~by Haley Lynn Gray~
In November 2012 I was diagnosed with melanoma. I had surgery on 5 December.
The freckle was a couple of millimetres across. The melanoma was 0.4mm thick — not even the thickness of a sheet of paper. They took a large piece out of my neck, and the scar that healed is several inches long.
Mine also keloided, which means the skin overgrows with collagen as it heals. My body went into overdrive. After several treatments it has calmed down, but the scar is visible and permanent, and the area will always be sensitive. I can’t comfortably wear earrings that hook into the ear any more.
What nobody tells you about afterwards
People imagine skin cancer as a single event: it’s found, it’s removed, it’s over.
What it actually is: regular visits to the oncologist and the dermatologist. Biopsies for every new spot that appears. A collection of odd little scars where things have been taken off. Sunscreen every single day, and genuine thought about sun exposure before doing anything outdoors.
Sunscreen only works to the extent that you remembered it, reapplied it, and didn’t miss a patch. Sunburn frightens me now, because I know what further damage could mean.
And there’s the part that has nothing to do with me: worrying about whether my children inherited the same skin.
Truly, the gift of melanoma keeps on giving.
The thing I’d most like you to take from this
Mine was 0.4mm thick, and that’s why I’m writing this rather than something else.
Melanoma caught early is usually a surgery and a scar. Melanoma caught late is a completely different conversation. The difference between those two outcomes is frequently nothing more than whether somebody looked.
So: get your skin checked. Get the thing you’ve been meaning to have looked at, looked at. It costs an hour and a co-pay, and the alternative is unthinkable.
The same applies to the mammogram, the blood test, and the appointment you’ve moved twice. Owners are spectacularly good at servicing the car and ignoring every warning light on themselves.
What it changes about running a business
A diagnosis rearranges your assumptions, and some of that is worth keeping.
It ends the idea of “later”. Later is an assumption, not a plan. The trip, the conversation, the thing you’ve been postponing until the business is calmer — the business is never calmer.
It makes the dependency obvious. If everything runs through you, what happens during six weeks of appointments and recovery? That’s not a hypothetical question, and answering it is ordinary risk management.
And it clarifies priorities fast. Not in a greetings-card way. You simply stop being willing to spend weeks on things that don’t matter, and you get considerably better at saying no.
Living with the scar
I’ve come to terms with the fact that my neck will never look the same. It’s visible, people notice it, and occasionally someone asks.
Which leads somewhere I didn’t expect. Scars are things you live with every day. They heal, and things are never quite the same afterwards — and that’s as true of the ones nobody can see. Angry words leave the same kind of mark. So does being bullied at school, or in a workplace. Those scars are harder to point at, and frequently harder to live with.
Mine is on my neck, and it’s the visible evidence of something that was caught in time.
Go and get checked.
