Skin cancer wise, Pickles ain't got nuthin' on me...

Tomorrow will be a year that one of my co-workers told me that my dermatologist was on the phone. I had forgotten all about the lesion that removed from my upper left arm a week before, the one that two doctors didn't think was cancer.

Well, it was malignant Melanoma, and no matter how much the doctor told me that it was "very early", nothing could keep me from running down the hall to puke. I had shown another doctor this lesion a year earlier, and she told me it wasn't cancer. I only went in again when I noticed it starting to form scales.

I was very lucky, it was stage 1A, .07mm depth. However, I still ended up going through two surgeries. The first one was a local wide excision done in the dermatologist's office. He assumed he got it all. Next week I got a call that they found abnormal cells too close to the excision. One month later, I had surgery in the hospital under general anesthesia, performed by an oncology surgeon. They did a relatively new procedure called a Sentinel Node Biopsy, where they took out two lymph nodes closest to where the cancer was. End result? The final pathology showed that all the cancer had been removed in the first surgery and there was no spread.

The next two months were hard. I'm left-handed and was left with a limited range of motion for a month or two, but got it all back without therapy. Also, the incision got infected, and I ended up on Ampicillian for three weeks, along with a Tetanus shot. By the time it was over, I counted about thirty times I was stuck with needles.

One of the things I became the most emotional about was, what would have become of me had I not had health insurance? You think a county facility would have sent three different pathologies to Loma Linda University? Think they would have paid for hospitalization and the complicated lymph node tracer procedure on me or offered me physical therapy for my range-of-motion issues? Don't think so. They would have done the local wide excision and sent me home without follow-up.

I feel especially humbled by this situation because a friend of my brother's died this week at the age of 63. He was diagnosed with Stage Four Melanoma when the lesion was discovered.

I what I'm trying to get at is that I doubt Pickles spent much time fretting about the fact that forty-one million of her fellow Americans without health insurance have been hung out to dry by selfish, greedy, soulless pricks such as her husband and her fucking political party. One of my friends was diagnosed with colon cancer this week and she doesn't have health insurance.

Don't you pay no nevermind to those Godless liberals, Pickles.

Husband had a spot on his arm for over 15 years, I tried and tried to get him to have it removed. About 5 years ago I noticed that the "mole" changed shape and color, so I made him an appt to have it removed...and thankfully I did, it was Malignant Melanoma. BTW I'm a 13 year breast cancer survivor. Congrats on your 1 year anniversary!

and congrats on your 13 years, as well.

We had not seen him for a while, and then his buddy called to invite us to his wake. We were shocked. All from a mole on his ankle.