The beginning of my melanoma journey is important, and something I don’t talk about much. I want to do it more, for the sole reason that awareness and early detection is vital in a diagnosis scenario. Perhaps if I had caught mine earlier, things wouldn’t have progressed to where I am today. Now, more than ever, I urge you to check out anything that doesn’t seem quite right. With the UK slowly emerging from lockdown, the backlog of cancelled screenings and late cancer diagnoses have skyrocketed, and I’m so fearful for people who will be on the receiving end of these delays.

My story really begins in the summer of 2014 when I was 26 years old. I went to see my GP about a mole on my back that had started to itch and bleed a little bit. It was quite small, and was directly under my bra strap. I couldn’t see it myself without looking in the mirror, and therefore it was quite easy to forget about for a few days, unlike if it had been somewhere more visible perhaps. The doctor suggested (as I had already assumed) that the bleeding was probably a result of my bra strap rubbing against the skin. Still, she took a picture of it and referred me to a dermatology specialist.

A few months later I turned up for my clinic appointment with a dermatology consultant at the Heath Hospital in Cardiff. He took one look at the mole on my back, and decided to operate that same afternoon to remove not only the mole but also the skin surrounding it. I walked out of the hospital later that evening with an impressive looking 30 stitches across my back.

I had a follow up appointment a couple of weeks later, which I attended with my mum (thank goodness) and was told that the biopsy had come back as a stage 2b melanoma. Anybody who has read my other posts will know how obsessed I am with the NHS. My care has been outstanding, and I really am in awe of the individuals doing these jobs (I think in another life I would have loved to have worked in medicine). That being said, I want to be honest about my experiences. They haven’t all been entirely positive. Now, please note, I appreciate that there is no nice way to tell someone they have cancer, but the way in which I was told was full of negativity and sadness. The nurse who told me didn’t offer any positives, only statistics about how likely I was to survive 5 years. I found this really unhelpful. My mum and I were distraught, until we went home and spoke with our GP. Whilst still being realistic and giving factual information, she did it in an entirely different way, with optimism, hope, insight and explanation of treatment developments. Everybody receives information like this differently and perhaps others wouldn’t have reacted in the same way I did to the manner of the nurse, I just know that when I think back to that conversation it makes me feel really sad. Not because of the diagnosis, but because of the pity and shame I felt leaving that clinic appointment.

After all the drama of that appointment, treatment, I was told, would be a wide local excision or WLE (meaning they had to remove a certain amount of skin surrounding where the mole had been that may still have cancerous cells remaining – clear margins in cancer talk), and then I would be sent on my merry way. I had the WLE a week or so later, under local anaesthetic I might add which still haunts me to this very day! As I hadn’t yet had the stitches removed from the last excision, they decided to just cut out the scar with stitches still in tact, leaving me this time with an even more impressive 50 stitches across my back.

Treatment for stage 2 melanoma is usually just the surgery (or WLE) that I had already had, however I think because of my age I was offered an additional treatment, under oncology, of a newly approved immunotherapy drug called Interferon. It was left entirely up to me as to whether I wanted to have the Interferon, because as far as the doctors were concerned the cancer had been removed from my body via the surgery. This was more of a belt and braces approach to make absolutely sure nothing returned in future. The treatment consisted of daily infusions over a course of 4 weeks, designed to re-boot my immune system and fight off any stray cells that may have been lurking.

I had a picc line fitted before treatment started (a very thin, soft tube that is inserted into a vein in your arm, and stays there until treatment is finished. The tip of the tube is positioned in a large vein that carries blood into the heart. It means you don’t have to be cannulated every day, which I was all for.) I suffered quite seriously with the side effects, which included nausea, headaches and pretty extreme levels of fatigue which landed me in hospital full time. However, when it was finished I resumed normal life quickly and carried on as though not much had happened. I did have a couple of follow up scans, which were clear, and 5 years of 3 monthly skin checks, which were also clear. This made it all the more shocking when I went for my final skin check last summer (they were going to sign me off at 5 years), only to be told that something had shown up in my lungs on a routine MRI scan for something completely separate.

I feel grateful to some extent that it was picked up then, and not when I became symptomatic. It meant I started treatment last year with a low level of disease which hadn’t yet progressed. This has meant that I’ve been able to carry on with life as I know it for the most part. Who knows what situation I would be in if I hadn’t had that MRI scan.