Umbilical melanoma/internal questions

Hi! I'm glad you said something on this forum because the same thing happened to me, sort of, and I wasn't seeing a lot of people who had the same case. I felt the alone too because I don't think it's too common to find melanoma in your belly button, so you posting made me feel better! Kind of a long story but.. I originally had an infection in my belly button (I have an innie) back in Oct 2016. I managed to clean it out and it went away. But it came back at the end of November/beginning of December. I went to the doctor because there happened to be a tiny growth that he said looked like a blood clot growing outwards. This was about the time I found out I was pregnant too. The doctor advised to clean it and it should go away.

Fast foward to the beginning Jan 2017, at this point the growth grew 3x it's size and every time I had tried cleaning it, it would bleed and leak clear (sometimes yellow) liquid. So I had the doctor remove it and send into the labs. It came back as stage II malignant melanoma! It really came as a shock to me because there has never been any cases in my family with skin cancer. My family comes from Philippines and you'd think my tan skin would protect me enough. I live up in Alaska too and we don't get much sun..

Anyway, I went to the local surgeon in town and had a couple of other moles removed and then I was advised to go see Dr. David Byrd at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. We don't have many medical resources here in Alaska so the next best thing was going to Washington to have my belly button removed. Since they told me melanoma is a very agressive cancer, I had to leave the following week. Being pregnant doesn't help either because it could speed up the cancer due to the hormones in my body doubling each day and it might hurt the baby too if I wait any longer.

So I went to see Dr. Byrd and he helped me feel a lot better because he has been doing this sort of thing for a while now. We had the surgery to remove my belly button area and a couple of lymph nodes from the right and left side of my groin to make sure the cancer didn't spread. In the end, they managed to remove the cancer site and they found out the cancer didn't spread to my lymph nodes. Now that it's March 2017, I am cancer free and the pregnancy is going great so far. I was a little wary with being put to sleep because the anesthesia but Dr Byrd assured me that the anesthesia was safe and the only thing that would effect the baby is the weight and that the baby may be born early. I think that if it wasn't for this baby, I would have never known I had skin cancer because what the doctor in my hometown said is that the pregnancy made the cancer grow outward instead of inward.

Hi

What an odd presentation of melanoma – I learn new things here every day. It's not really an internal melanoma if its stage 1 – stage 1 says it's only in the very top layer of your skin. Stage 0 is in the very, very top layer and is the best of all, stage 1 is a tiny bit deeper but still you have very good chances of a complete cure with no further trouble. How very lucky that this was found instead of sitting there, growing deeper and possibly becoming a serious problem for you. Just get the surgery done, get the all clear then go to whatever frequency of checks they recommend (the big danger now is a second/unrelated melanoma popping up somewhere). Glad it's found, don't worry too much just go through the recommended surgery and keep up with the recommended skin checks.

The very large majority of mm's occur in the external skin. But in fact mm can occur anywhere there is epithelial tissue containing melanocytes. This includes the epethelial linings of all the major internal organs and mucous membranes. Good for you that you persisted in pointing out the problem and that your doc listened and acted!