Updating

The quick version of the first post was that I was pregnant and got a spot checked out (that had been changing for almost a year, but hadn’t had it looked at because I got pregnant, then had a miscarriage and needed a D&C, then got pregnant again. By the time we verified that pregnancy was sticking around, I was a month from changing insurance…

So at the point of the last post, I had a shave biopsy done and it came back as a deep malignant melanoma. They had scheduled the WLE & SLNB…

I found that thread and posted an update thinking it would bump it to the top, but it didn’t, so here’s what I posted on that thread:

“Re: New Here … Calynda – (7/13/2013 – 3:39am)
I thought I’d dig up my old thread to post an update. The WLE and SLNB were successful. The margins were clear and they pulled two lymph nodes during the surgery. One of the two tested positive… At that point, we couldn’t do anything more before the baby got here.

I had my baby boy on May 15th. I was induced at 37 1/2 weeks due to blood pressure. He’s pretty much perfect. I had my PET scan on June 7th. There were two spots that they wanted to look at more closely, but were things that they usually wouldn’t look twice at. One spot was in my spine and that turned out to be nothing. The other spot is a 6mm mass on my deltoid tendon that they aren’t sure what it is. They don’t think it’s the cancer, but they couldn’t rule it out.

I had an axillary lymph node dissection on July 5th (and still have the JP drain hanging on me). They pulled an additional 12 lymph nodes and all 12 came back negative. Yay!

Next week my baby boy has his two month check up on Monday, I have my post op appointment and hopefully have the drain removed on Tuesday, I have an orthopedic consult for the spot in my arm on Wednesday and get to drive 1.5 hours for a consult at a melanoma center on Friday. It’ll be a busy week, but hopefully by the end of it, we’ll have a plan of attack.

I’m feeling good. The scariest part of all this (besides the waiting) was going for the PET scan because I knew that would give us the best indication of how bad the waiting might have been.

I don’t know if we can post pictures here… If we can, I’ll share my little boy, Elliott Cole.”