My Cancer Story

I wrote this about a year ago and decided to publish the account of my “cancer story”.

Cancer Story

I had this mole on my knee as long as I can remember.  It was bigger and darker than others but not that strange looking.  When I went to the dermatologist two years ago I specifically asked about it.  The girl told me it was not a big deal.  A year later I had Ryan take a look at it.  He had spent all summer working in dermatology offices since that’s the kind of doctor he wants to be.  I told him I was concerned because it looked like a funny shape to me.  He pointed out that it was really two moles, very close together and that was the reason for the funny shape.  That made sense.  I could now see where the two moles were touching.

Throughout the summer when I started wearing shorts again, I started noticing it more again.  I couldn’t really find the two moles anymore.  Now it just like one big one (about the size of an eraser on a pencil).  For the first time I noticed it was bumpy and there were white flakes on it. I thought about going in for a while, but decided I had other things to worry about, like having a baby and becoming a first time mom.

July 22, 2010- I went to the Dermatologist to have a whole body mole check.  It had been about 2 years since I went, I was going off Nebo School District insurance and had already hit my deductible so I figured I might as well go to as many doctors as I could, and I had a funny looking mole on my right knee that was making me nervous.

I didn’t see the actual dermatologist, but I saw the PA (Physicians Assistant).  I told him my family history (my dad had pre-melanoma on his face, Grandma Edna had melanoma, and my sister Wendy had melanoma on her arm), then I pointed out the one on my knee and told him I was most concerned about that mole.  He looked at it and said, “It does look a little funny, not too bad though.  But if you feel like it’s changing, I’ll go ahead and take it off.”  He then proceeded with my full body mole check and removed two more things (one on my left arm that was grey-I had never noticed it before, and one on my back-I asked him to remove that because “it would get irritated by my bra”... I just didn’t like it).

That was all.  I went home, got Hannah and took off for the Snow Family Reunion in Heber.  No big deal.

This is what it looked like after they scraped it off.

 
August 3rd - I was grocery shopping at Smith’s and had my phone buried in the diaper bag.  I never heard it ring.  When I got in the car I saw I had a missed call and voice mail.  I didn’t recognize the number.  I wondered if it was the dermatologist’s office calling.  I listened to the message.  I thought for sure it would be the secretary's voice saying “We got your test result’s back, everything looks good.  Have a nice summer.”  Instead, it was the doctor herself (who I had yet to meet) calling from her personal phone at home (come to find out later that made total sense because she only works 2 days a week from 12-4....not a bad life).  Anyway, she just said she got my test results back and wanted to discuss them with me so I needed to call her back as soon as possible at her home.  My stomach got all in a knot - that couldn’t be good.

When I got home, I got Hannah settled and called her back.  Everything she told me is now kind of a blur.  She told me the results for the mole on my knee came back as melanoma.  It was .42 mm deep.  I needed to have it removed.  She wanted to see me the next day to see if it was something she could do or if I needed to go to the Huntsman Cancer Institute.  That made it seem like a big deal.  While she’s telling me all this I was trying to remember the details of Wendy’s cancer.  Hers ended up being “no big deal” - meaning, they cut it out and it was over with.  That gave me comfort.  She wanted to me to call her office and set up a time for tomorrow.  I did.

I called Jonathan first.  He reacted very calmly.  I was also surprisingly calm.  It was what it was, we would deal with it as it unfolded, and everything would be fine.  I caught it early and that was the good news.

Next I told Cheryl, then Wendy.  Wendy was good to talk to because she had just been through this exact thing 2 years ago.  I waited until my mom got home from work to tell her.  She just kept saying, “Well, crap.”

August 4th - 1:30 I went to the dermatologist.  My parents came down to watch Hannah and Jonathan met me there.  The whole thing was again kind of a whirlwind.  The doctor didn’t have any openings that day.  She was just squeezing me in and it sure felt that way.  I wanted her to come in and sit down next to us and say things like “Good job for knowing your body and coming in.  We caught it early so everything is going to be fine.  This is what it means to have melanoma…  Here’s a diagram of your skin...  This is how deep yours is...  This is how it spreads...  This is what’s going to happen tomorrow...”  Instead, she ran in - looked at my knee, squished the skin around it, said she could do it, wrote a prescription down for me for compression socks, and asked if I had any questions.  Well, of course I had questions but I didn’t know what they were or how to ask them.  I mean, I had read up on melanoma before coming so I had a basic understanding but I didn’t know how to say “talk to me like I didn’t spend 15 years studying medicine and I have no idea what’s going on - explain it from the beginning.”  I asked what my official diagnosis was so I could compare what I had to Wendy.  She said, “You have melanoma.”  I told her Wendy’s diagnosis and she said, “Oh, I don’t diagnose things that way.”  Why don’t all doctors diagnose things the same way?
I came home feeling like everything would be fine.  I always knew it would be.  I was frustrated though that the doctor didn’t spend more quality time teaching me about the cancer I had.

