Pulled muscle? No, melanoma

I just came across a heart-breaking story of a young English newlywed who thought she had beaten melanoma, only to find out that what she thought was a pulled muscle was actually her cancer returned – and spreading.

I’ll be honest, this type of story always makes me a bit nervous. Yes, I know that once you catch and remove melanoma early, you stand a pretty good chance of surviving a very long time. But as any of you who have had this diagnosis, you know that there are days that you wonder if that new patch of whatever-the-hell-that-is on your skin is the cancer coming back, that sudden shortness of breath isn’t that you’re out of shape but the cancer invading your lungs, that headache that is likely a sinus or stress headache is maybe the very early signs of something spreading to your brain.

The more you know about melanoma and how it can silently spread, the more paranoid you can get. I get it, I’m guilty of it as the next person. Stories like this don’t help my state of mind some days. But I’m sharing it because we melanoma warriors can’t be complacent. We need to make sure that we’re really paying attention to our bodies and advocating for ourselves if something pops up that just doesn’t feel right. My melanoma may be gone forever (and I’m really hoping that it is); but knowing that some times, despite the best efforts, it does come back. And we need to make sure that we really understand our bodies and know when something just doesn’t feel right. Is it paranoia to blame everything on melanoma? Yeah, probably. But make sure that if something doesn’t heal, seems to get worse, doesn’t respond to normal treatment, that your doctors understand that you have harbored melanoma in the past, and they need to consider that among the options.

Sadly, this woman’s doctors didn’t find it until it was too late. And that’s a tragedy that I hope none of us have to face.