Now that was scary: During last weeks vacation I noticed a pruritic birthmark on my right omoplate. The mark has been there as long as I can remember, but it never looked different or started itching. Until last week.
Today, after reading some lurid tales about birthmarks gone bad, I visited a surgeon, who decided I should get rid of the mark. After anesthetizing the omoplate, he removed it with a scalpel and presented me an astonishing conglomerate of pigment cells. (Birthmarks are made of those cells.) I had always been under the impression that birthmarks only occur in the upper layer of the skin, but I was wrong: The mark was ~ 1cm high and thus must have stretched across multiple layers.
It will now be sent to a lab for a biopsy and in two weeks I'll know whether it was a melanoma or not. (According to the surgeon it should be benign with a probability of 99%.) And I'm expected to not take a shower for two days. Yikes!