departure for portland is creeping up fast! i’m going to portland at the end of the month and staying through mid august. after friday, i only have six more weeks of injections. my drs are all v positive. they seem really genuinely happy when my scans come back negative – as if they really thought there could be something on them. my oncologist doesn’t want to talk numbers, and always gives me the crazy ranges like 5 to 35 percent. i asked my derm to give it to me in plain language, and pull no punches, and he basically said that if i was going to relapse, it would have already happened. he says that he has two kinds of melanoma patients: the 60 year olds, who usually relapse w’in the first year, and the 30 year olds, who all survive w\/o relapsing. <\/p>\n
He told me the story of a guy who came in 5 years earlier w\/ a massive melanoma on the back of his head — so close to his major lymph nodes. Apparently it had been bleeding for 6 months, and he finally came in to the dr. It was advanced stage III – in lots of lymph nodes. He had surgery and did the interferon, and 5 years later, is perfectly fine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
departure for portland is creeping up fast! i’m going to portland at the end of the month and staying through mid august. after friday, i only have six more weeks of injections. my drs are all v positive. they seem really genuinely happy when my scans come back negative – as if they really thought … Continue reading straight talk from the dr – and its good<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[44,64,16],"class_list":["post-399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-update","tag-hope","tag-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel","tag-other-peoples-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=399"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":401,"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions\/401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}