So to pick up with where I left off, I was just diagnosed with Stage IIA (maybe IB) Melanoma. I had a brief moment of "Why me?", but pulled myself back together because... hey, I've got a family to take care of, and I'm not going to let a mole keep me down.

So, that's the bad news. The good news is that it was VERY early... almost as early as you can detect one. Also, it means that unless my lymph nodes were swollen (they weren't), there's no need to do a Sentinel Lymph Node Biopsy! Buuuuut, you still have to have an excision to make sure you get all of the possible melanoma out. Doesn't sound too bad, right?

Well... Lets just give you a breakdown of the procedure. My biopsy was 8mm. Since I have Stage IB/IIA, I get a 1cm margin excised. Not to bad... except that's the RADIUS. So now, we're talking about an approximately 1 inch circle being removed from my arm.

Still not too bad right? Welll.... Now that I would have a 1 inch circle... you can't close that well with sutures. Now, you have to make a pointed ellipse that is 2cm at the widest and 6-7cm long. That's right folks. For a 7mm early melanoma, I had a 1inch by 3 inch ellipse excised from my arm. Just to give you a rough estimate... Look at your standard "band-aid". That's only slightly larger than what was removed from my arm. I am including pictures now of the closed incision... I'm not going to link thumbnails just in case you have qualms about seeing sutures and fresh incisions. The first one is just the raw image... the second, I've overlaid approximate areas that were removed.

Up Close and Personal Annotated Excision

There you go... all the nice details.  All told I had about two dozen or more stitches, internal and topical.  Then the healing begins.