway, she dove right in and started taking measurements and making sounds of concern and mapping out my dermal constellation on a poorly drawn body shape on some official medical document.

And she found at least a pound of flesh she wanted to hack out of me. But she narrowed it down to three moles that had the worst ABCD violations from the Mole Code of Conduct (Asymmetry, Border Irregularity, Color and … um … just being a total Douchebag).

So you could say that next week I’m going in for a triple biopsy. (Please re-read that sentence carefully, especially if you’re a gold digger: It’s a triple biopsy, not a triple bypass. So don’t expect to marry me and inherit my vast stockpile of wealth Kenny G CDs when I topple over a week later with my hand dramatically clutching my heart. Because the joke would be on you! They’re Barry Manilow! And they’re LPs! Besides, we already learned that my ticker—despite an EKG that’s as queer as a football bat—is still essentially fine.)

Again, I choose not to be even remotely concerned about any of this until I have a very specific reason to be. Like looking down to find my cold, dead heart in my own bloody hands. The only downside to having the biopsies is the vanity crisis they’ll generate when I won’t be able to work out for almost a week while the stitches heal. ACK! If I can’t work out, nobody will sleep with talk to sleep with me!

And speaking of dermal scabbing, the tattoo is healing nicely. Once it stops looking like it might scare the wimmen and children, I’ll post pictures. (Remember: It’s in a place that’s not very appropriate to show people at work. Not that that has stopped me.)