When my daughter Susan called to tell me the pathologist’s finding she was trying to put a positive spin on it. What kind of spin can you put on malignant melanoma?
I was quiet, not biting my tongue so much as clenching my jaw. What I was thinking was, “This just isn’t fair.”
Well, nobody said life was fair. I’d learned how to deal with life’s little blows. Or so I thought. My hip fracture wasn’t fair either. But I didn’t die within a year, as my mother had. Now I look at that misadventure as a warm-up. Learning to understand being dependent. To that point, I’d been the proverbial hog on ice. Having Susan wait on me and drive me everywhere, that was a very humbling experience. Not fair, but why waste energy on anger?
Last year, Susan tore a ligament playing soccer. The darn thing wouldn’t heal. The X-rays were pretty clean. Finally, they did an MRI that showed dozens of microfractures. Outside the bone was solid. Inside it had turned to Jell-O. Payback time. I got to chauffeur her around for a while.
But this was different. Her father had died of a metastasized melanoma. A smooth, colorless lump on his forehead had been removed. Doctors recommended radiation afterward. He declined. We think he knew it was too late, but he never spoke of it.
Susan’s surgery was scheduled. Her husband wanted to go with her. I’d seen her through two difficult pregnancies and deliveries, a ruptured appendix and several surgical procedures that came out okay. I swallowed my worry and stayed with the grandkids, assuring them that Mommy would be fine. She would just have a huge scar on her right arm. Maybe, not as long as the one on Grammy’s hip.
She came back with an arm immobilized by bandages and another patch under her arm where 10 lymph nodes had been extracted. Everything looked good, the surgeon said, but we would have to wait on the pathologist’s report. We went every week. First the underarm drain came out. Then the sutures. Then the staples holding her stretched skin together. Then back to the dermatologist to have a closer look all over. He took out two more suspicious looking moles, taking wider margins than normal and closing with a stitch. “We aren’t taking any chances with you, ever again,” he said.
The big M had actually looked benign. Another dermatologist had looked at it two years ago and said it was nothing. No color, no irregular borders. Nada.
Well, some of these guys don’t seem to recognize “amelanotic” melanoma. The pictures on their office walls show only the grossly disfiguring ugly black lesions. Those pictures must have been taken of cadavers. By the time you had something that looked like that, you’d be playing harp in the celestial chorus.
It’s been a month now, and Susan went back to work for the first time this morning. The arm is still weak-she lost about an acre of muscle-and she still has some pain. But she was game to go. A real Type A personality. Perfectionist. She got that part from me. The melanoma she got from her father.
The lousy part of this whole thing is that she now lives under a cloud. From one doctor’s appointment to another. The dermatologist needs to see her every three months, forever. There will be annual chest X-rays and liver tests. (There is no blood test for melanoma as there is for prostate, and some other cancers.) The surgeon is still concerned that the final pathology report showed a mass of precancerous cells surrounding the melanoma. Were the margins sufficient? He thinks so. Gulp. Talk about the sword of Damocles.
The good part is that this whole mess has affected all of us in different, mostly positive ways. I know it’s cliché, but priorities do change. For Susan, it’s a slight shift from Type A to, maybe, A minus.
With the profile of someone whose resistance, once lowered by stress, can spiral precipitously downward, she is finally taking charge of her health. She stopped smoking. That’s big. After losing 12 pounds, she’s eating more nutritious food and less junk. She will begin taking some supplements again.
But the best is that she is doing what she loves. Playing with her kids, cataloging their photos, helping the four-year-old bathe her pony, she even rode her horse and cleaned out the tack room last week. With a month off work, she’s made time for all the things she said she didn’t have time to do before.
Susan now does a Sudoku puzzle every day while I do the crossword. We play Scrabble and have lots of long, relaxed, uninterrupted conversations. We have a family dinner almost every night now, where the kids tell us about their day at school or sports. The 12-year-old has stopped losing his temper and yelling, “That’s not fair.” I used to cook and serve the food then retire to my quarters to watch “The News Hour” and “Jeopardy.” I guess my priorities have changed, too. I can even imagine my personality slipping into Type B.
And Susan’s kids tell her they love her a dozen times every day. In a world that’s not always fair, that’s about as good as it gets.