9 Months Since the Excision

A few days ago, I celebrated a milestone of sorts. It’s been nine months since the excision. I’m in San Francisco for work and have been doing quite a bit of walking this past week. The scar still aches at times, and if I’m going uphill, it can be somewhat sharp. And when I get off the elliptical, it seems to sometimes ache as well. Other days, even when I’m exercising, it doesn’t bother me at all. I find it a little strange that the achiness comes and goes. I wish I could figure out the pattern of what causes it.

I think a lot about how lucky I am to only have that scar though. I think about how different things could be if I hadn’t gone to get my psoriasis looked at. I didn’t feel sick. I didn’t feel like I was growing melanoma literally right before my eyes. I certainly never knew about amelanotic nodular melanoma and what it looked like.

I’m not particularly religious. But I sometimes wonder if there is some purpose that I’m meant to fulfill. Why was I given such a lucky break on finding this early when so many others are not so fortunate? I hope that this blog is helping people understand that the diagnosis is not a death sentence if it’s caught early enough. That getting the excision done and the resulting scar isn’t as scary as it feels when the doctor first mentions it. (Although the wait for the results on whether or not it has spread is torture, not going to lie there.)

So, I’m sure you all want to see how the scar is progressing:

My scar at nine months

The photo is a little dark, sorry. The hotel lighting is terrible and using the flash made it super blurry. The scar is still pretty red and sometimes gets almost purple when I work out strenuously. But I’ll take it over finding melanoma in my brain, lungs, or liver.