Well, after several months hiatus, here I am, putting fingertips to keyboard once again.

Once again, the busyness of life has managed to get in the way of blogging. I enjoy blogging, but it’s the thing I don’t do when other stuff takes over.

This time around it’s been a combination of things. We arrived back from our holiday and got straight back into work, while simultaneously moving my parents back to the other side of the country. They’re in their eighties, and decided to move into a smaller dwelling in an aged care facility in Western Australia.

That meant quite a lot of packing, a pile of repacking and making sure they’d downsized enough, because they were moving to a one bedroom unit from a two bed/one office house, and then the selling of a car, finalising house sale and selling of various household items. It took a while.

Then Song Contest: Almost Eurovision rehearsals began. I’m helping with the vocals, although I’m not part of the cast, and we’re rehearsing two nights a week and intermittent weekends. It’s fun, but there’s a fair bit of preparation involved.

Of course, there’s always writing too – I’ve just finalised some rewrites of a fantasy first story, and I’ve been writing the second installation of that one at the same time.

And then I had a skin check, because a mole on my leg had changed.

At this point, I just want to remind everyone – get your skin checked regularly.

You see, the mole/freckle that had changed turned out to be a melanoma in situ. Now, as my doctor reminded me when I went back to get the results, if you have to have a melanoma, then this is the ‘best’ type to have. And although the margins of the excision were clear, the next step is to have a wide local excision.

That means I need to have a bit more surgery, and some nice wide margins taken to make sure it’s really all gone. That’ll happen at the end of August after my husband and I have had a week away catching up with our eldest. Then I’ll need to have more frequent checks of my skin and lymph nodes for the rest of my life.

So, to reiterate – make sure you get your skin checks. If the doctor hadn’t mentioned that I should keep an eye on that particular mole, I wouldn’t even had known I’d had it, (it’s on the side and back of my thigh and quite out of sight) and it would have grown, spread and possibly turned out to be a melanoma that wasn’t Stage 0.

It’s been a funny few weeks coming to grips with the idea of melanoma, reminding myself that the thing is actually already gone, and trying not to obsessively check every freckle. (I have thousands, so that could be pretty problematic!)

So, in short (and just in case you didn’t hear me the first time) – get your skin checked!