Once I was back at home, things ticked along quite smoothly. The drains were the biggest nuisance, as the tubes tended to get in the way and it was a little disconcerting for people to see 2 tubes coming out of my leg with bags of blood of the end of them. However, I bundled all of the tubes and drainage bags into a pillow case and tried to keep it all out of sight as much as possible. Whilst they were pretty uncomfortable, the drains did their job and I had very little swelling in the leg which was good. Days passed pretty quickly considering and I got into a decent routine that stopped me from going crazy. I had loads more visitors and watched a decent amount of DVD’s and IPL cricket on Sky.

I saw Mr W twice in the following week or 2 and he was happy with everything. He changed his mind a few times on the number of nodes he had taken out of my groin. From what he said, they tend to take a chunk of flesh rather than pick out individual nodes so I don’t think they know exactly how many he took out anyway. During one of our check-ups he dropped into conversation the extra lymph nodes he had taken out during the main dissection were all clear. Great news. He had expected as much. Given that the sentinel nodes had contained such minute traces of cancer cells he hadn’t expected any of the nodes further up my groin to have any issues and he’d been right, as he generally seemed to be. The nodes he had taken out of the right hand side of my groin were also all clear so results were what we’d hoped for.

The results put me in that strange position again called NED. As I’ve mentioned before, NED means there’s no evidence of disease which on the face of it is great news. However, I had been NED as far as they were concerned when they did the initial needle biopsy in my lymph nodes and ultrasound scan right back at the beginning. I had been so pleased at the time that I’d sent the text out to all who knew my situation to tell them I was in the clear and I had a glass of champagne over lunch with Mum and Kathy. What that had proved to me was that NED most certainly didn’t mean you were cancer free. It meant that there was no evidence of any cancer in me but as I said before, that can be because there is none in you or it can be because they just haven’t found the bloody stuff yet. It’s a funny cloud to live under, not ever having the full green light to move on with life but with the situation I was now in as a stage 3 melanoma patient, NED is as good as you get given so that was okily dokily with me.