My friend John Schappi posted recently about his participation in a support group for Parkinson’s Disease patients, so I decided I would look again at support resources for melanoma patients. I started with what I knew – an online community that I’ve been relying on for information over the last 10 months. But as I’ve noted in recent posts, our experience with melanoma is in transition – from an active battle against the beast to one in which we get on with our lives. So, it’s time for something else – and my search continues.

Sometimes I have difficulty figuring out how to do something until I am able to articulate just what needs to be done. My challenge this time is transitioning my focus from Robert’s 10-month (so far) fight against melanoma – surgery, recovery, deciding what treatment course to follow, and clinical trial of an experimental melanoma vaccine – to a less active battle against a recurrence of the disease.

My quest for a “name” for Robert’s melanoma came to an end today when we saw Dr. Lipson at Johns Hopkins Hospital. We were there for the one-month follow-up after Robert received the last of four sets of injections with the melanoma GVAX vaccine as part of a clinical trial at Hopkins. I hope my question today about whether Robert’s melanoma has been classified as “nodular” marks the last time I ask for a name.

I learned a lot today during our appointment with Dr. Lipson at Johns Hopkins – so much that I can’t absorb the information and turn it around into a day-one story. I’ll write more in the next week about melanoma, but for today I’ll write about the biopsy.