Skin cancer is no joke. It can kill you.
It could have killed me.
I was never into tanning, either in the actual sun or in tanning beds. But I am very fair (my foundation shade is Porcelain), and every summer growing up I would burn to the point of blistering. Our family vacationed in Florida every year, and my mom loved to sit out on that beach all day, every day. She has olive skin and would get a dark tan. In those days (late 1950s – early 1960s), skin cancer was unheard of. My mom would throw a t-shirt on my brother and I over our swimsuits to protect us from sunburn. We had suntan lotion, but did it have SPF in it? I’m guessing not.
Well, guess what? I would get so burnt on the first day of vacation that I would lie in bed crying all night while my little brother kicked me in his sleep. I remember a yellow nightie I had, made of nylon with a ruffle around the neck. It was so pretty, but man, it was no help with a second-degree sunburn!
My mom would put some salve or lotion on it, and off we would go to the beach again. By the third day, I was peeling all over. I never got a tan. I would just burn, peel, and burn again. Every dang year.
Fast forward to 2006. I’m 50. There’s an annoying spot at the tip of my nose that looks like a pencil smudge – kind of grayish. People at work keep trying to rub it off. At my dermatologist checkup, Dr. Neish says, “How long have you had that spot on your nose?”
I say, “I don’t know – several months, a year maybe.”
She’s concerned. She takes a biopsy, sends it off. Two weeks later, I get a phone call.
“You need to call Dr. John Zitelli and get an appointment. He’s a specialist who only works on faces. That spot needs to come off.”
“Oh no, what is it?”
“It’s melanoma.” The dreaded, worst kind of skin cancer. The kind that if it gets into your lymph system, you’re in big trouble.
Dr. Zitelli is a specialist in Mohs surgery. That’s where they take your cancer off by the slice, in layers, one layer at a time, and examine each layer right there in their on-site lab, while you wait, until they reach a layer with no cancer. Then they patch you up and send you home. It’s an outpatient procedure, all done in a single day.
So my mom and I get there, and they take me back. Dr. Zitelli is there, along with four or five interns, who are there to observe. The doctor asks me what kind of music I like, and puts the local classic rock station on a boom box in the corner. He approves of my choice. The interns gather around as he examines my nose and explains the process. He’ll take off the top layer, bandage me up, and send me back to the waiting room while checking it out. If there’s cancer at the bottom of that layer, they’ll take me back and shave off another layer, and so on. Once they get to the bottom of the cancerous tissue, they’ll do the repair/reconstruction.
I’m handed two Valium, and Dr. Zitelli proceeds to inject tiny shots of Lidocaine all the way around my nose. About 20 of them, it seems like. Both act fairly fast, and pretty soon I’m feeling no pain. We’re joking around. I ask him if he can give me a better nose and make me a “hot 50-year-old.” He says I already am. We all laugh. As he starts cutting, I can feel the scalpel doing its thing but it doesn’t hurt. It’s a weird feeling for sure.
While he’s slicing and dicing my schnozz, all the interns are hovering, their faces in a circle around my head. I’m watching their expressions. Thank God there’s no mirror.
WARNING: It gets gross here.
“Okay, first layer is off,” he says.
“How big is it?” I ask.
“A nickel” is the response. OMG. That’s the whole tip of my nose. GONE.
I get bandaged up and shipped back out to my mom in the waiting room, which is filled to the brim with people with bandages on their faces, ears, and bald heads. All waiting for the answer on their first cuts.
It takes more than an hour, probably closer to two hours, to get called back in. There’s good news: he got all the cancer in the first slice. Now it’s time to figure out how to repair the gaping hole in my face.
The interns gather around again, and Dr. Zitelli asks them what their strategies would be. One says grafting, and he says no, that would be dead skin and would look ugly. Then he explains to me what he’s going to do. He says he’s going to take a circle of tissue from the top of my forehead, cut it down to the top of my nose, twist it around, and sew it on to the hole. It will stay that way for three weeks so it has time to grow and learn to live there. After that, I’ll come back and he’ll take out that middle strip of tissue. The hole left in my forehead will scar over because the skin there is too tight to sew back together with that big of a wound. The track from the wound down to the top of my nose will be stitched together.
Let me tell you, it was as awful as it sounds. I was sent home with a bandage that stuck out about 2 inches from my face and instructions to take it off every day and clean everything with a Q-tip and water, then rebandage it. The piece of tissue that was twisted inside-out lay on my nose and was not just skin, but all the living tissue underneath. It was as thick as my pinkie. And if that’s not enough to make me throw up, when I touched my nose, I felt it on my forehead because it was still connected.
Three weeks of this, and I had to go to work with this big honking bandage and my glasses perched on top of it. At the time I was the benefits manager for a university and was doing benefits orientations for new faculty every day. Talk about embarrassing.
Finally, the day came to remove that middle piece. It still took months after that for the healing of my forehead, even though my nose was now back in one piece and shaped slightly different than it was pre-melanoma. Only thing was, it was also now two different colors and grew hair. Thank God for my Magix Prime Face Perfector and Skin So Soft Facial Hair Remover Cream.
The moral of the story is: Please be careful! Use SPF every day (I recommend Anew Hydra Fusion Daily Beauty Defense SPF 50). Wear a big, floppy hat when out in the sun. Don’t use tanning beds. You may think a tan make you look better, but when you’re older, the result of all that tanning will be discoloration of your skin, wrinkles, and possibly skin cancer. Believe me, you are just as beautiful with your pale skin that you are with a tan! And you will stay more beautiful as you age without sun damage.
The Joy of Lipstick 