I spuddle.

And now it’s… Public Service Announcement Saturday!   Except this will not be a regular feature because I couldn’t possibly think of something to say in terms of PSAs once a week, and besides Saturday is Writing Blog Day which I haven’t done yet but I HAVE achieved the first step towards that, which is to drink so much coffee that I feel sick and have chest pain and have already Googled “heart attack symptoms”.   Because stuff I feel like I HAVE to do wigs me out, whereas stuff I feel like I’m doing for fun or when I’m not supposed to be doing it, such as this post, feels downright frivolous, apart from the fact that there is not much that is fun about the words “skin” and “cancer” in the same sentence.

Here is my story.

When I was twenty, I was going to university in Vancouver.   I was studying International Relations at UBC and becoming an expert on How To Have A Panic Attack In Public Without Anyone Knowing.   In retrospect, I have no idea why I was so high-strung during those years, I think it’s because I never actually got any rest:  I went from school to work to running long distances for no reason to out-in-the-evening to school again to frantic-last-minute-report-writing and back to work again without much sleep in between.   That may have been part of it.   In any event, I was pretty freaked out for almost the entire time.   One of the symptoms of this was to get short of breath and then to hyperventilate and faint.   Don’t I sound like I was fun back then?   A whole barrel of crazy monkeys, let me tell you.   So one day, I hyperventilated and fainted in the Student Union Building and so that I could feel less like an idiot, I let someone take me to the doctor so that she could tell me that I had hyperventilated, which I already knew because I did it all the time.   However, she also said, while listening to my hysterical breathing, “How long has this mole been on your back?”   My answer was, “How should I know?”   For one thing, it was tiny, about 2mm across, and perfectly round.   It looked like someone had just drawn a dot on my back with a Sharpie, although probably I would have noticed if that had happened, but I had recently been unconscious, maybe someone saw that I’d fainted and thought it would be fun to dot my back.   I had no idea.   I just wanted her to fix me so that I stopped hyperventilating and fainting in public, which was embarrassing.

“You have to get that taken off,” she said.  “Right now.”

So before I knew it, I was downstairs in her building in the office of Dr. No Manners.   I can’t remember his name, so I’ve made one up, in case you think that was actually his name.   Dr. No Manners said, “Meet me at St. Paul’s tomorrow at 3.”

“OK,” I said.   For some reason, I still wasn’t concerned.   I was mostly still worried about how many people had seen me pass out in front of the coffee shop.

The next day, I met him at St. Paul’s, where I had to wait for him in the ER waiting room for two hours.   The time went by pretty quickly with just trying not to faint yet again:   there was one person with a gushing head injury and another woman, who I will never forget, who had a miscarriage right there in the waiting room.    V. glamorous, if by “glamorous”, I mean “tragic and heartbreaking.”   Finally Dr. No Manners showed up and steered me into some surgical suite which strongly resembled a janitor’s closet.   He explained that usually patients were unconscious when they were in there, so the fact there were mop buckets also present wasn’t usually an issue.   Oh.   Well, that makes sense.   He proceeded to cut the offending mole off my back.   Why I was there alone with no one to hold my hand, I have no idea, but there I was.   At one point in the procedure, the phone rang and Dr. No Manners actually put the scalpal down on my back while he talked on the phone about a barbecue, I’m not kidding, and blood trickled down my side.   They don’t call him Dr. No Manners for nothing.

A week later, I was summoned to Dr. No Manners’ office, where he thrust a piece of paper at me.   It said, “Stage __ Melanoma.”   I did not know what this meant as I was not yet a full-fledged hypochondriac.   I thought it meant “skin cancer that can easily be removed”.   So I went home and called my dad, who is a doctor, and said, “It said something like Stage something-or-other Melanoma and they’re going to remove it again.   I guess remove more of it.   I don’t know.   I have finals though.   Do you think this will get in the way of exams?”

“What stage?”  Dad asked.  “WHAT DID IT SAY?”

“I don’t remember,” I said.  “Is it important?”

Apparently my dad got off the phone and my whole family mourned my inevitable passing.   But I still did not know it was serious.  I had NO IDEA.   I carried on, let Dr. No Manners remove more tissue, and then wrote an exam while so stoned on painkillers I couldn’t remember my student number much less any ideas I may have had about the repurcussions of the AIDS outbreak in Zaire.    A few days later, I got a call from Dr. No Manners nurse and she told me that he felt they had got it all and referred me to the cancer clinic.

