Metastatic melanoma?

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Hi, I had a stage1 melanoma removed from my upper right arm 3 years ago. I decided to have surgery to check if my surrounded lymph nodes were cancerous ... they weren’t. They removed some surrounding tissue so the margins were clear. I have since been having 3 monthly checks, which have recently extended to 6. Each time my checks were ok. 

In December of last year, I was routinely sent for a lung function test. It came back saying I had a 1cm nodule on my lungs. I was sent for a pet scan on Saturday, and have to see a consultant on Wednesday 9th for my results. 

I haven’t slept since, as I’m extremely anxious that it maybe stage1V metastatic melanoma. 

Is there anyone who is sharing similar experiences that I can chat with?

  • Hi Lynne54, sorry to hear about this stress you’re going through. My experience is a little bit similar but not exactly. I had a stage 3b nodular melanoma on my leg removed in Sept last year. Due to the positive lymph node I had a full body scan. The CT scan highlighted something on my liver which couldn’t be characterised and so I was sent for an MRI focussing on the liver. By this point it was December. I had a massive sense of doom and was preparing myself for the worst. After some days of this, I think I went into autopilot mode to function through the wait. Such as I’d built myself up to hear the worst, when I got brought in for my results appointment I was quite surprised to hear that it was just a benign incidental finding. So, I’m not sure I can offer any real advice, but just to say I understand how stressful it is. With hindsight, it’s easier to look back and think I shouldn’t have catastrophized so much, and just tried to relax, but I know that’s easier said than done. I guess as the check-ups and scans will come and go, I’ll get more acclimatised to the waiting for news, and I hope I may find it easier to wait until I actually am delivered some bad news before worrying, as the bad news may not come. For now, I guess you could try and focus on the fact that not all investigations lead to bad outcomes and try and busy yourself with other things whilst you wait to hear, and I hope like me you then find out it’s nothing to worry about. I guess if your melanoma got dealt with at stage 1 and your lymph nodes were clear, that’s got to swing things a lot more in your favour. Wishing you all the best for results day. Let us know how you get on. I guess another thing you might want to mentally prepare for is they might not know exactly what it is still when Weds comes. For me, once I’d had the MRI, they were able to rule out metastatic melanoma but I still needed some further investigation to figure out what sort of benign thing I had going on down there - at this point it didn’t matter to me so much as I’ve obviously been living with this anomaly for a long time and it didn’t need any treatment. All the best to you.

  • Good luck with your results today Lynne 

    Take care KT

  • Lynn was your pet scan ok ? 

  • Hi, sorry to hear this stress, I had a stage 1a melanoma removed January, wle in February which came back clear, 

    Then overnight I developed lots of tiny black moles had 2 removed which both came back melanoma, so followed with pet ct scan, yesterday I saw my consultant who told me cancer is now in my lymph node in arm pit and qst rib, now stage 4,

    I start combination immunotherapy 19th July, I'm completely shocked to now be stage 4