Hi all,
Just to keep the trend going, wanted to post about our news yesterday from MD Anderson. Last year in February, my 48 yr old husband was diagnosed with Melanoma. Believe it or not, he had a 19 mm (almost 2 cm) lesion on his upper left back. Apparently, it had grown immensely in 6 months and my daughter noticed it while they were swimming and then he said it woke him up one night, felt like he was lying on a marble. He actually never told me about it and I didn't see because he gets ready for work and leaves about an hour before I do. So he went to a dermatologist up by his work. I can still remember bursting into tears when I first saw it before his surgery and how I could have missed it. He ended up telling me he had melanoma while we were watching a movie on Saturday night and it finally made sense why that afternoon he told me where the life insurance policies were (I couldn't figure out why he was telling me where the policies were). I got on the phone with MD Anderson the following Monday after I had calmed down. The Saturday night he told me he gave me the path report the doctor had given him. I had the path report (my husband actually never looked at it) and it had the highest ratings for everything, depth, Clark's, etc and all the prognostic factors were off the charts. I was a medical librarian and I used to work with biostatisticians that work on outcome studies so I looked up the evidence-based research outcomes that night and knew it was not good.I got on the phone with MD Anderson the following Monday after I had calmed down and scheduled his surgery for the following week. I also burst into tears randomly at work that week, it was pretty intense.
My husband has a scar almost across half his upper back, he actually went back to work the day after surgery. The tumor had no skin component so our first appointment with oncology after the surgery but before the scans, they said he was probably stage 3 or 4 nodular melanoma (of course one of the most aggressive) and considered it metastatic melanoma. SNB came back negative though and also his scans later that month came back negative.
Just had our 1 year scans yesterday and they came back clear. Never thought we would be here, still remember reading that pathology report and then researching the various outcomes with his numbers and breaking down. Been a wonderfully hard year and we seem to live in 4 month increment, but hard to believe so far NED. I hope we can pay it back to whoever needs it.
Many hugs to all of you out there, I've been on this board for the past year.
Thanks,
.
