A Life Spent Learning About Autoimmune Disease and Cancer
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Read Bob’s Story
Chapter: 1
A Single Day Changed My Life Forever
I vividly remember the day my life changed forever. May 7, 2010 was a beautiful sunny spring day. It was a Friday. Golf season had just begun a few weeks earlier. I was very excited for that season because I had surprised myself and won the championship of our golf league the prior year. I couldn’t wait to get out and play that weekend since it was going to be great spring weather. I worked for a surgeon at the time, and I had gotten to work just before 8:00 AM. That day the front office receptionist was coming in late, so I had agreed to cover for her until she arrived. Before I detail the upcoming events; lets jump backwards to Tuesday, May 4th of that week. The surgeon I was working for removed a lesion from the center of my forehead that day. She didn’t like how it looked cosmetically and had been asking for some time if she could remove it. The doctor didn’t have any concerns that the lesion was posing any danger to me medically; she just thought it was unsightly. That wasn’t untrue; so, I agreed to let her take it off. Bouncing again to thatFriday, May 7th, I arrived behind the reception desk and walked over to retrieve the documents which had come overnight on the fax machine. I rifled through the papers and saw a page with my name on it. It was a pathology report. Now, at this point in my life I was not very knowledgeable of the process for my type of surgical case. Heck, to this point in my life (I was 39 years old at the time) I hadn’t even had stitches. Anyway, it’s protocol to always send excised lesions for pathological examination. This was the report on my forehead tissue. “Malignant melanomaand forwarded to the Mayo Clinic for further examination.”
