Page 21 - The Freckled Eye - Book

Finally, Dr. Phan came into the room. She sat down and in her soft voice, the
words started to roll out of her mouth while her head started shaking left and
right. She said Teri, I’m sorry. It doesn’t look good. I feel confident the tumor
has grown. Though I can’t say with 100 percent certainty, I am confident with
my experience, seeing this type of cancer, you have melanoma. My heart
sank. Melanoma? I wasn’t expecting this. That was the first time I heard it
called that.

She began to explain how rare this type of eye cancer was and that not much
was known about it. She also said how lucky I was to have caught it this early
and that normally most people don’t find it until its much bigger. She also
said, normally they wouldn’t do anything until it was at least 2 mm, but
because we caught it early and we now know that it has grown, she was
confident we should move forward.

I was so thankful I had trusted my intuition. I was totally freaked out, but also
relieved. She continued to say that up until about 10 years ago, they would
just extract the eye and that was it. Again, my heart sank. I felt nauseous...
My body and brain started to fell like it was shutting down. She then added
that in the last 10 years the medical industry had made great strides on other
treatment options and mentioned a hot laser treatment we could
try. Apparently eye removal didn’t really help, so they’d stop doing that, at
least at this point. Thank God. Hot Laser Treatment sure sounded better
then extraction. So, I listened intently on our next step.

After Dr. Phan explained how Hot Laser Treatment would work, I basically
surmised they'd go in with a blow torch (laser) and burn the area where the
tumor was. The upside of this treatment was that hopefully this would kill the
tumor. The down side, regardless of the outcome, was I'd lose site in the area
that was burned. There was also a good chance that later I’d lose all my
vision in that eye. I was already having site issues, but I had no idea exactly
what to expect and what the after effects would be. I was numb. My body
shut down. I was breathing so slowly. Was I going to lose all of my
site? Was I going see black? This was huge. What a big decision… but
when faced with cancer, I can’t imagine any decisions being easy. I didn’t
see any other option and I didn’t want to wait. Thank god mom was there, but
she still didn't know. I quickly closed my right eye to get a sense of what not
seeing would be like. It was weird... it was different... it was scary.