And the bad news is...

Many of you who know me well and read my blog, know why I haven’t been posting. I don’t mean to be mysterious to the rest of you. It’s just I’ve been having a lot of issues that I don't want to broadcast out into the world, to be recorded forever and ever… amen. I’ve let a few months slide by in my postings, so I thought I’d draft a small update. At least I’ll try to keep my little family blog from atrophying. I have been posting here for over two years and I’ve hardly let a week go by. Why did I suddenly stop posting for a few months?

Let’s start with Aidan. I am trying to keep his privacy for the future in check here, but I think it’s OK to say we’ve been dealing with autism here. At this point, we know it’s a relatively mild case, or high-functioning autism – something that appears to be around the Asperger’s level, and maybe a little worse. The good news is that it’s clear that he has amazing intellectual gifts! He has amazed many of his therapists with his ability to spell words, write letters and draw. It’s clear he is gifted in art, music, math and writing. That’s a lot to say for a four year old! The negative side of all of this is, as with most autism cases, he has a lot to overcome socially. Poor eye-contact, speech delays, lack of imaginative play and trouble making friends to name a few. We’re working hard with him and have him in different types of therapy

Dealing with that has taken up a lot of my time and thoughts… until…

I had my annual physical at the beginning of April, where my doctor noticed a funny looking mole on my lower-right leg. I’ve had a few funny looking moles removed in the past. I’m a moley kind of girl, and have even passed my frecklieness onto my dear children. Funny looking freckles on me do not tend to send up the alarm bells for me, but occasionally I’ve had them taken off, just to be sure. The doctor sliced, stitched, and I was on my merry way. It didn’t even hit my worry meter, which is saying a lot for someone who’s been known to lose sleep over where I’m going to park for a doctor’s appointment the next day. I like to worry.

About a week later, my doctor’s office called me at work. “Your biopsy results came back today. Can you come in this afternoon to consult?” It usually takes me at least 7 days to get an appointment with this doctor, and here he was calling me to come in that afternoon?! Try to finish a work day after that. I figured it wasn’t a social call, but I had no idea what it might really be. Time to dwell and obsess for awhile!

Since I worked for Mayo Clinic for a number of years, their website, www.mayoclinic.com tends to be my first reference stop when looking up health information. I typed skin cancer into the search bar and came up with:

Skin cancer — the abnormal growth of skin cells — most often develops on skin exposed to the sun. But this common form of cancer can also occur on areas of your skin not ordinarily exposed to sunlight.
There are three major types of skin cancer — basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma and melanoma, which is the most serious of skin cancer.
Since I had no idea which one it might be, I googled pictures of each type, to see if any looked like mine. I started with the first two less-serious ones and they just didn’t fit the bill. The Melanoma one? The one that says “is the most serious of skin cancer”? Yeah. That’s exactly what mine looked like. The kind that kills people.

The more I read about melanoma, the more worried I became.

“Malignant melanoma is the most dangerous type of the skin cancers. Typical features of melanomas include irregular borders, multiple colors within the lesion, rapid growth, and susceptibility to easy injury with bleeding. Any mole that exhibits any of these changes should be evaluated immediately by your physician.”

Check. Check. Check and… yep. Check!

photo below is an example of what mine looked like, but not an actual picture of mine. I never thought to take a picture of it, although I kind of regret that now.

By the time I got to the doctor’s office, I was a complete wreck. He handed me the pathology report, and it was exactly as I had feared – Malignant Melanoma – Clark stage III. My doctor appeared to be as shocked by the diagnosis as I was. He honestly thought it was just a simple mole. He rightfully patted himself on the back a bit for SAVING my LIFE! After all, I did not even point the mole out to him. He noticed it as he was checking me reflexes. If he had not noticed and removed the mole, simply put, it would’ve killed me.

Happy thoughts…

The next step for me will be to go in to surgery on Monday and have 2 square inches of skin removed around the original mole site. (Draw 2 inches and make a square out of it, and you’ll get the idea of the size.) I’m not very excited about this, but at least they’ll put me under and give me good drugs for the situation.

In addition, they will do something called a sentinel lymph node biopsy to find out if the cancer has spread. I’m not entirely sure what’s involved in that, but I’ll post more next week and let you all know the joy of a lymph node bisopsy. My prayers right now is that they are clean, because that means I’m done and can go on my merry way, with checkups every 6 months. If I have cancer in my lymph nodes, the next step is chemotherapy.

Chemo. We really really don’t want to think about that. After all, you know my hair is important to me.

That is all, in a nutshell, why I haven’t written. In the future I’ll write more about what has occurred in the past few months, when I’m ready, but I will keep you updated on my current situation. It's an amazing world we live in with this fancy schmancy internet thing. I just have to stay off of Google and melanoma searches because it's a scary internet out there too!