Newest first. Posted when I have the energy and something worth saying.
I’ve been diagnosed with stage 3B melanoma. Instead of telling this story forty times, I’m telling it once, here.
This is where I’ll post how things are going: appointments, scans, good days, bad days, and whichever jokes survive. The info page has the medical basics so nobody has to google at 3am.
You don’t need to reply to anything. Read it, laugh at it or ignore it, whatever suits you. More soon.
Shaved my head end of June and noticed a 15x15mm black mark above my ear. Appointment with GP within a week, fast tracked to the oncology team in Yeovil who then fast tracked me to plastic surgery.
Plastic surgery removed it on the 7th August with a 0.05mm margin and sent it off for testing. Results came back 4 weeks later that it was cancerous with a Breslow thickness (how deep into the skin it goes) of 2.5mm which classed it as stage 2a (Stages are 0, 1a, 1b, 2a, 2b, 2c, 3a, 3b, 3c, 3d, 4). They confirmed they had successfully removed all of it and the next steps were exploratory/confirmation that it hasn’t spread to a lymph node. For a stage 2a, was told it’s a 90% chance not to have spread. I got the lucky Ben10 percent eh…
Second surgery was on Thursday 24th September. They did a wide local excision with a skin graft 2cm either side of the initial extraction above my ear, this is to be super sure there were no dormant melanoma cells left in the skin, and replaced it with some skin from my thigh (which now looks like a patch of corned beef), and they also did a lymph node biopsy. Lymph nodes are all over the body (the body has around 600 of them) and they filter fluid and house white blood cells to help your body fight off germs and infections. They extracted two of them, these are the two that were connected to the melanoma location (which they find out by injecting a radio active dye into the scar and tracing which lymph nodes it flows to) and were sent off on holiday to a testing lab.
The results came back and it had spread to one of the two lymph nodes, which bumps me up to a stage 3b. The next step which will be within 1-2 weeks is full body scanning. A combo of CT, PET-CT, MRI, Ultrasound; if I’m as lucky as I have been recently I’ll get to have all four. The results of this will dictate the core treatment. Maybe more surgery, maybe immunotherapy, or quite possibly targeted therapy as my biopsy results noted I was BRAF positive. Being BRAF-positive opens up specific treatment pathways. Doctors can use targeted therapies such as BRAF inhibitors (often paired with MEK inhibitors) which specifically block the abnormal protein to slow or shrink the tumor. These days, and especially in the last decade, melanoma treatments have come absolutely leaps and bounds so the prognosis is good. I’m feeling positive.