Burned by the Sun

The scary new epidemic of skin cancer among the young -- and how to stay safe.

What's That Spot?

It was a broiling, cloudless summer day in Dallas. I was 26 years old, sitting by the pool at my sister's house. Despite the white skin and green eyes I inherited from my English and Scottish ancestors, I loved the sun and had spent a Midwestern childhood hoping that maybe the freckles would eventually all merge and make me tan.

Instead, I'd suffered several agonizing sunburns from summers at cold, sparkling (and highly reflective) Minnesota lakes, complete with blistering, peeling, and even a couple of trips to the emergency room.

Yet here I was, lounging in the midday rays so strong they hurt, and still harboring the futile hope that a little color would make me look healthier, thinner, sexier. I looked at my left thigh and focused on a sore, about the size of a dime, that would scab over but never quite seemed to heal. I'd noticed it for a few weeks -- or was it months? Then I'd put it out of my mind.

My sister's husband, a facial plastic surgeon with experience in skin cancer, came outside. "Hey, Richard, what is this?" I asked, pointing out the spot on my leg. "Could it possibly be a skin cancer?"

He squinted at it in the sunlight and said distractedly, "It's probably nothing. Don't worry about it." Right, I thought. People my age don't get skin cancer.

The sore seemed to heal for a while. But a few weeks later, it bled a little again and scabbed over. Something told me I couldn't ignore it any longer. The next time I was at my sister's, I asked my brother-in-law to take another look. "I've had this for months," I said. "And it comes and goes but never heals. I just have a gut instinct that it's skin cancer."

"You may be right," he said. "I think it should be biopsied." Those instincts proved correct. It was a basal cell carcinoma, the first of many more to come over the next 20 years.

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“ Smiling is a two-way mechanism. We do it when we're relaxed and happy, but doing it can also make us feel relaxed and happy. ”

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