Showing posts with label Surgery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Surgery. Show all posts

22 February, 2016

Melanoma

I'm an incredibly fair skinned and freckled person and I have been vigilant about keeping an eye on my skin over the years as an adult and protecting it with sunscreen, due to the fact that my mother has had melanoma twice. 

During my pregnancy with the boys, I had a skin spot/discoloration that changed in size and color, so I had it checked out by a dermatologist. It was fine, it was measured and looked at with a fancy little light thingy. All was well and he said to keep an eye on it. 

During my pregnancy with, Olivia, it changed again...

Josh, on several occasions mentioned that I should have it looked at, but because I was pregnant I didn't have the energy or mental focus to deal with anything else, if you know what I mean. 

I had it checked out on January the 25th... On the 27th the biopsy came back and I was told I had Melanoma.


Melanoma...

Those words hit me right in the gut, really hard...

Shit. 

What. the. actual. fuck.

I was at work with a million things going on with it being my first week back from maternity leave, and it really stopped my in my tracks. I fully expected it to be nothing at all... 

I was immediately scheduled with a plastic surgeon for surgery to have a WLE. The very next week I saw the plastic surgeon and by the end of that same week I was having surgery to remove it.

I have a pretty gnarly scar.


In the end I'm incredibly lucky to have a caught my melanoma in the earliest stage. The surgeon was able to get clear margins, and those are definitely the magic words you want to hear. So right now, all is good and no further treatment is needed. I will need to see my dermatologist every 3 months for the next 2 years, and every 6 months after that... Basically the dermatologist and I are going to become good friends. I'm fine with that.

I'm so grateful to be this lucky and that I didn't procrastinate, because if I'd waited another year this could be a completely different story to tell. 

With that being said... it's been a little bit of a mind fuck. Sorry about the language, but internally I was freaking out, while putting on my "cool" face. Now that I have children... it completely changes the way I feel about death and anything that could cause death. the word Cancer is freaking scary as hell. 

I feel nervous and paranoid about my skin now... like it's a ticking time bomb waiting to attack me. I'm only 32 and my body has allowed cancer to grow... even if it was the earliest stage, just the fact that my body could allow that to happen... scares me. You can best believe that I will not miss a single appointment with my dermatologist. EVER, and I don't care if I have a hundred biopsy scars to check silly little skin spots...I will not let me body betray me, again. 

One of my friends, and ex coworker, lost his mom to melanoma a few years ago... it was heartbreaking... it happened fast, and they never found the actual spot or site where the Melanoma originated from... that is what scare me most... not catching something. 

Obviously, I'm more than lucky in this entire situation, and can't live my life in fear... but I will be extra proactive, and be the best advocate I can be for skin cancer awareness. 

If you are reading this and you have a mole or skin spot you've been worried about, and have been putting it off... PLEASE, please, please go and get it checked out, because what you don't know can hurt you. 

17 July, 2011

My baby making equipment sucks - Surgery Update

It's 5 days after surgery and I am now able to sit at the computer without feeling uncomfortable, for the most part lol. I'm still moving around at old lady speed but getting better each day. I've been a couch potato, watched lots of day time TV, I've become addicted to "The Talk", court TV shows and I've had entirely too much time to think, haha. I also got to see Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows part 2... and it was totally worth all the crap I've endured this week :)

