By Bel Dunbar

I can’t take the credit for this clever play on words, I’ll give that to Rod. One thing we’ve found recently with both of us being diagnosed with different stage 4 cancers is this: keep your humour well and truly intact!

In the last week or so, I’ve decided to do what I do best and write a blog about being diagnosed with a melanoma. Many of you have read our much lighter travel blog: 111 Days in Europe. As it turns out, I love writing (not so much the essays of course) and maintaining a blog has been a great way to capture the essence of our travels. We’ve really loved reminiscing over the posts as the years have sprinkled a fine layer of dust over some of our memories. We started 111 Days when Hamish was 4 – he is about to turn 13!

Obviously me outing my unpleasant diagnosis on social media is not an ideal way for most of you to hear about what’s been happening in our lives in the past few months; I apologise wholeheartedly for this. There is just no way I can reach out to you all individually and I know you will understand this. Many of my close friends and colleagues, and my dear family already know, but this blog will allow me to reach those of you further afield, as well as providing me the opportunity to update you all along the way.

So buckle in – we’re in for a hell of a year.

Let’s back it up a bit…

It was only a short while ago I outed Rod’s diagnosis on 111 Days. For those of you out of this loop, Rod was diagnosed with a Stage 4, Pancreatic Neuro Endocrine Tumour in December last year. After nearly 7 years of intermittent, debilitating abdo pain, he finally got some answers. He is on an immunotherapy regime of monthly deep sub-cut injections, which are designed to slow the growth of his tumours and manage his symptoms. Nine months in and this is working a treat. The treatment isn’t curative, but it’s a super slow growing type of cancer; he’s well, he’s put weight back on and is pain free.

A couple of months ago I had a very boring looking little lump removed from my left thigh. It had been there for nearly 12 months and hadn’t done much at all. It didn’t hurt, it didn’t get bigger, it didn’t change shape, in fact, it didn’t do anything much at all. The last few weeks when we were in Thailand, it was getting warm and itchy, so I figured perhaps there was just some underlying infective process going on.

How wrong I was. My former ED colleague and now GP took this lump out and forced me to rest: “No bike, take it easy – I don’t want those sutures coming apart!” I received a distressing call at work one morning from the GP Clinic, advising me to “bring a support person” to my appointment that afternoon. Trust me when I say, you don’t want to hear those words. My friend Maddie was working with me at the time and she said, “Bel, what’s happened?” – I said to her, “Mate, I reckon I’ve got cancer!” It was a long day until my appointment at 4pm that afternoon.

Between that appointment on August 7 and now, so much has happened and I’ll devote a couple of blogs to these few high stress months to fill in the gaps. For the moment though, I’ll go Hollywood and “cut to the chase”. I’ve been diagnosed with a Stage 4, metastatic melanoma (resected). This first part of that is super scary sounding, but the last part is important. There is only evidence of one tumour and it has been surgically removed. There is currently no other evidence of disease on the PET scan and brain MRI I’ve had. There’s also no evidence of a primary – apparently more common than you think, approximately 10% of metastatic melanoma’s have no known primary. Tuesday I’m off to Peter Mac for a wide local excision (WLE) just to achieve a clear margin.

I’m well. Rod, Jess and Hamish are OK. I’ve been riding my little heart out as much as I can lately (which isn’t even that much to be honest…) to make up for the next few weeks of recovery on the couch. I’ve had to make some big decisions in the past few months and that’s been super hard; Rod and I have talked and talked and talked. We now have a solid plan – I’m just gonna put my head down and do what I’ve got to do to reduce the chances of this recurring in the future. I’ll explain all in another post. The website is new, so I’ll work on it becoming more functional and presentable in the coming weeks.

Much love, Bel.