Took a Year

It took a year for me to convince my doctor that it was not just a crazy freckle. I finally got a nurse practitioner who was also convinced it was "just a crazy freckle" but she agreed to biopsy it. Two weeks later I called to find out what was taking so long to get the report back. The nurse said, "Well we had to send it off to see if it had spread." Thus my melanoma journey began. That was roughly 31 years ago.

My crazy freckle was melanoma

All of my melanomas, over 40 of them, have been on my right leg. Sometimes I still get emotional when I am told that the path report is positive. Most of the time I can take it in stride. By God's grace, 90% of them have been in situ but just the last 3 came back stage 1 and my first one was also staged but I can not remember which stage.

How can I prevent more from developing?

The biggest thing that bothers me is that there does not seem to be anything at this stage that they can do to prevent them from coming. They just cut. I am running out of skin on my leg. Some of them can not close or can only partially close. I have had skin grafts but right now they are saying the wounds heal just as fast without the skin graft as they do with.

I have joked that people need to buy stock in band-aids but skin cancer is no joking matter.