SARA MCHUGH

Stage:Stage III

I was the light skinned, freckly girl, growing up in a family of Irish Italians. I would always burn before I eventually got my “tan.” I grew up in the small town of Waterbury, VT. I was a very active kid, playing soccer, baseball, golf, swimming and skiing. In May ‘09, I graduated from the University of Vermont with a Bachelors degree in nursing. That summer I worked as a camp nurse on Lake Champlain, then in August I started working at the UVM medical center as a RN.

After about a year of working nights, I started noticing some changes to a mole on my left thigh. The mole was always funny looking, it was a mole on top of a freckle, and together they made a heart shape. The mole started to itch and be painful, it started growing and it had a red nodule coming from it. It had all the ABCDE that characterize a melanoma. When I called the dermatologist office they said their first appointment would be in 2 months. November ‘10, I finally saw my dermatologist; she was pretty sure the mole was melanoma and did a biopsy. I wasn’t too surprise when she called me the next day to give me the results. The melanoma was “thick” enough that I needed to see a surgical oncologist. At the appointment with the surgeon, he told me there was a 20% chance that melanoma cells would be in the sentinel node. Those were good odds to me, so I was confident that I’d be in the clear.

Two weeks following my surgery I got the call that my sentinel node was positive for melanoma. This was devastating to me, knowing that it meant I would have to have a radical node dissection to my left groin and start a year of interferon treatment. Fortunately, the lymph nodes in my groin were all negative for cancer. The interferon did not agree with my body, my Oncologist kept cutting the doses in half due to toxicity on my liver. After ending up in the ER a few times, I stopped the interferon after 5 months.

In October ‘11 a few months after stopped the interferon, my sister and I drove out to Los Angeles to travel nurse, something that I always wanted to do. I came back to Vermont that spring to move in with, my now husband. Brian and I got engaged that December ’12 and bought at house in July. August ‘13, at a routine follow-up with my surgeon, he found a suspicious spot by ultrasound on my left thigh, by the original melanoma. He did a needle biopsy, which confirmed that it was a new growth of melanoma. Luckily the PET scan was negative, other then the growth on my left thigh. The tumor was surgically removed. The pathology came back that the cancer was “wild” type (BRAF negative) and they did not have any medications to give to me. I decided to undergo radiation treatment in that area.

Brian and I got married June ’14 and went on our honeymoon to Italy that September. May ‘15, I went in for another routine ultrasound, this time the surgeon found an enlarged lymph node by my left ovary. He thought it could be an ovarian cyst, so he had me have a PET scan. The scan showed malignancy to the enlarged lymph node, but nowhere else in my body. May 13th I had my left iliac lymph nodes removed. I am now at stage IIIC. I have upcoming appointments with Dana Farber and with my oncologist at the UVM medical center, to see if any clinical trials are available to me. This November I will celebrate 5 years since my original diagnosis. I realize I’m not in “the clear”, but I do feel fortunate to still be alive and well today to share my story. Since my diagnosis I have been trying to educate my friends and family on this deadly, yet preventable cancer.