The Good and the Bad

Doesn't the title sound like a John Wayne movie? I guess no one really watches those, my dad has pretty much everyone of John Wayne's movies and we used to watch them during the summer when bored. New Year's Eve Benjamin got his stitches removed. It went pretty well. He started to cry when we took his shirt off, so much for the short term memory. I think the skin might have grown over some of the stitches because there was a little bleeding and you can see prominent stitch lines still in the scar.

When removing the stitches they told us the results came back from testing the birthmark and there weren't any cancerous cells at the time. So they don't have to go in and search for more. Then the nurse told us to come back in 6 months. Yeah we were done ... until Wednesday. The office called us saying the doctor (who wasn't there when the stitches were removed) wanted to speak with us. Today was the appt. I didn't know what to think, the results couldn't have been wrong, but why would the doctor need to take the time to meet with us. He told us today that the good news was what we already knew. After extensive testing the pathologist didn't find any cancerous cells. But there was a bit of bad news. The pathologist did find that the cells had already been making and sending out the mole cells into other parts of Benjamin's back. Both the doctor and pathologist were very surprised to see that this happened at so young of an age. They don't know how far out from around the original birthmark they are but that they are there. He asked us to come once a year so that he can keep an eye on it because if things were to change it would be from the inside not the outside (like the birthmark). Then he told us if we moved when Joseph graduated he would help us find a doctor to take over. I am so grateful that we did this now. Who knows how much it could have spread if we had waited. I really believe we were meant to go to this doctor whose life was affected by his own young child getting skin cancer. Benjamin's birthmark may never have became cancerous, but I breathe so much easier knowing that we took steps to remove that risk. And hopefully the cells still in there don't re-populate or change.