A Melanoma Journey

So many of my fellow melanoma warriors have created blogs, so I figured, What the hell? I might as well try it myself....Seems like a pretty cool way of getting some of my thoughts out and keeping them from overcrowding my brain...The bumpy, scary, and sometimes heartbreaking rollercoaster ride that is known as melanoma can do that--overburden our minds with too much stress and far too many thoughts not to get some of them out...Technically speaking, I began my journey with melanoma back in 2001, only I was blissfully unaware of it, since I was misdiagnosed. The ugly mole was shaved off and the slides were misread as "not significantly atypical enough" to be called dysplastic.
In any case, it grew right back, and two years later, in 2003, I was blindsided with the news that I now had melanoma, a type of skin cancer that can be fatal. Since then, the longest I have been NED (melanoma speak for no evidence of disease) has been for at most, 16 months. My first recurrence sent me onward and upward from stage Ib to stage IIIb. The recurrence came in the form of an in transit metastasis right next to the wide excision scar from where my original melanoma was removed. I began a course of two treatments, GM-CSF along with Temodar, a type of chemo. A month after finishing the GM-CSF and two months after the Temodar, another recurrence popped up...a subcutaneous/in-transit metastasis that was only about an inch below where my nodes were taken out at the same time as the first recurrence.
This crap just keeps deciding to rear its ugly, nasty ol' head....
At least as far as I know right now, only in my left leg...
Now, I face what is so far the scariest treatment plan yet...for me, at least: Isolated Limb Perfusion. A tourniquet will be applied to my uppermost leg; a couple of major blood vessels will be hooked onto a heart lung bypass machine in order to circulate ten times the lethal dose of a chemo agent known as Melphalan; at the same time, the leg is heated up to about 104 degrees, since apparently, it makes the chemo more effective. This is done for approximately an hour and a half before being flushed out of the leg with clean blood...All this in the hopes of obliterating this beast once and for all...I have to hope for this above all else...
Frankly, however much I hate to admit it, this procedure scares the livin' shit outta me...Yet for as much as it does, the melanoma is truly starting to scare me more...
Ahhhh, well...We will see....