Surgery was on Wednesday the 13th at 7:30am. The day before surgery I spent the afternoon getting cozy with the toilet and I couldn't eat any solid foods. I had to do a bowel prep *lucky me* and I had to drink phosphasoda <---- YUCK!!! The most disgusting crap I've ever ingested into my body. Seriously... it was so nasty I almost threw it up both times. Yes, I had to drink two bottles of that crap. Needless to say, Wed morning I was starving and very ready to get everything over with. I got signed in at 6am, got into my little room, stripped down and got snuggled up into a lovely and fashionable medical gown topped with fancy blue hair net hahah. Once they put my IV in, they let Josh come back and sit with me. Thankfully we got to hang out with one another until it was time for surgery. I saw the anesthesiologist, he asked me if I'd ever had any complications, so I told him that last time I had surgery in 2009 I woke up. He said being a redhead will do that. Hahaha. Most redheaded people require more anesthesia to be kept asleep. It has something to do with a chromosome we have that changes our receptive ability. It was kind of a complicated explanation but it made sense to me. Dr. Laura came in right after the anesthesiologist, all dressed in her scrubs, she's such a tiny little thing and I always see her dressed up with her white Dr's coat, so I felt relieved knowing she would be the one doing most of the work and she looked confident in her scrubs haha...I just felt a lot better seeing her before! Dr. Laura was her usual funny yet professional self and went over all the details once again, which made me feel really good. Once they started plugging stuff into my IV I don't remember much else. I do remember the medication hitting me and me looking over at Josh saying, "I think I feel this". That was it. I don't remember anything else except waking up with Josh sitting right next to me with his ipod in my face. I was in my little recovery room under about a hundred blankets and here sits my husband with his ipod pointed directly at my face asking me the secret code word. LOL I didn't know it, but it's an inside joke between the two of us :) He was hoping to catch crazy red-head wife ramblings, but all he got was a sour face and a sick wife who could barely keep her peepers open. I was in surgery for 3 1/2 hours!! So when I woke up, I was really nauseous... I stared waking up more I threw up a bunch of times in recovery, and all I remember is shaking all over each time I threw up, because it hurt to roll over, to sit up, to cough, it just hurt to use my stomach muscles :/ It took me a while to wake up enough to eat a cracker and have some water, hahaha, but that only made me sicker. Josh and the nurse kept trying to get me to sit up more so I'd wake up, but I looked up at Josh and said in my most pathetic voice "can we just go?". Josh looked at my nurse and told her, "she is probably as good as she was going to be, so we might as well head home soon". I followed with a "please can I we just go". I was so sick and all I wanted to do was lay in my bed. Before I knew it, Josh was dressing me hahaha. I don't know why, but thinking back on it, well... it's kinda cute. I know he really loves me when he can dress me when I'm half conscious. He got me dressed, the nurse got me in the wheelchair and he was off to pull the car up. Being wheeled outside was nice, it was so hot outside (102) and I was so cold that it made me feel like I was wrapped in a giant heating blanket! I curled up in the front with the seat all the way down, Josh strapped me in and rubbed my back as he drove me home. Once inside he got me to the bedroom where I immediately passed out. Once I was finally awake enough to eat, Josh got me some mashed potatoes and I was a happy girl after that :) That evening Josh gave me a "soft" rundown of what went on in surgery, then he pulled out the pictures. LOL yes, there are 3 pages if pictures of my insides... totally wasn't expecting that, but I was really glad to be able to see everything. It was not pretty... I could not put them down, I could not believe what I was seeing. It was like world war III went off in my baby making oven :/ The left side is the worst. The ovary and fallopian tube were rolled up together in an adhesion and scar tissue. You could see the right ovary but not the left at all, it was underneath everything, the cyst was big, and gross :/ I had bowel stuck to the adhesion's and all of that, was stuck to the side of my uterus and bottom of my abdominal wall. The cyst grew a lot bigger since May. Because my ovaries are stuck in place and the cyst was at the bottom of my ovary it was really hard to get to. While removing the cyst it broke and all of this dark chocolaty fluid came out, they cleaned up all the fluid as best as they could and she had to leave behind part of the cyst wall. Dr. Laura called me Thursday morning and explained everything to me, which was totally unexpected. I'm not used to having a Dr. who is so personal and informative and who calls you personally after surgery. She said that it took at least an hour to get the cyst out and cleaned up, they had to leave part of it behind because it was so deep into my ovary that if she had gone any further she would have open my ovary and I would have lost valuable eggs, so she didn't want to damage it further. I had a ton of scar tissue, the right ovary and fallopian tube have adhesion's and Endo, just not as bad as the left, she burned off the Endo that she could. She did not cut the adhesion's on the right because they would have started growing back and attached to different parts of my insides, and since that was the better side, she didn't want to mess with anything that might cause me problems down the line. She did cut adhesion's on the left, because everything was so freaking stuck together :/ Like I said... it's not pretty, and it's not going away. When she called Thursday morning she basically said "You should try right away, because it's just going to grow back and we have better luck for the next few months". I go back to work on the 27th and I have my follow up appointment on the 28th... I'm guessing we'll do another scan to see how it all looks, and to determine if the cyst has already started to grow back. She said we could go ahead and try a few IUI-treatments, with Letrazole, and possibly in-jectables. She did inform me that a lot of times, women with bad endo will need IVF. Basically... if we do a few IUI's and it doesn't work then most likely our only other option would be IVF :/ We're not there yet obviously, so I shouldn't be upset and freaked out, but it's easier said then done. I hate Endometriosis... I wish there was a magical cure and I wish fertility stuff didn't cost so much. It is so much to think about and hurts my brain lol. Overall surgery was a success, since I did not lose my ovary and only lost part of my fallopian tube... I'm relieved that surgery is over, I'm glad to finally know how bad my Endo is, and I'm sad that this is the reason we've not been able to have a family. I'm worried that there is just too much scarring, I know that I still need to have faith and hope, but today I feel defeated. I already feel like the IUI's will be failures, wastes of money and slaps in the face. I need to do some more research... I know I'm just feeling sorry for myself, but the truthful reality is this "My baby making equipment sucks ass" and there's no sugar coating it. I am having thoughts of not even wanting to try the IUI's, should we just try on our own.... Ahhhhhhhhhh I feel lost now, and completely unsure of what I truly want to do. I've been laid up on the couch with nothing to do but think and think...and think. I know once I get up and moving more that I'll start to feel better... but good Lord I hate the way I feel right now. Dr. Laura said - "When you do finally have babies, after you're done you may want to have your OBGYN take out all the bad stuff, because it's never going to go away". I have very mixed emotions right now. I don't know if I need to cry, scream, pout or what... I just know that there is a small part of me that's very sad inside... maybe even a little broken. I haven't really shared that with Josh or anyone else, I've pretty much kept that to myself. I don't want to seem like I'm feeling sorry for myself or need pity, because I don't. But I do have the right to feel sad and angry at my body for not doing what the hell it's meant to do... I need my time to feel this out... time to sort out my emotions, if ya know what I mean.
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05 May, 2011

