Well, this will be a more serious blog than normal, and I've been meaning to write this for a while, but as with all my other blogs, it's been on the back burner. The bottom line is that my dad has (or more hopefully had) cancer. During the summer he noticed a lump on his neck right by where it meets his shoulder and he didn't think much of it. It got a little bigger and then he finally started realizing that it might not just be nothing. So he asked my cousin, Teresa who is a general surgeon to look at it and she was like "um... hello! You need to have this taken out like yesterday!" so he went in a few days later and she took it out and had thought it was just a fatty tumor but when she looked at it it was black and the pathology came back as melanoma. And the weird thing was that they still have never found the primary site. With all melanoma it starts on the surface with a weird mole or something, then goes internal, but they still haven't found a site that looks like the primary. Something else that is also a worry is that once it goes into the body it can get into the organs, usually first the lungs and the brain. But the good thing about my dad's is that a few days after his first surgery, they did all the scans and didn't find it anywhere else in his is body, which is great news. Especially since he was just about to come on the Grand Canyon with me. They said another week wasn't going to do any harm, so it was so great to have him be able to come and although I'm sure he thought about it a ton, as did I, but he was able to be in a beautiful place meeting new people and be in nature to think about it.
After the trip, he went had another surgery from a different doctor, Dr. Noyse who is a melanoma specialist. The plan was to put in some dye that would affect the cancer ridden lymph nodes that were all around where the tumor originally was. My dad had heard stories about the spinal accessory nerve being cut and he was really concerned about it, and he's played Squash with Dr. Noyse and expressed his concern to him. But the doctor spent 45 mins trying to get a lymph node off that was surrounding the nerve, but when he got down to it, the nerve didn't look very healthy either, so he had to cut that nerve and take out some of his Sternoclidomastoid (SCM) muscle. The nerve gives function to the trapezoid muscles, which shrugs your shoulders and raises your arm above your shoulders. He ended up taking 32 lymph nodes out and 23 of them were dyed and infected. They turned everything in to pathology and it turned out they all showed up looking not like melanoma but melanosis. Which apparently Dr. Noyse has never really seen before, but it's really good news. What they think it is is those lymph nodes and all the other effected cells did have melanoma but his body had started attacking it and the cells actually change so they're not metastasizing anymore and are not melanoma. So, that is really good news.

Now he's doing his best to not obey the guidelines he as a physical therapist would give someone else to take it easy. It's been a little bit of an issue trying to get used to not having that muscle. He can't do things over his head. Some of his other muscles will compensate for it, but as for serving in tennis or playing squash, he may have to learn how to do it left handed, bc he just doesn't have power overhead. Also cutting from the nerve being cut, it feels like it's always kinda burning I guess and he's hoping that will subside once it heals a little. He was able to go on a bike trip on the White Rim trail in Canyonlands that he had been planning with some friends. His plan was to drive the support vehicle, but he ended up riding almost the whole way. He was pretty sore after, but he was really happy to be able to do it.

So, now he's debating taking Interferon, which is a chemo type drug that with melanoma there's not that much proof that it actually makes that big of a difference in the long run. And he's trying to learn how to use his arm differently.

It's been a big wake up call for all of us. I'm pretty good at wearing sun screen during the summer but I have recommitted myself to that and to really checking out all my moles and staying on top of that. And it made us all realize how much we love him and each other, and how we always take advantage of having people we love around us. It made me so glad that my dad was able to come on the river with me and that I was able to have that time with him and that I still have more time with him. Hopefully they did get it all taken out and he is cancer free. Melanoma is a really hard thing to scan or test for so it'll be hard to detect, but he's also determined to stay on top of it and we'll get to have him around for quite a while longer! I love you dad!