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The Ribbon Is Black for a Reason
How Melanoma Changed My Life in Four Short Months
By Nancy A. Midey Galusha AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2013Nancy A. Midey Galusha
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4817-1878-3
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
"I'm Screwed."
"This is not mastoiditis," the head doctor of the ear, nose, and throat team at Strong Memorial Hospital announced on July 20, 2010, in the emergency room. "I'm very sorry, Mr. Galusha. If this were mastoiditis, you would have a raging ear infection. We don't see any sign of an ear infection. This is most likely a tumor. You have a very large tumor in your pelvic region as well. We were able to look at your CT scan from yesterday. We can't say for sure, but, considering that you have tumors in two different locations, it's most likely cancer."
I literally felt the floor fall away from my feet at the sound of the doctor's preliminary diagnosis. I began to shake uncontrollably. Jerry glanced over at me and said without emotion, "I'm screwed."
My knees were knocking, and my teeth were chattering when a kind and observant nurse placed a heated blanket around my shoulders. It was 90 degrees outside, and, although it was very warm in the tiny, overcrowded cubicle that contained my husband's emergency room bed, I felt a chill that I had never felt before. I was stone cold.
Getting to this point was a short trip. On the weekend of June 9, 2010, Jerry mentioned that he had a headache. Throughout that week, he described it as a pain in the back of the right side of his head that radiated down to his shoulder. When he mentioned the pain to a friend at work, his friend told him that his skin in that area was red. By the end of the week, he was alarmed enough to go to the doctor.
"You're having muscle spasms," the physician's assistant said. He then prescribed a muscle relaxer and told Jerry to return in a week if he didn't feel better.
Jerry nursed that pain for a little over a month. Some days it seemed slightly better, and other days it was worse. Jerry took an alarming amount of ibuprofen each day in an attempt to make this headache go away ... but it didn't go away. I found out later that Jerry had also taken some pain medicine leftover from some old dental work, but even that didn't provide lasting relief.
I nagged like any wife does when her husband clearly needs to see a doctor and won't take the time off from work to do it. I made him change his contact lenses in the hope that eye strain was causing his headaches. He switched from sleeping on two pillows to one to rule out neck strain. We addressed all of the obvious causes of a headache to no avail. Finally on the weekend of July 14, I said, "If you don't go to the doctor Monday, don't come home from work." Of course I didn't mean it literally, but I knew that this was the threat that would give Jerry the motivation to take the day off and go back to the doctor. He could honestly call his boss and say, "Nancy's making me go back to the doctor." And that's exactly what he did.
CHAPTER 2
Bad News Always Comes Back Quickly
On Monday, July 16, 2010, Jerry called the doctor's office and made an appointment for later that morning. The same physician's assistant saw him and said that he thought that Jerry had pulled a ligament in the back of his head and that it was taking longer than usual to heal, but, to be on the safe side, he wanted Jerry to have an MRI that afternoon. While I drove Jerry to the hospital for his MRI, I felt unusually nervous about the speed in which this test had been scheduled. The MRI took almost an hour, and when it was over we made a quick stop at the shoe store. At 5:33 p.m., Jerry took his phone out of his pocket and noticed a missed call from the doctor's office. The message waved the first of many red flags.
"Mr. Galusha, we have some results from your MRI. I'll be in the office until 5:30. Give me a call before then." Jerry dialed quickly, but everybody had already left for the day.
"Jerry, I don't mean to be negative, or to scare you, but only bad news comes back this fast," I said. We had only left the hospital forty-five minutes earlier.
As soon as the doctor's office opened the next morning, Jerry was on the phone. The physician's assistant explained that they had found a mass in the mastoid area of Jerry's skull. He told Jerry that he needed to see a neurologist at Rochester General Hospital on Thursday. The two days leading up to that appointment were emotionally grueling. In my heart, I knew that something terrible was looming, but I tried to be somewhat positive. Common sense told me not to tell Jerry, "I told you to go back to the doctor sooner." To this day, I'm very grateful that I didn't resort to that kind of chastising, as I discovered, not much later, that it wouldn't have changed a single thing.
I visited my mother that evening to prepare her for bad news. My mother adored Jerry. He was a second son to her. She tried to convince me, and convince herself, that this was nothing more than some sort of strange infection and would be cleared up with a good old fashioned dose of antibiotics. My instincts told me differently. I tried to be very honest with her and explained that the word "mass" is just a synonym for "tumor," but she wasn't ready to hear it, so I left her house knowing that I'd failed to prepare her for what I felt was going to be earth-shattering news.
On Thursday, Jerry and I met the first of several neurologists that would be involved with my husband's health care in the following months. He looked at Jerry's MRI for quite a while but then admitted that the mastoid was not an area that he was very familiar with, so he asked us to go downstairs to have a CT scan of Jerry's chest, abdomen, and pelvis. He prescribed this scan because of Jerry's previous melanoma thirteen years before. "Let's rule out anything really bad," the doctor had told us. If only it had been that easy. That doctor scheduled an appointment for Jerry the following day with a colleague.
CHAPTER 3
History: Summer, 1997
A mole on the back of Jerry's left calf had changed. It had grown larger and had changed in color from brown to black. The sides of the mole had also gotten ragged in appearance; they were not smooth like they had been before. I noticed it when the weather got warmer and he was wearing shorts more often. I commented on it several times and asked him to see our dermatologist, but he brushed it off as a waste of time. One evening I took my mom to a friend's yard sale. The woman who was having the sale was a friend of a friend. "Did Angela tell you about my cancer scare?" she asked. She showed me a long, fresh scar on her leg and explained that she'd had a malignant mole removed and told me how dangerously close she'd been to being in "real trouble." Her description of her own mole also described Jerry's mole. The very next day I called our dermatologist's office and made an appointment for Jerry. He had no choice now. I was forcing him to go. He was angry with me because it was a busy time at work, and he thought that his boss would be angry with him for taking a day off. The dermatologist took one look at Jerry's mole and sent him directly to a plastic surgeon in Canandaigua. The plastic surgeon removed the mole that day. A couple of days later, he called our house with the results of the biopsy. Jerry wasn't home, so I took the call.
"Your husband's mole was malignant, Mrs. Galusha. Do you understand how serious melanoma can be?"
I was defensive and replied, "Dr. E., you don't realize that I'm the one who made my husband's appointment in the first place? He wouldn't have done anything about the mole if I hadn't made him!" Why did doctors always blame wives for their husbands stubbornness? I fumed.
The melanoma diagnosis brought with it a series of scans and blood tests. At first Jerry had to see the dermatologist every three months,
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Ribbon Is Black for a Reason by Nancy A. Midey Galusha. Copyright © 2013 by Nancy A. Midey Galusha. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
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