Chapter: 1

A Single Day Changed My Life Forever

I vividly remember May 7, 2010. Who wouldn’t…..it was the day my life changed forever.   It was a beautiful, sunny spring Friday.  Golf season had just begun a few weeks earlier.  I was very excited for that season because I had surprised myself and won our golf league championship the year prior.  I couldn’t wait to get out and play that spring weekend since it was going to be great weather.

At the time, I worked for a surgeon, 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.  I need to jump backwards for just a moment 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 me 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.  I thought so too; therefore, I agreed to let her remove it.  That leads me back to Friday, 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.  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 pathology report regarding my forehead tissue.  “Malignant melanoma and forwarded to the Mayo Clinic for further examination.”