Let's Catch Up

I really want to start blogging more, because I know if I do, the posts will be shorter, and less boring to read, and because I want to start sharing more about the melanoma and cancer community. So we will see!

I follow a lot of melanoma related blogs, and sometimes bloggers share information that inspires me to write my own posts. Recently, Chelsea of Adventures With My Enemy Melanoma (who was one of my biggest inspirations to start my own blog) mentioned Is My Cancer Different, a movement dedicated to educating people about how different cancer can be. Did you know that "cancer" is really just a catch-all, generic term? Cancer is defined as uncontrolled growth of abnormal cells in your body. Because there are many different types of cancer, and even the same cancer can behave differently in different people, everyone's cancer IS different. If you or someone you love has been diagnosed with cancer, go check the website out!

I have always (I like how I used the word always, even though it's been 2 years since my initial diagnosis) felt like "my cancer is different". It started in my skin, not inside my body, the treatment is somewhat different, and I have never felt like I had cancer. People sometimes use the word "sick", and I hate that because I didn't and don't feel sick. I definitely feel out of the ordinary in the waiting room in oncology, and when I had radiation. My doctors and nurses love me because I'm healthy and always happy, when a lot of their patients don't have that good fortune. I haven't gotten nauseous or lost my hair (and certainly not my appetite) or had one side effect from immunotherapy - which is another thing, because my cancer is different, traditional chemotherapy doesn't work as well in most cases. This is both a good and a bad thing, good because I don't have to endure difficult chemo, which kills both good and bad cells, usually makes people sick, etc; bad because it means melanoma is less understood than other types of cancer. 

Some people who have had melanoma caught it earlier, before it spread to their lymph nodes or anywhere else, and it only required surgery to remove the skin around the primary site. Some of these people are very active in melanoma awareness, and I've read stories where they've been hassled a little because basically, their cancer wasn't good enough. Seriously, people out there who are doing what they can to help prevent this terrible cancer from happening to others, have actually been ridiculed because they didn't suffer quite enough? But, read anything on the internet and you will find that there are a lot of hateful people out there with clearly not enough to do! Even within a cancer centered community. 

Whether you were fortunate enough to catch any kind of cancer in the early stages, or at the later stages, whether you had traditional treatment, none at all, are in a clinical trial, or went holistic, your cancer IS different, because you are different. Whether you suffered a little bit or a lot, your cancer matters and you matter. 

In other news.....look what I did last weekend:

I've been wanting to do this for about a year now, and on a whim while at the tattoo/piercing studio with some friends to get our ears pierced, I decided to just go for it. Hurt like nobody's business but was finished very quickly and I love it! I already want a cross on the other foot :)

Next weekend I set sail on a cruise to the Bahamas with a group of girls, so if you hear about a bunch of shenanigans on the high seas, we probably had something to do with it....let's see if I can learn my lessons and avoid sunburns while I'm out there!

Can't Wait!!