1st consultation...

Sunday afternoon saw me on my way home to Scotland to meet with the Doctors about “The Ear” . The best option for coming home this time was via Dubai with Emirates, so I was back in Glasgow just after lunchtime yesterday. 

This afternoon I had an appointment with the plastic surgery team in Glasgow who will be doing the actual operation to remove the cancer. I didn’t really learn anything I don’t already know (having googled melanoma to oblivion for the last couple of weeks!), but it was good to meet with the surgeon and talk through the specifics of my case. While skin cancer is completely curable (or rather ‘cut-out-able’…), melanoma is also a serious condition that can spread quickly, so it was good to talk to the experts about what will need to be done for me. The ear is an awkward place to have a growth removed from. The guidance is usually to have a 2cm margin around a lesion of the size of mine, although doctors are now doing studies into whether a 1cm margin is sufficient to remove everything that needs to be removed. That is good news for me, as taking away a piece of my ear 4cm across wouldn’t leave me too much to hang my glasses on! The surgeon who is now leading “my team” seemed very knowledgable, and confident that he could remove the cancer and still leave the ear looking reasonably sensible… (albeit, the tragic end to my ear modelling career…) It looks like I will have a reasonably large piece of the skin on the front of my ear removed, along with the cartilage beneath it, leaving just the skin on the back which will then get a skin graft from the back of my other ear to cover the hole. Although it will change the shape of my ear a bit, and leave me with a squidgy bit in the middle, it will leave things as close to how they are just now as is possible. At the same time as that operation is going on, they will also do a sentinel lymph node biopsy to determine whether the cancer has spread to anywhere else. There is going to be a lot of waiting around for appointments and then for biopsy results to confirm all is well before I can return to Uganda again. In the meantime, Heather will be home alone with the kids, so we still appreciate your prayers for life at home, as well as prayers for the melanoma situation.

Thanks.