I suffer from an incurable disease, apparently, and have done so for over 10 years. I recall I went to the doctor 10 years ago about it, who took a biopsy, expressed a great deal of curiosity (‘oh my goodness I’ve never seen that before’ – which didn’t help my state of mind) and then read the pathology report a few days later and said ‘don’t worry about it’.
It took me another 10 years to get worried about it again, went into the doctor’s (this condition has a habit of morphing about a bit) to clear these concerns, and the doctor managed to dig out the report from 10 years ago (an information management strategy that I’m impressed with, anyway!) and apparently this thing is called Schamberg Disease.
No, I hadn’t heard of it either, and neither had the doctor.
But, knowledge is of two kinds – you either know it or you know where to find it. Being a doctor, I had assumed he had access to all sorts of information resources I don’t.
But he didn’t.
He googled it.
And now I know why it’s benign. Unsightly, but benign – think knobbly knees with zinc cream on pasty-white consultant legs. Just as well that I managed to get married early on.