Since a dear friend died of melanoma at the age of 33, I have semi-religiously visited a dermatologist to have my skin checked. Over the years I’ve had the odd mole removed and some sunspots treated, but nothing too serious. The dermatologist I see tolerates my skin neuroses. She jokes gently that I do not need to return so often and yet I come anyway. Twice a year, every year.
Our relationship is a quiet one. While she draws the blue curtain, I undress down to my bra and undies, leaving the rest of my clothes in a messy pile on the chair. I lie down on the bed, let her scan each mole with her magnifier and wait to be told that she is done, and I can get dressed. Sometimes she has questions about parenting because her children are still in primary school while mine are not. But usually it’s a speedy process and I’m in and out in less than 15 minutes.
I trust her. She is honest, upfront and much younger than me. She has flawless skin, where I have lines. She has no glasses where I wear mine half on and half off. And she has luscious black hair that I never really noticed until mine started falling out.
My doctor suggested I talk to the dermatologist about my thinning hair. And so, I made an appointment. I sat in the waiting room with others, half watching the television screen, and half wondering what I was going to say about why I was here. Talking about moles was one thing but admitting to thinning hair was somehow harder.
When the nurse showed me into the screening room, I sat down on the black plastic chair to wait, scrolling on my phone and composing the right words. I’m used to seeing the dermatologist in a dress and heels but that day she had on black scrubs, or something that resembled them. I thought that it probably meant it was a surgical day, a mole removal day, where she cut. She asked me if I was there for a skin check and I explained that I was not, blurting out that I’d noticed my hair was thinning.
She moved closer and checked my scalp and then sat down at her desk and began typing notes, explaining that she wasn’t really concerned because it was quite common for women my age to lose some hair because the follicles grow smaller and the hair breaks. I said something about the joys of getting older and she asked me if I’d noticed when the hair loss started.
“Just after my partner died in 2020,” I told her.
She stopped typing and looked up; her face changed by my words. I was surprised that I hadn’t mentioned it already but, then again, our relationship wasn’t usually like that. That day she had questions. Direct ones that I appreciated. She asked me how he’d died and how my kids were coping. I told her that I’d cared for him at home because it was during Melbourne’s lockdown, and a hospital admission would have meant the kids couldn’t see him.
She kept her gaze on me, not hurrying to the next appointment or finishing my notes on her computer. She remained still and present and we talked – five minutes, or 10 maybe – about grief and parenting and how stress can trigger hair loss.
And then she leaned forward so that we were suddenly much closer than we’d ever been. Before I’d just been a body on a bed, having my skin checked, the doctor fulfilling her professional duty. And even though I’d been semi-naked in front of her and felt her hands on my skin, this was different. Now I was a person, someone sharing her story. And she responded so warmly, so unexpectedly, that I could feel tears threatening to fall.
“And how are you?” She asked.
I mumbled my usual response about being fine and she pushed a little harder.
“I just really miss him,” I said, surprising myself.
She nodded as if she understood. She didn’t hurry me out. She just let me talk until I was done. And by the time we’d made a new appointment and I’d said goodbye, I knew that next time I saw her things might go back to the way they’d been but that something would have shifted imperceptibly.
Outside on the street I waited for a tram to take me home. It was sunny and I squinted, having left my sunglasses at home. I smiled at a woman waiting near the tram stop and she smiled back, and we shared that brief glimpse of connection that you sometimes have with strangers, as if what had happened in the dermatologist’s room had followed me outside and softened me.
And as I climbed the step of the tram to find a seat, I felt lighter, as if I’d just unburdened myself of something I didn’t even know I was carrying.
• Nova Weetman is an award-winning children’s author. Her adult memoir, Love, Death & Other Scenes, is out in April 2024 from UQP
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