i know. it's been a LONG time since i blogged anything. hear me out -- i have good excuses.
about 5 weeks ago my sister called to tell me she'd been diagnosed with malignant melanom...a. for the uninitiated, that's the scary kind of skin cancer that kills people, as opposed to the two far less lethal kinds of skin cancer that you hear a fair bit more about.
a few weeks later, while waiting to have the melanoma removed and a lymph node biopsy conducted to see if the cancer had metastacized, her doctors found a 14-mm "nodule" in her left lung. so the good news just kept coming.
we were planning to spend christmas in the phoenix area anyway, since my parents as well as my sister and her family live there. when we got the news about the lung thing, i decided to come down early to be with her and my parents, help her out after surgery, and do what i could to help navigate the medical beauracracy. (as you may have heard, i have some amount of experience in that particular area. i also have experience figuring out how to do things with only one arm instead of two. this came in handy (ok, pun intended) since her melanoma was on top of her hand, which meant a skin graft on th eback of her hand and keeping the hand immobile for a few weeks.)
i'm happy to report that after several nail-biting weeks, all the test results have come back as good as we could have hoped for. the melanoma did not metastacize, they removed it all, and the thing in her lung is just a random thing in her lung (more common than you may have known). so, one huge collective sigh of relief later, a happy holiday is now being had by all.