Surgery will have to wait...

Well...sadly surgery will be put on hold until the beginning of July. Coral called yesterday to let me know that Dr. Laura indeed would not make it until the 18th. She gave me 3 options - 1. Continue the BC pills without the last week to completely stop my cycle, 2. Stop the BC pills and have a normal cycle with no drugs or 3. be refereed to another doctor to take care of it everything while Dr. Laura is out on medical leave. So I opted for option number 3. Coral reminded me that "we don't know exactly what it is" So don't feel bad about option 3. I didn't want to run out on Dr. Laura but I was anxious to get things moving along and find out what this mass is on my ovary. Coral then called back to say she was so sorry she made a mistake and I wouldn't be able to see the other doctor. So she called up my regular Gynecologist Dr. Henderson and spoke with her about everything, she said she could do it but probably not till the end of June and basically that it wasn't her specialty. I honestly did not want to go back and see her at all so I decided to just wait for Dr. Laura to return and do my surgery since she is a specialist. It kinda sucks that I have to wait but I did find out that I will still get my in-depth scan done on the 13th of this month with Radiology Associates and that makes me feel a lot better.

I was coming back from the post office today when Coral called to tell me that I'm now scheduled for pre-op on July 11th with surgery to follow on July 13th. Then she said "I don't want to alarm you, but we need you to come in and have a blood test(CA-125) to check for ovarian cancer". My heart skipped a beat... They never mentioned this before... So I'm going in tomorrow before work. I guess I'm glad they are being completely thorough but it makes my stomach feel a little nervous :/ I'm sure all will be fine...so I'm just going to think positive thoughts on this one until I know the results. Wish me luck!
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30 November, 2009

Out danm spot!!

What a day…I barely slept last night with everything on my mind…not to mention I stayed up late watching my shows :)...Josh is the best; he makes sure my Sunday shows are ready when I get home from my night shift… plus I had to get up way to early today this morning. Yuck! I’m not the best morning person. So I picked my mom up at 9:30 and we drove across town for my appointment with the plastic surgeon. I have to say I really like him better then the dermatologist that I saw a few weeks back…This guy was very informative and I felt comfortable in his presence. When I saw the Dermatologist he stood by the door most of the time he was talking with me, as if he had a hot lunch date to catch. He was nice…but I just didn’t care for his bedside manor if you get my point. The plastic surgeon looked at the spot on my back and said (That needs to come off as soon as possible) I was relieved and scared all at the same time. I’m glad he’s taking it off sooner rather then later...I also showed him a spot on my left wrist and left shoulder. The dermatologist threw me for a loop and his anxiousness to leave the room and kind of left me overwhelmed…so I never showed him any other spots I was concerned about. But the surgeon saw them and has decided to take them at the same time. So Wednesday morning I have surgery at around 8:00 in the morning. I have to be there at 6:45…double yuck!! They will sedate me and do an excision with margins on all three and then they will send them off to be tested. I’m hoping, praying, and trying to stay positive about this…but I have to say I don’t think I’ll be able to rest easy until I get the results back..I have no idea how long that will take. I’m sure I will find out Wednesday…I guess the only plus side is that I’ll get a few extra days off work and some good pain meds...hehe Josh is going to take me to the hospital..I’m so glad I have him. I’ve been at his side through all his medical hiccups, hospitals visits and surgeries…Guess it’s his turn now :) But I wouldn’t have it any other way he is my very best friend and I know he’ll take great care of me.




peace.love.freckles