I am just curious as to whether or not I should consider getting a second opinion.
I have a 1 mm line on my left thumbnail. I am 33 years old, female, and caucasian. It appeared at the beginning of the year, and depending on how you look at it, it almost appears to run from the cuticle to the free edge of the nail plate. With a lightsource behind the thumb, however, it very clearly stops about 4 mm from the cuticle.
It's a pale color, purplish-bronzy in most lights, and not terribly obvious. It has very definite borders on each side, and is absolutely uniform in color.
My derm has looked at it twice, very closely, measured it, and took a picture of it. He says it is absolutely nothing to worry about, and that it is most likely the result of a nail bed trauma ( I vaguely remember slamming a thumb in a drawer around the holidays, but cannot swear to which thumb it was) of some sort. He classed it as a melanonychia, but he also said it could be a subungual hematoma that is just going to take quite a long time to resolve, if ever. He said sometimes trauma can damage the nail plate and create a permanent void. He also said it's the lightest one he's ever seen, and agrees that depending on the light source, it's hard to tell where it ends.
He also said, if I had shown it to him incidentally during my yearly exam, he would have classed it as nothing to worry about. He only measured it and took pictures because I came in specifically for that issue.
I asked him about a biopsy, because every scrap I've read on single digit melanonychia seems to demand a biopsy, but he says he feels that this isn't suspicious at all. He said he'd be happy to check it out again in six months, to confirm for me that it's stable, but he's very comfortable in telling me that it's not a malignancy.
Would you recommend another opinion? I want to trust my doctor, and he's been terrific, but when the literature seems to insist on a biopsy...... I worry.
Is this a watch and wait situation?