Skin cancer killed my grandfather. I was only three years old and I barely remember him. If I concentrate I can call up a blurry memory of him singing as he pushed my twin brother and me in a wooden wheelbarrow down a green hill, laughing as we tried to sing along with him.
He had a mole on his hip that bothered him for years. Sometimes it bled because his belt rode up against it, rubbing it raw. My grandmother reportedly nagged him to get it checked, but as one of the only veterinarians treating house pets and farm animals for three North Carolina counties, he was always busy, always promising to get it looked at next week, next month.
When his family doctor finally cut the growth away and sent it off to the pathologist in Greensboro, the results came back: advanced metastatic melanoma. The cancer cells had long since broken free of the skin lesion that spawned them and begun to divide and proliferate in his liver and lymphatic system. After that it was only a matter of time.
I think about this each year as summer comes and I – unlike half of skin cancer survivors – begin to deploy my yearly arsenal of sunscreen sprays and lotions. Or when I make the trip every year and a half or so to the dermatologist to stand chilly and embarrassed as we go over every inch of scalp, every funny-looking freckle, the spaces between my toes, the parts of my back I can’t see, no matter how I twist and gyrate in the mirror.
“Every patient I’ve seen with bad skin cancer has looked like you,” she told me once. “It’s always strawberry blondes.”
That was my grandfather and that’s me and my twin – halfway between ginger and blond, a mix of kilted Celt and marauding Norse raider, I guess. I’m probably far better suited to some cloudy, rain-blasted place that only gets full sunlight a dozen days a year.
Instead, I live in the south and, once summer comes, can’t resist the pull of a hot, sandy beach. This last weekend, my boyfriend and I traveled to the Gulf coast to splash in the ocean, eat lots of seafood and celebrate my brother’s and my birthday with family.
I was sunburned before I even got there. The hot, Florida sun turned my left arm bright pink through the driver’s side window and left a wedge of fuschia skin on my knee.
During our stay, my boyfriend – whose mixed-race Puerto Rican skin only turns even more golden brown in the sun – kayaked in the surf for hours, rented a bike and rode for miles and swam until the sun was dipping down to the edge of the horizon. I, meanwhile, put on sunscreen with a putty knife for 45-minute walks at dusk and early morning before the sun had turned the beach into a white-hot, light-reflecting sunburn factory.
Even so, I’ve returned to Georgia with hot red patches on the back on my neck and knees – places where I sweated through my purportedly sweat-proof SPF 50-plus sunblock – and on my driving arm. I joked to my brother that I am author Amy Tan’s long lost ginger cousin, Farmer Tan. Over the next few days these areas will become itchy and riddled with red bumps. If I’m lucky, they’ll fade and disappear and the skin won’t peel off.
I’ve wanted to be tanned in the past. From time to time, I even lay out in the sun in an attempt to make myself look less like a tapioca-colored shut-in and more like the glowing, brown-all-over guys I see at the gym, men who seem to be made of polished teak or some whole other material than I am. My adventures in tanning, however, have generally ended in either frustrated boredom or water blisters, only to be abandoned for another five or six years.
Skin cancer is the most common cancer in the US and in many cases is treatable, particularly with early intervention. The American Academy of Dermatology reports that more than 8,500 Americans are diagnosed with some form of skin cancer every day and that in the US in an estimated 144,860 new cases of melanoma, 68,480 noninvasive (in situ) and 76,380 invasive, will be diagnosed in 2016.
With those kind of numbers and my family history, I just keep telling myself that it’s more dignified at my age to have my shirt on than off. And while skin so pale it’s blue-ish may not be anyone’s idea of sexy, it beats cancer by a long shot.
