This piece is a continuation of My Melanoma Story that began with the previous blog entry.
My Melanoma Diagnosis
Melanoma Symptoms: I thought I knew my body, my personal temple, pretty darn well. Every ounce of food I consumed was predetermined. My workout schedule was vigorous, as my vanity was pretty important to me. It had to be, it was part of my life (and frankly my responsibility) to look good. The people in my inner-circle were vain too, so there were a lot of reminders surrounding me to take care of myself. So, never would I have even considered Melanoma symptoms.
There was nothing out of the ordinary to me about the mark on my skin; aside from its itchiness and that it didn’t seem to be healing on its own. I wasn’t alarmed by it at all. To this day, I see many pictures of Skin Cancer and Melanoma that look nothing like mine did. And I hear that from a lot from other Cancer patients and survivors, too. Everyone is different. The ABCD matrix is meant to be a baseline, it’s not intended to be a set-in-stone, self-diagnosis tool. It’s important to remember that neither I, you, or anyone else who‘s not a trained doctor on the subject is qualified to make a clinical diagnosis of your skin. A chart doesn’t make anyone an expert, nor is it supposed to. Its purpose is simply to provide some basic education about the dangers of Skin Cancer and Melanoma, along with a few methods to help prevent them.
My Melanoma was a flat freckle that started to look like an amoeba. It was growing into other freckles and had some discoloring; weird, but nothing crazy. It did have irregular borders, but it was smaller than a pencil eraser. So despite what you see, read or hear, get your skin checked. Doing so saved my life…and it could save yours too!