Concern & Anxiety

I swear, I think I am the queen for anxiety and I hate it with every fiber of my being.  Not kidding.

So, as you may or may not know…I am extremely fair skinned, extremely…like almost ghostly fair skinned.  I know I’m not alone, and that their are so many others out there that have as white of legs as I do!  I know it… and it sucks because wearing a skirt nearly requires I don’t know, something so it doesn’t look like my legs are matching the color of my khaki skirt.  At one point at work I had a coworker that called that khaki skirt, my “naked skirt” because it blends in with my legs so much that I look like I’m naked.  Uhhh, yeah.  Anyways, that’s not the point of my post… well, not directly.

My point is that having fair skinned means high risk for skin cancer, and well especially if you have lots of moles or freckles or spend alot of time outside.

I’ve had this mole on my cheek/jaw bone forever… like seriously, for ever or as long as I can ever remember.  It was always there, just a regular routine normal mole that occasionally grew a hair every now and again.  Which, by the way… gah, hate.  Chin hairs, mole hairs, little stubborn hairs that return at the blink of an eye and just as fast as you put the tweezer away, that little bastard is back… yeah, hate.

Well, every now and again I’ll get almost like an in grown hair on that mole, and I didn’t think much of it… it almost felt as if a zit was behind the mole and unable to pop since the mole was covering it up.  That’s what it felt like, and so that’s what I just assumed it was… just that, an ingrown hair zit stuck behind a mole and eventually it’d go away and all would be fine and dandy.

I thought.

Until it didn’t go away for a good month or so.

Then, I started pushing and squishing, and trying to pop it like a zit… I even tried to puncture it with my tweezers or peel off a layer of the skin in order to get it to release, because gah, it was so painful!  Nothing ever would work and it would never ever release, so I’d put hot hot hot compresses on it, with the hopes of that working… and, it didn’t.

Then it went away.

And I thought I was good to go, it was gone, no pain, no further problems.

I thought.

And then it returned.  Fluid filled and red. 

I could push on it and move around my pointer finger and I could push the fluid around in it, you know, kind of like a little marble size ball that the water was in but it would never puncture open; that’s what it felt like.  I kept pushing and pinching and ugh, everything… eventually a little bit of the clear fluid came out, but that was it.  Still weird, and squishy… Then I picked at it, and picked… and picked and picked and picked… and then it started to bleed, and then scab and then I’d pick again, and it’d scab, and then it’d hurt, and itch and peel and… then fluid would return and then…

…it hardened up.  And the mole returned. 

But it was bigger.  And there was a blue color around the side and bottom of it, with yet a little fluid left around the bottom side of the mole kind of by the blue part. 

I pushed it off, pushed it off… until it just hit me this weekend and I thought about it, and I started googling like I always do because refer to the first sentence of this post.

And of course, of COURSE what do you think came up?

ABCDE’s for checking your skin:
A:   A is for asymmetry.  One half of the mole or skin growth doesn’t match the other half.
B:   B is for border irregularity.  The edges are ragged, notched or blurred.
C:   C is for color.  The pigmentation is not uniform.  Shades of tan, brown and black are present.  Dashes of red, white and blue add to the mottled appearance.  Changes in color distribution, especially the spread of color from the edge of a mole into the surrounding skin, also are an early sign of melanoma.
D:   D is for diameter.  The mole or skin growth is larger than 6mm or about the size of a pencil eraser.  Any growth of a mole should be of concern.
E:   E is for evolution.  There is a change in the size, shape, symptoms (such as itching or tenderness), surface (especially bleeding), or color of a mole.

Signs of melanoma in an existing mole include changes in:
- Elevation, such as thickening or raising of a previously flat mole.  (my mole was never flat though)
- Surface, such as scaling, erosion, oozing, bleeding, or crusting.  (my mole was doing all except erosion because I’m not exactly sure what they mean)
- Surrounding skin, such as redness, swelling, or small new patches of color around a larger lesion (satellite pigmentation).  (my mole was pretty much doing all of that)
- Sensation, such as itching, tingling or burning.  (I don’t remember any tingling or burning, but on occasion it would itch, still does every now and then)
- Consistency, such as softening or small pieces that break off easily (friability).  (I’m unsure what they mean by “breaking off” but, not really happening with mine)

So, I called this morning because I can’t handle thinking about it and I’m getting in tomorrow morning at 9:30 am to hopefully get this thing removed because ugh, it’s going to make me lose sleep pretty soon… it’s all I think about, day in day out and it doesn’t help I read medical records all day and match my symptoms to their symptoms and then google the information and self diagnose myself… that doesn’t help at all.

And yes, I am already on anxiety medication. 

If any of you have had something similar to what I’m explaining, please let me know because uh, hai, I am worrying like a manic worrier worries.

Say some good thoughts for me that I’m overreacting and all will be fine, I just hate going to the doctor for this kind of crap… it completely puts me in a tizzy.

Tagged as: abnormal moles, anxiety, anxious, bcc, Cancer, concern, doctor, melanoma, moles, scc, skin cancer, skin check, skin lesions, spitz nevus, worry