Melanoma? The kind of skin cancer you get from excessive exposure to the sun? Yeah, I have pretty poor taste, but I will not go there …
I’m guessing it metastisized (hence the ‘started as melanoma’). Melanoma can be very aggressive.
Your secret is most definitely safe with me.
It looks like you fell asleep with your head in your hands and your elbow slowly slid across the keyboard as you nodded out.
[quote=“Chef_Troy, post:58, topic:632798”]
However, NONE of my family know, and none of them ever will unless:
[ul][li]Mrs. Chef dies before I do;[/li][li]I somehow manage to love again;[/li][li]The person I fall in love with happens to be a man; and[/li][li]That man is insane enough to want to hang out with my family.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
That second bullet made me sad until I realized it was a sequence of events, not separate conditions.
Do I seem like the kind of poster who would blab some stupidly intimate detail all over the boards? Geez, I’m honestly insulted :mad:
My understanding is that unlike basal and squamous cell carcinoma, melanoma can start anywhere on your body, not just the areas exposed to the sun.
[quote=“Chef_Troy, post:58, topic:632798”]
For years, nobody who knew me IRL knew that I’m bisexual – not even my wife (whom I have known since I was twelve). I was able to tell you weirdos, though - I even started a thread about it back in 2000 called Ask the Closeted Bisexual Guy!. This led to occasional awkwardness when my wife accompanied me to Doper get-togethers - it was uncomfortable to be around people who !KNEW! when she didn’t (it didn’t occur to me that I might start hanging out with Dopers - everybody knows that people you meet online are imaginary).
Eventually I was able to muster up the courage to tell her, and it went better than I could have hoped. Since then, I’ve come out to several of my IRL friends, none of whom has cared.
However, NONE of my family know, and none of them ever will unless:
[ul][li]Mrs. Chef dies before I do;[/li][li]I somehow manage to love again;[/li][li]The person I fall in love with happens to be a man; and[/li][li]That man is insane enough to want to hang out with my family.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
How did you evetually come out to her and what happened?
Pretty much this. Hence I am not telling either, and I don’t really have any “bad” secrets.
The story is on the last page of the thread I linked to, but the short version is that after an unrelated crisis, the insulation was temporarily stripped off our emotional wiring, and I realized that I just had to jump over my fear and land where I landed. I told her, she waited for the punchline, she asked a lot of questions (some of which I had the answers to), and she took a couple of days to process it.
The biggest problem she had was the fact that, even though we’ve known each oher literally since we were kids, I didn’t feel I could tell her before. She had a point - marrying someone without telling them something so fundamental was not cool of me.
I’m an A-list actor in Hollywood.
Oh, you want secrets that also happen to be true. Humph.
I have a couple that I’ve never told anyone (only two other people in the world know, and I haven’t seen or corresponded with either of them since the night in question, nearly 30 years ago), and unless we’re allowed socks, I won’t be telling them here, for the reasons RP explained.
You’re the guy who owns the shower we all pee in.
I thought he was the dude who showers in the urinal…
We all thought you were a devote.
That’s like my family. Keeping track of who knows what and who knows who knows what is damn near impossible. I am the only one on good terms with everyone. I have three rules for dealing with the fam.
- don’t get in the middle of any dispute.
- don’t give an opinion unless directly asked. If asked, tell the truth.
- regarding anything in my life, either everyone knows or no one knows.
I have revealed things on here about my general past and experiences (though not in too much detail) that I wouldn’t tell people not in the know IRL, as it has operated as an emotional safety valve for me .
But there are two Dopers who I know IRL before I became a Doper.
There is also a Doper who posts on here regulary, who knows WHO I am IRL, but doesn’t actually know me. (Though I have met him).
But as he and his friends are, putting it mildly, hostile to what I represent, I am more restrained in what personal information I post now.
Specifically you? I’ve no clue. But in general terms many of us put enough info out to be easily identified by someone who makes an effort, even if we don’t reveal our names.
Wait, I know this - you’re Spartacus, right?
It’s not particularly a secret in my family, but SpouseO and I (and his sister and dad, now that I think about it) are hiding the fact that we’re both atheists from his mother. Largely because it’s just a discussion we don’t really want to have with her, and it really doesn’t affect our lives in any way. But it would affect hers - she’d be all up in trying to “save” us, and then shit would get real. So it’s best for all of us to just ignore that little factoid.
I would guess he died of melanoma that spread, not anal cancer.
ETA: I wonder if it was anal melanoma.