Home-Surgery: How Not To

Trigger warning:  If you are traumatized by moles, cutting off body parts or botched home surgery, you might want to skip this post.

Many years ago, when we only had two or three children I noticed a mole on my husband's back that concerned me.  I don't recall if google was the big in thing yet or not, but somehow the internet let me know that I should keep an eye on Josh's moles, and which ones to worry about.  We had pretty good insurance at the time, so off we went to the doctor to check it out.  The doctor agreed that this particular mole (let's call him Fred) might be problematic, so he did the in-office procedure to cut it out.  And Fred was no more.

The doctor also gave me some helpful tips for judging moles, and he told us that skin tags and moles just hanging on by a little bit of skin, regardless of size could easily just be snipped off at home.  "Wonderful!", we thought.  We have babies at home, surely we could remove moles at home.  How hard could it be?

A few weeks later Josh decided that a mole on his leg (let's call this one George) was irritating him.  George was a pretty big guy with multiple heads, but met the criteria of just hanging on by a little bit of skin.  We sanitized the area and had to choose our tools.  Now this is where we started to go wrong.  In the thinking process, you could say that "mistakes were made".  I almost don't want to tell you, but the blog does say, "Qualmless"...

We chose...a cigar cutter.  Yes, that's right, we chose a cigar cutter, gosh darned it.  One of these things:

If you don't know how this works, you put your thumb in one of those nifty finger holds and one or two other fingers in the other finger hold and you can pull those blades in the middle open to make a hole in the middle.  You stick the end of your cigar in the in the hole and squeeze it shut and snip off the tip.  You'd think the blades would have to be nice and sharp to cut through a big thick cigar.  You'd think something that could cut the tip of a cigar off would slice seamlessly through flesh.  What's that?  No, you wouldn't think that?  Okay, well we thought that.

So, like I said, we sanitized the area around George and we used fire on the blades to sanitize them.  I carefully fitted George into the opening and quickly squeezed the blades together.  George would not be so easily taken.  The blades closed, yes.  But George folded over on himself, caught in the blades like flesh caught between teeth.  Like, say, if you bit a giant mole with out severing the skin and then had it caught in your teeth.  Just like that.  (Have I gone too far?)

So there we were, with a cigar cutter full of mole, blood dribbling out, Josh grimacing (he hates it when I say that he grimaced, but he did).  "Should I open it??", I ask.  Josh says, "NO!  Get something to cut it off!"  Okay then!  I happened to have a pair of these spring loaded sewing scissors near by:

With George firmly still attached to both Josh and the cigar cutter, I pulled the cigar cutter up away from Josh's leg and snipped the little bit of skin left in between.  And George was no more.  (Well, after we pried him out of the cigar cutter and threw him away that is.)

So, in case you are considering this home-surgery for yourself, I made up this handy graphic to help you remember which tools you should and should not use:

Hope this helps.