“Advice to 16-year-old me”: Please check your skin and protect it from the sun…
“I want you to know, because it’s melanoma that’s going to take the strongest man you know, your best friend, and the love of your life.” (- And that’s when I lost it.)
Once at a family party, I went around the table asking my relatives what advice they would give a young person, and my grandmother (who has much experience battling scleroderma and other skin afflictions) said she would have taken better care of her skin, stayed out of the sun, and always used sunscreen. That advice stayed with me.
It was the following year that I began to find odd growths on my chest. The first one scared the hell out of me and I remember how high my heart rate soared when the nurse checked my vitals as I sat waiting for the dermatologist to come in for my exam. To date I have had 4 growths removed, and some we have decided to leave there and keep tabs on, and thus far I have been fortunate enough that all abnormalities have been benign. But I worry each time, because as we fair-skinned folks (who have at one point been determined to be dark, frequenting tanning beds, smearing ourselves with baby oil and lying in the sun to look “healthy”) get older, we need to face the fact that we may have done our bodies some serious damage. A few years back I made the choice to switch to a daily moisturizer with spf, always wear eye protection in the sun, and be careful to keep an eye on new freckles and marks. Little adjustments can make a big difference. We can hope.
(Via and thanks to @slack and @petelbury)
