Originally Posted by
harper92
This is the most scared I've been in years. Every other time I've worried about something, test results would come back completely clear. This is the only time I've ever had anything come back abnormal and I'm truly in hysterics over it.
I had a new freckle on my finger that I noticed last April. It started off very small but kept growing, and I was terrified it was Melanoma. It was round and brown, but the fact that it was evolving made me go to the derm in November to get it looked at. He wasn't worried at all even though I told him it was growing, but he took it off for me since he saw how freaked out I was.
Once it was off, I completely got over it. Didn't think about it at all even as I walked out of the office. They said they'd call me with the results, but I was so sure then that it was nothing that I didn't wait by the phone.
Turns out I'd missed a few calls in December, and finally they sent me a letter in February saying they had my results and to call them. I completely freaked out. I called them back, and the nurse told me they had found atypical cells in the biopsy and to come back in to get it looked at and maybe get a wider excision. When I hung up, I had a complete screaming-on-the-floor meltdown. I had never been so scared in my life. I called back later to ask more questions because the nurse hadn't explained what that even meant, and she told me it was NOT cancerous but just atypical. She told me it was nothing to lose sleep over and that maybe if I left the cells for 1,000,000 years it might turn into something, but that it seemed unlikely. That calmed me down, and I was able to mostly function for a little while.
Well, I went to my followup the other day. The derm I saw was a different one from the first one I'd seen about the spot, and he was much more intense with horrible bedside manner. He fearmongered the hell out of me, told me crazy things like "we can't be certain it wasn't early evolving melanoma" which confused me because I thought they could tell it was benign from the biopsy?! Then he showed me pics of melanoma, which I'd already seen, and said, "This is what we worry about, because this can kill you." I wanted to scream at him and ask him why the hell he thought it was a good idea to talk like that when I'd told him the MOMENT he walked in that I have horrible anxiety. I was visibly shaking and already crying the moment he came in, and it's like he didn't even notice or care.
He said we'll have a wider excision where they'll take more skin and get clean borders. He said once we do that, I'll never have to worry about it again because it'll be completely gone. This was supposed to calm me down, but for some reason it didn't. I was so terrified by how poorly he'd explained everything and how concerned he was that I was breaking down. When he left the room, I burst into tears and asked the nurse, "Does he think it was cancer?" And she said no, and explained that atypical means a gray area between totally normal and cancer. For some reason this didn't help either. I don't like knowing I had anything on me that was abnormal. I don't like the uncertainty.
From all my research, I'd read that atypical moles aren't really that big of a deal and that melanoma typically evolves from normal skin, and that it's melanoma from the start. I read that it's very rare for them to come out of even atypical moles, and that kept me at bay for a while. But this derm has shattered all of that and I'm in pieces. I wish he had been gentler with me and explained things better instead of making this atypical mole, which apparently is super common, into a huge deal and make me feel like I'll get cancer in a week.
I had the worst panic attack of my life a few nights ago and wound up in the ER because I couldn't breathe. All of the worry from this stupid freckle culminated in that. It was 3 in the morning and they gave me a shot of Ativan. I had another attack yesterday from thinking about all this and had to take another Ativan. I haven't been on that drug since I was 19 and doing terribly, but at least I was worried about something that wasn't happening at all back then. This is actually real.
I go in the 21s for the wide excision. I have no idea how to handle this. I'm covered in spots and feel like I'll get melanoma at any moment and it'll be too late. All I've thought about for weeks is death and I can't take much more of it.