I still had no idea.   I thought the Cancer Clinic thing was a bit OTT for a little mole, but I went along with it.   My doctor at the Cancer Clinic, Dr. Jason Rivers, explained that every six months I would have every square inch of my skin photographed, then each batch of photos would be contrasted with the previous so that any change in my skin would be recorded and could be taken care of.   At this point, I began to puzzle over the amount of trouble that seemed to be going into my ongoing care.   Every six months?   Forever?   Photos of me?  NAKED?   What the ____?

That’s when I started to do my homework.   That’s when I found out that say I hadn’t hyperventilated and fainted while in line for my daily blueberry muffin, and I hadn’t gone to the doctor, and she hadn’t looked down and seen this tiny black dot on my back, and I hadn’t let Dr. No Manners remove it, say all that never occurred, then guess what?   I would have died.

Died.

I wouldn’t be typing this some eighteen years later because I wouldn’t be here.   I wouldn’t be buying dresses, raising kids, writing books, and worrying about why one eye always seems to be slightly out of focus, because I would be dead.    I wouldn’t be anxious about the five pounds I’ve mysteriously gained, the fact that I’m almost forty, or the book that I’m not finished yet.   I.   Would.   Be.   Dead.

There are a lot of different kinds of skin cancer, many of which can be easily removed, and then there is melanoma, which very quickly metastasizes to the rest of your body, most frequently your brain.    Your odds of survival after the melanoma has grown a certain amount below the surface of your skin are only 5%.   It is one of the worst, most insidious kinds of cancer, and it operates as efficiently and methodically and unemotionally as a serial killer.   I know two people personally whose lives were forever changed by this cancer:  one friend lost her brother and another lost her mother.    This kind of cancer is deadly.

I think about my melanoma and my incredible luck to have found it so early (especially when you consider that it was on a part of my body that I never, ever would have seen myself) a lot in the summer.   We live a block from the beach and we go there a lot (in long sleeves or at the very least SPF 50 and wide brimmed hats) and I see all these young kids lying out in the sun, dark brown (or, worse, red) in the summer sun.   They are laughing now and having a great time, and they seem to be oblivious even though that seems impossible to me, in this day and age, like seeing kids who are smoking, you stop and think, “ARE YOU SERIOUS?”   But they’re immortal, right?   Wrong.   No one is.

So this isn’t the least bit funny and it’s not supposed to be.   YOU do not want to die.   This week marks the eighteenth anniversary of my first appointment at Cancer Clinic, which means that my skin has been examined by a dermatologist, looking for the tiny markers of a death sentence, thirty-six times.   I have had countless moles removed and biopsied, and I’ve been so lucky.   I want you to be lucky, too.   Check your skin.    Regularly.    Stay out of the sun, or if you’re in the sun, cover up.   Figure out that suntans aren’t “beautiful”.   They’re deadly.    Don’t take it for granted, because it can all be taken away.    You often don’t know if you’ve lost the genetic crapshoot until it’s too late.

This week, I learned something that I didn’t know about sun exposure and melanoma:   It doesn’t matter if you’re burning or tanning, the changing colour in your skin indicates that your body’s natural defences have been killed by the sun.    You are putting yourself at risk.

I know posts like this probably don’t have the impact that I wish that they had, but if reading this makes you change your own sun-habit, then it was worth the hour that it took to type.   My mum used to say, “Brown fat looks better than white fat.”   And I guess I believed that for a long time.   I used to lie in the sun, but as often as not I’d get hot and uncomfortable and move to the shade.   But as a kid, I was often tanned, occasionally burned.   Sun exposure in childhood is one of the strongest indicators of melanoma risk.   I was the only one in my family to have melanoma, but that’s the genetic component:   you don’t know who inherited it until they’re diagnosed.   Maybe one day there will be a blood test for it, but as far as I know there isn’t right now, so keep your kids protected when they are outside in the sun.   And yourself.   After all, pale skin may not hide your unsightly veins, but no one is going to see those veins anyway if you’re in a box under the ground, are they?

Filed under: Health, Me, Myself and I