On Thanksgiving eve I got the call first from Dr. W. The skin he had removed showed no signs of melanoma and he felt comfortable now that enough tissue has been removed around the original site and as far as he was concerned everything looked great. I saw him a week later and he removed the bandages and pulled my stitches and I haven’t had to see him since. Dr. M called later that afternoon and had some mixed news for me. One of the nodes he had removed showed microscopic traces of melanoma. This was mixed news because it was a very small amount and only in one node. Of course any was more than I wanted but this now brought the question of what to do next. There are a lot of statistical oddities about melanoma. I was about to come face to face with one of them. The recommended action when one has a positive test in the nodes is a procedure where they remove all the lymph nodes from the suspected area. This is an invasive procedure and statistically people who have this procedure done don’t live any longer than people who don’t. Dr. M was recommending that I have the procedure done. By the power of Google I had convinced myself that I wasn’t going to do it if the test came back positive. Why subject myself to this if it wasn’t going to make me live longer? I called my oncologist to get his opinion. One of the things I like about him is I can always pick up the phone and call him. I sometimes get to talk to him immediately or he always calls me back the same day. He very strongly suggested I have this procedure done and thought I was being foolish if I didn’t. I appreciated his directness but wasn’t convinced. I called doctor M and we had about an hour discussion on Thanksgiving eve about all the studies I had read and how they collected the data and what it meant and what it didn’t mean. I felt fortunate that he took this time with me. I am sure he had plans on this evening that didn’t include discussing statistical analysis of patients who have had a lymphectomy procedure done with me. You couldn’t tell however and I think if I had wanted to spend 5 hours talking about it he would have stayed on the phone with me. It’s kind of funny in the end after over an hour of a statistics discussion he said to me that it boils down to this. Cancer is bad, there is a high probability that since I had one positive node that I have more, and they should be removed. Why would you leave cancer in your body knowingly? I agreed and we scheduled the surgery for December 8th. This journey was about to get much more difficult. I wasn’t going to be able to hide this from my family anymore. At this point only my older sister, my kids; my ex wife, two coworkers and the NG know about what I was going through.
