melanoma wife: First day!!

LEARN THE ABCDEF'S OF MELANOMA!!! EARLY DETECTION IS THE KEY!

Monday, August 23, 2010

First day!!

Today was Sela's first day of 4th grade! I cannot believe she is getting so big! I woke her up and offered her some coffee milk like we used to drink when we were younger-to help get her going! Neither one of my girls are morning people, and I knew she needed some pep in her step to start this school year off right! :) She was very happy and ready to go! I was very pleased and had a great morning talk with her. As I was going over the normal mom stuff (reminding her to be herself, smile and not look so serious all the time, if you want friends-you have to be approachable and be a friend first, etc) I watched her every expression, every move and was again reminded how she looks SO much like her daddy. The little freckle on her nostril just like his...her big eyes-her serious face.....so I let her know-that all day today, while she was making her way through her new campus-her daddy was watching and with her with each step-and I know he is very proud of her. Her eyes kind of got a little glassy, but then she looked at me and smiled and said, "i know"! Gotta love that 4th grade knowledge...she already knows everything ;) Tomorrow is Sloane's turn! She will start a new Pre-K program-only 3 days a week-but she is excited....at least today she is...I will keep you posted how it goes on the first official day!

So as I type this post, I just want everyone reading to know....Life is good for us. We are happy. We will always miss Marcus. We will always love Marcus. We will never stop talking about him. We will always have pictures of him and our family around our home. But we have peace. We know where he is. We know he no longer suffers. Our lives are taking a new path with new people involved, but it will never take away or erase any part of our lives before. It is just a new season. And we are so grateful for the season of life we had with Marcus. He truly helped shape us into the people we are today. I know that for a fact. I would NOT be the woman I am today, if I hadn't been married to Marcus. He was a great husband, friend, father-leader. I pray that I can have even half as much impact in the lives of others, as he did in mine.

So, here's to today. The first day of 4th grade for my baby girl Sela...and the eve of the first day of Pre-K for Sloane....with soccer, gymnastics, ballet/tumble, etc....our lives are about to be CRAZY!! But we wouldn't have it any other way. THANK YOU GOD. <3

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: Congratulations! Life sounds good and you are moving on which is so healthy for the girls. Being a stage 3c mm survivor for 5 years myself I have been following your blog for a long time. May you have some peace and a lot of happiness in this new chapter.
rm; August 27, 2010 at 10:24 PM

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how it all began-the "mole" story

well, just for those that don't already know-here is how this journey began. it all started with a little mole that marcus had since birth, on his thumb. in early 2007, i noticed that it had started to change-it was bigger and part of it was black and part was brown-i really didn't know much about melanoma, but i remember the way it looked-it reminded me of the mole on my niece's foot that a dr. removed when she was small, because he said if they didn't remove it, most definitely it would turn cancerous when she went through puberty. ANYWAYS, so i began nagging sweet hubby to go get it looked at. of course, he kept saying, "it's no big deal, i have had this mole since i was born-it's fine". so life went on.

well, hubby works with his hands since he is a machinist, and he bumped the mole-it bled-it grew bigger. a few months later, he bumped it at work AGAIN-it bled-it grew bigger-and now it actually started to bother him. it was sensitive.

one day out of the blue he called me from work-and asked me to make an appt. for him to go to the dr. to get the mole removed. THANK GOD! so of course i got right on that phone and made him an appt. first call to his current primary care phys. was a joke-they couldn't see him for at least another week or so because they were only seeing flu patients on fridays (the only weekday hubby has off) and didn't feel his mole was anything to fret about! well, i sure thought it was and called my primary care phys.-she had no problem seeing him on friday like he wanted!

sure enough, once he saw her, she didn't like the looks of the mole and immediately sent him to a dermatologist. and only by God's hand guiding-did she decide to NOT wait 3-6 months for a dermatolgist in beaumont to get an opening-but she sent him to a dr. in mid-county-that she didn't even know-she had just received his business card in the mail the week before-and decided since he could work hubby in so quickly-that he was the ONE!!! THANK YOU GOD!!!!

well, the next week came-marcus went to the dermatologist-wanting to get that mole removed!! to his surprise-the dr. wanted to biopsy it-he didn't like the looks of it either. (do you see a pattern here? sweet wife was on to something !) he talked the med. asst. lady into cutting as much of the mole off as she could-and she did-we later found out that she removed all the cancer from the thumb with that biopsy! one week later, we were told that the biopsy showed malignant melanoma and they sent us straight to MD Anderson in Houston!!!! talk about scary!

the medical oncologist explained that the type of cancer he had was called superficial spreading melanoma-and it liked to spread to the lymph nodes-so he suggested a partial amputation of the thumb-to make sure he got all the cancer-and a sentinal node biopsy-to see which, if any lymph nodes had cancer- Marcus wanted to save his thumb-so that is what they did. the dr. removed the margin around what was left of the mole-and took a skin graft from the side of his stomach to rebuild the thumb. this all healed very well.

they did the sentinal node biopsy and found that there was one lymph node under his arm that had cancer-it ended up having 20 cells in it-so they suggested he remove all the lypmh nodes from under his arm. he did this and all the other nodes came back CANCER FREE!!!!!!!

now they also suggested he do 4 weeks of high dose interferon to kill any cells that may have gotten loose from that node-to prevent this monster from coming back. they also want him to do 11 months of the interferon shots-but we don't know how far he will go with those. all depends on how sick they make him-and if they are anything like the high dose-he may only go 2 weeks.**MARCUS COMPLETED 4 WEEKS OF HIGH DOSE INTERFERON AND DID THE SHOTS 3/WEEK FOR ABOUT 3 MONTHS BEFORE HE STOPPED**

we later discovered that once the cancer has spread to lymph nodes closest to the mole, it is considered stage III-no one ever really told us this-we had to learn on our own.***UPDATE-8-31-09 LUNG METS WERE DISCOVERED SO MARCUS WAS UPGRADED TO STAGE IV***
***AFTER IL-2 AND SEVERAL CHEMO COMBOS, MARCUS LOST HIS BATTLE 4-1-2010. MELANOMA SUCKS!!!***

this is a brief outline of the "mole" story-hope it was easy to follow-and hope it makes everyone think twice about their moles!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! PLEASE LEARN ABOUT MELANOMA-IT IS NOT "JUST" SKIN CANCER!!!!!

melanoma wife

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LEARN THE ABCDEF'S OF MELANOMA!!! EARLY DETECTION IS THE KEY!

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Monday, August 23, 2010

First day!!

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