My Dad Beat Cancer

While visiting my parents on Easter Sunday, my father told me about his bout with skin cancer.

(This came as a total surprise to me, I had no idea anything like this had been going on...then again, like myself, my dad is intensely private.)

He had a bump on his arm for a while, it wasn't really bothering him, other than the fact that it was there. Then, I believe he said it was in late December or early January, it broke open and stuff came out. "After a couple of days," as my dad put it, he finally broke down and went to the dermatologist, who determined that it was way beyond his expertise level. So, off to the doctor who took a sample for testing.

Melanoma. Skin cancer.

So there was the bump on the arm, that had to come off, which involved bringing the skin together in what my dad describes as a 'Frankenstein' look (it's just a scar really, although it's long, but that give a man character.) Then there's the dye they inject to determine which lymph nodes could be affected (a total of two), they had to go as well and get tested.

There were also a couple of suspicious spots on his back (like me, my father suffered bad sunburns in his youth), though he was told that these would wait until the other tests were done. It seemed to my dad at the time that they were waiting to see just how bad he was, before taking the time to work on his back. When he asked the doctor about his survival, he was told that it was 70/30...but to hear my dad describe it, all you hear is the bad news (the 30%).

Well, the tests came back and both lymph nodes were clean. His back has since been worked on, sounds like that was clean too...the only spot happened to be that bump on his arm, but it never spread to anything else. Thankfully it was caught in time.