Well it has been a long & frankly emotional week or two.
We started with feeling angry, frustrated and generally pretty low – the little people were starting to pick up on the vibes & The Mr took matters into his own hands.
My car for the last 3 years has been little less than a bus – a blue tank. It might carry 7 people with ease but it isn’t friendly on the wallet so we have been thinking about swapping her for a slightly more economical machine for quite some time.
Now this may surprise you but I know diddly squat about cars so The Mr tends to adopt a more proactive method to evaluate my tastes – the motorway test – we drive along & he makes a mental note of the vehicles that we overtake that I go “that’s nice” to.
So last weekend we jumped in the blue tank & The Mr said – “it’s time to get Mummy her new car” ….did I mention we like to torture the dinkies by taking them with us to look at cars!
So long tale cut short, we drove over to the other side of the country, got out of the tank…the Mr points to the cutest, teensy tiniest car I have ever seen & says you can have that if you want it!
This is a photo taken of my old car sitting next to my new car “Figgy”, a perfect Nissan Figaro. Half the price to tax & insure, more miles to the gallon (apparently) although to be honest when it looks like this and is as much fun to drive I don’t really care about numbers. The dinkies love her – especially when it is sunny & we get to pop the hood back.
Today I was particularly grateful for Figgy. We had another long drive – back to Oxford – The Plastic Surgeon wanted to meet with me.
Now, I am very much an optimistic sort of person, but we have been dealt with some pretty crappy cards of late & there was a big part of me that was expecting us to get all the way up there to be told No you may not come on our trial because it is totally & utterly impossible to do a Sentinel Node Biopsy now.
We meet with The Surgeon and go through the routine discussions – he wants to look at my big back scar, the smaller back scar and even the leg scar – he is quite surprised that I have had these done by dermatologists & that I haven’t yet actually seen a “proper surgeon”.

Whilst I was under the impression that my back wide excision was wide – it was not wide enough & this makes the mess that Gloucester made even more obvious. With a melanoma that has such a fast mitotic rate and deep Breslow depth as mine – the margin should have been greater that it was.
This is bad because of the element of risk that I have potentially been put under – however the good part is this means a sentinel node biopsy is an option after all.
He checks my lymph nodes are not swollen – he says there are some raised lymph glands in my groin but they are small & on both sides & therefore not a concern – he says that he can only feel them because I am slim & not fat & The Mr laughs that Dr Oliver Cassell has now gone down on my list of favourite people. (I resist the urge to hug him just incase he changes his mind)
He discusses what the procedure will involve (I will go into this in more detail another time) and he mentions how “eye opening” my case has been to him as a surgeon – the postcode lottery of Medical support.
We sign the consent form & are then escorted by his secretary to another part of the hospital where Dr Cassell has arranged for me to have Pre-Op assessment today rather than having to come up again next week.
I have to confess to shedding a few tears of relief as we walked across the hospital.
I will be back here in just 2 weeks time for an operation, and whilst that operation comes with risks I think the greater risk is doing nothing.
For today I can smile – something has gone my way – and The Mr & I got to drive home in the sunshine in Figgy!