Carole Hosey, Stage III

I was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma stage three B, when I was 41 years old. That was 11 years ago. I have been healthy and cancer free since November 2015 (I write this in April 2026). As someone with very light skin, lots of freckles and blue eyes. I have always been conscious to look for melanoma. However, this appeared on the bottom of my foot and it did not look like what I thought melanoma could look like. I thought I had stepped on something. It was small and black. I showed it to my general practitioner physician and she also thought maybe something was stuck in my foot and gave me an x-ray. She was not worried about it. Several months later, while vacationing out of state, my sister who is a nurse practitioner took a look at it and right away said it looked like melanoma. By then it had broken through the skin. When I returned to my home state, I saw my dermatologist the next day. He told me he was 50-50 that it was melanoma. I was pretty sure he was certain it was melanoma, but just wanted to give me some hope. When he called me two days later, he told me that based on the size of what he removed, I was at least at stage two. He sent me to university of Michigan where they removed a large portion of my foot and did a skin graft from my groin. They also did a lymph node biopsy and found that it had spread to two lymph nodes in my groin. I later had a full lymph node dissection from my groin. In 2015 the drug treatments for melanoma were just starting to get better but since I had no evidence of disease from my PET scans and MRIs, I decided not to do any drug treatment. I continued with scans every few months for a while. And then I stopped doing the scans because they were so anxiety provoking. I continue to see my dermatologist every six months. I have occasionally had moles removed since then, but I have not had a recurrence of melanoma.

Carole Hosey, Stage III Melanoma Survivor
Date of Diagnosis: 08/12/2015
Detroit, Michigan