Susie's story
My story is about my husband's fight with melanoma. I've remarried now and my second husband is healthy but I always have that feeling that death could be just round the corner and that it's really important to live for now. That's why we're in France, I suppose, making the most of the rest of our lives.
My husband, James, had a mole on his thigh in the late 1980s. He ignored it but one day said that it was itching and kept bleeding when he had a shower. I'd read somewhere about the signs of cancer and an itchy mole was one of them so I asked him to go to the doctor. He kept meaning to and finally I made him an appointment as I was so concerned. The doctor said he'd take it off with a local anaesthetic in the surgery and that if we didn't hear anything, to assume it was alright. Well, we didn't hear anything for a couple of months and assumed that all was OK. This was in the days before much was known about melanoma - I certainly didn't know about it. James had a high-powered job and we had three young children so the worrying 'mole' got lost in our minds really.
James had to go away on business and while he was away, he phoned home and said he'd found a pea-sized lump in his groin. I said it was probably an inguinal hernia (I'd been a children's nurse and had seen hernias like that) but he asked me to make an appointment with the doctor for when he got home.
After he got home and went for the appointment, he discovered that the reason we hadn't heard anything was because the mole had got lost on its way to the histology laboratory some miles away and no-one had thought to chase it up. The doctor apologised and said that he had had a feeling it was a melanoma, but because he hadn't got a report back, had been too busy to think any more about it. James would have had the chance to have a complete recovery if that mole had reached the lab because he would have gone in to the hospital to have a large scoop taken out round the mole which would have cured him. As it was, the melanoma had spread to the lymph nodes in his groin and beyond.
James died two years later after a long, hard fight against an incredibly virulent cancer and finally of a brain tumour, a melanoma that was too dangerous to remove (he'd had one removed already from his brain) He died at home with us and having had four major operations to remove the different melanomas that sprang up all over him.
The lesson I learned and poor James had to learn by losing his life was that you should never assume that a test is OK just because you don't hear about it. It's called negative reporting. Our children lost their father and I lost a wonderful man because of it - please learn by our loss - that's why I've written this.
Susie