Mum Thanks Four-Year-Old Autistic Son Who Saw A Mole About To Be A Skin Cancer

A mother is thankful for her four-year-old autistic son’s obsession with a mole on her leg that she got checked and found out it was about to become a form of skin cancer.

Kirsty Nelson said that her son, Zac, who is non-verbal and doesn’t like to make eye contact, spotted the mole on her lower right leg about four weeks ago.

“Zac would come up to me 30 or 40 times a day, look me straight in the eye, even though he doesn’t like to make eye contact, grab my hand and put it on the mole and then make sure he made eye contact with me again,” she told 9News.com.au. “He was completely obsessed to the point of it being the first thing he did when he came home from nursery. He would pull up my trouser leg and put his eye right up to the mole and make sure I was watching.”

Taking cue from her son’s obsession with her mole, the 39-year-old mum-of-four, from Worcester Park, London, first looked up skin cancer on the internet, but even then, she wasn’t worried, but decided to have it checked.

“I said to the doctor, ‘I know this is going to sound crazy, but my autistic son is really obsessed with this mole’,” she said.

The doctor immediately grew concern over the mole and referred her to a consultant at St Helier Hospital in Sutton.

Five days later, on Saturday, the skin specialist confirmed that the mole was “close if not in the early stages of melanoma”.

“I’ve been pregnant for the best part of two years so I haven’t seen my legs for most of that time,” Mrs Nelson said. “The mole is dark brown, slightly raised and a little bit asymmetrical, but I wasn’t worried. I didn’t think there was anything extraordinary about it.”

The skin specialist also told Mrs Nelson that it wasn’t the first time he had heard of autistic children picking up on things such as this.

Mrs Nelson said that when she saw Zac after the diagnosis she broke into tears. She also wrote a Facebook post on SW19 Mums Network praising her son for saving her life, saying that she is forever thankful for Zac’s keen senses, and would never have noticed the mole, let alone been concerned about it, if it wasn’t for Zac.

She said that the mole was due to be removed and tested in the coming weeks, but was told that if it’s been seen early enough, hopefully, it could be totally treatable.

She also hopes that through her story, people wil understand children like Zac. “Zac is severely autistic and he needs a lot of support, but he has lots to contribute to society and hopefully stories like this might help people show a bit of compassion for children like him.”

Source: 9news.com.au