August 5th - I spent the day going from one medical supply store to another trying to find compression socks and a knee brace that will make it so I can’t bend my knee.  The doctor made it sound like it would be easy to find and cheap.  That wasn’t true.  I ended up at a doctor’s office that makes prosthetic arms and legs.  I felt dumb there.  They said that most surgeons have those braces at the surgery centers to just give the patients.  Mine didn’t.  I was starting to get the feeling that this doctor didn’t remove melanoma from knees very often (I later found out that she only has 1 or 2 patients with cancer a year…so not as common as I thought).  In the end, I called the doctor’s office because I needed a prescription to get one.  And they weren’t cheap - around $100.

August 6th - 1:45 I went in to have the cancer dug out.  My mom watched Hannah and my dad drove me to the appointment.  Jonathan met us there.  I guess I misunderstood what would be happening.  I thought she would use the razor thing that was originally used to scrape the mole off but just go deeper and wider.  Nope.  She numbed my knee, took out a scalpel, and cut a circle around my mole.  I started bleeding.  Then, she took pliers, lifted up my skin and started cutting with a pair of scissors.  The whole thing took about an hour and a half.  The chunk of skin was 3 inches in diameter and a couple of centimeters thick.  I watched for about half of the cutting before I started to feel nauseous and she had me lay down so I couldn’t see.  She stitched it up by doing a purse string stitch.  That meant she stitched around the outside and then pulled it together like a purse sting.  When she pulled I could feel the skin of my shin and thigh being pulled.  Very weird sensation.  When she finished she said I still had a dime-sized hole, so she did it again.  Then she did seven more stitches along the top. 

I was told not to bend my knee for two weeks.

 

August 7th-20th - I wore my brace only some times.  It was hot and cumbersome.  I was surprised at how easy it was to NOT bend my knee.  I was very aware of the pain associated with me bending my knee.  When it was straight though, it was fine.  The night of the 7th was when I was in the most pain.  I couldn’t sleep because it hurt so bad.  They didn’t prescribe me any medication because she told me the pain wouldn’t be that bad.  Jonathan went to the store at midnight to get me some extra strength Tylenol.  That helped.

I felt stupid wearing the brace.  It drew a lot of attention - but then again, so did walking with my knee perfectly straight.  People’s reactions surprised me.  Some people were very sympathetic.  I appreciated that.  Most people would see the brace and say, “Oh my gosh what happened?”  I would answer by telling them I had some cancer on my knee and it was removed so I had a big hole in my skin with stitches.  If I bent my leg the stitches would break, therefore I had to wear the brace.  People would respond by saying “Oh, good, I thought it was something horrible like you broke your leg.”  One person even said, “Well, you should at least make up a better story than that.”  Those responses hurt my feelings.  Yes, a torn ACL would be more painful and a longer recovery process.  But, a torn ACL won’t kill you.  Had I not gone in, I would be slowly dying of cancer.  Didn’t people get that?  Melanoma is the most serious form of skin cancer.  More than 8,000 people die each year because of it.  Now, I know that’s not as many as breast cancer, or lung cancer...but it’s still cancer and it’s still deadly.  People didn’t seem to get that.

August 20th - I went in to get the stitches out.  That was a pretty quick process.  I was told I could slowly start to bend my knee again.  It felt like I had to relearn how to walk.  I was amazed at how after only a week, my muscles that bent my knee were so weak.  With every step I felt wobbly.  It took about 3 days before I felt like I was walking normal.  It took about 2 weeks before I could go up and down stairs with some normalcy. 

September 3rd - It has now been about a month.  My knee has a small infection.  Every time I sit I can tell that I’m still stretching out the skin.  I try not to bend my knee too much.  When I was in the 4th grade, I was chasing after a ball, tripped and fell.  I had a scar on the right side of my knee from that fall.  Now that scar is on the top of my knee.  I had another mole on the inside of my knee.  Now, that mole is part of the scar.  It’s weird to think my skin was stretched that much. 

I spoke with the dermatologist’s office today.  The test results were back and all margins were clear.  All the cancer is gone.  I will now go in to be checked once every 4 months for a year, then every 6 months, then once a year for the rest of my life.  Because both Wendy and I have had melanoma, our other siblings have a 98% chance of getting it.

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It’s now been just over a year since it was removed.  I don’t in any way feel like I “survived cancer” because when I think of cancer I think of people going through things so much worse.  I do, however, have a lovely scar to remind me how grateful I am that I knew my body, and I got it checked out, and it didn’t become a big deal.

This picture was taken last month.

  This is zoomed in on my knee.  Cool scar, eh?