Welcome to the Forum, Mortal!
I’d add that if you need a melanoma specialist, it’s just that you don’t want a general dermatologist or general oncologist. You want docs who spend most of their time on melanoma, a primary focus. If it’s less than 100% because they treat another serious type of skin cancer that’s okay.
It’s 2018, not 2008, and as an expert here has written, there’s been time for docs to get up to speed on best treatments, so it’s a little less of a needle-in-a-haystack search, at least in some parts of the U.S.
How the process went for us, which may be somewhat typical, was that my husband saw a general dermatologist, who had a plastic surgeon remove a large, suspicious looking mole (aka the scary Halloween mole). When diagnosed as melanoma, the dermatologist provided three places for the next step, which he assumed would be a WLE and SLNB. (It was.)
We decided which one by asking which he’d choose if it was for him or his wife. By then I’d googled a bit and the director’s name had popped up more than once.
Sometimes choices get confusing and the pros here (not me!) can help you sort out options and questions to ask. But often treatment can be fairly straight forward. We’d thought we’d travel to get a second opinion, but after finding this forum and reading some of Celeste’s (Bubbles’) primer emailing, saved ourselves a trip and time, because the treatment recommended was clearly what was called for.
It takes some time to get the new lingo and alphabet soup under your belt and develop your sea legs.
Wishing you the best, and let us know how it goes.
Beth
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