"Some Vicious Mole of Nature..."

...thus spoke Prince Hamlet, and by golly did he quite hit the spot with that image.

To expound as best one might. 'The stamp of one defect' meant the Bard, by which possession - by nature and not through personal failing - a man takes 'corruption from that particular fault' alone, overturning any good he might otherwise have accomplished.

That single defect then is his downfall. He might have lived had he not died of cancer. That sort of thing.

Let us, though, be clear here. Shakespeare's 'mole' is not the mouldwarp but the mal. Not the cute furry animal, 'Wind in the Willows' stout-hearted hero and terror of many a lawn; but the stain or blot. The etymology is quite different, the meaning differentiated and distinct.

And yet in melanoma, do not the two come together in one unwholesome whole? A mole on the skin derives from the mal. It is, quite literally, a stain. But when it burrows into the skin, leaving behind it a visible heap - as if a molehill - bringing malignancy in its train and wake, is it not precisely so very like the earth-digging creature in its doings?

Does seem, perhaps, a tad unfair to burden an innocent animal with a metaphor of decay and death, yet it is hard not to be so tempted. For it is the burrowing beneath the surface that makes the thing, more than any image of a stain. Drop red wine on a shirt and it marks as it dries. But it does not then set off to penetrate further, as does the mouldwarp.

If you know your melanoma, you'll too know that the deeper it digs the nastier and more deadly it becomes. We all have stains, but not all mercifully are undermined thus.

Just how undermined I am, I am shortly to find out. My mole - my mal and my mouldwarp - has been excised. It is pronounced malignant, but we do not yet know quite how penetrating or how threatening. But what we do know is that the deeper it has gone, the more defective and deadlier it will prove to be.