The story of the infarcted mole

I have a mole, or to be precise, I had a mole behind my ear, where the hair meets the neck. It was one of those protruding pinkish moles about the size of a third of the tip of the pinkie finger,and it bothered me because it was a lump of numb flesh, and it didn't feel like it belonged to my body.

So one day, I said to my buddy, "I would like to remove the mole at some point." And she said, "My mum used to have a few such moles on her face. She tied a string around it and it fell off 'cos of the cut in blood supply. Why don't we tie a piece of dental floss around your mole?" I was pleased with the idea and consented to it. So I bared my neck to the waxed dental floss, and she tied the floss around it, and pulled. It hurt. I realised that the mole wasn't as numb as I thought it was.

The dental floss remained in my hair for another five days, as I deftly dodged all questions from my colleagues about the white string? in my hair. The mole got more and more swollen and red and painful, but it refused to fall off. I kept wiping the blood off and dousing it with iodine to make sure it didn't get infected. Five days later, my buddy took a look at it and said that it was looking crusty, infected and infarcted. She said in her best doctor voice that the mole had to come off, and that she would bring the necessary equipment to my house that very evening. I was very scared.

That evening, she came with two blades, antiseptic, bandages, iodine, gauze, needles, alcohol swabs, etc. Two blades! And needles too! I refused to let her inject me with anesthesia, so she put this anesthesing cream all around the mole instead. We let it sit there for a good ten minutes, and just before the home-spun operation she told me that she found out from her mum that her mum didn't tie string around her moles, but that she had gone to the skin centre instead, which took her moles off by laser treatment for $800! What? And here I was with dental floss around my mole for five days?!?

In any case, there was no turning back now, I bared my neck to her again, and in two clean swipes, the mole was off. The dental floss was still embedded in the mole. I felt an adrenaline rush.

Today I have a slight pink discolouration over where the mole was. She did a really good job -- it was her first molectomy too. My only advice is this: Don't try this at home!

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