From 
Del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
In 2005, William Speed Weed (yes, his real name), a science writer and regular contributor to Reader's Digest, was watching the latest Star Wars movie in a theater in Los Angeles with his friend and former prep-school classmate Raphael D. Sagarin, a marine biologist. They were both wearing shorts, and Weed noticed a large scar above Sagarin's left knee, similar to his own. "Did you have knee surgery?" he asked.
"No. Melanoma," his friend replied. Turns out they both had been diagnosed with melanoma on their left thighs!
Weed, 35, a redhead who'd always had lots of irregular moles, had been warned by doctors since he was 14 that he was at risk for getting skin cancer. Still, he never thought it would happen to him. But in May 2005 he became suspicious about a small mole above his left knee, because he thought it had developed a second color -- "a little bit like the spot on Jupiter," he recalls. He went to his doctor, who biopsied it and called him the next day to deliver the shocking news: melanoma. "Even though she said it wasn't a bad one," he remembers, "those were really hard, soul-searching days before my surgery, asking myself, Am I going to die?"
The surgery, which Weed sat up and watched, went well. "The hole was about the size of the top of my coffee cup," he says. "I loved watching it! I'm the opposite of squeamish." When the surgeon was finished, she sewed up the interior near the muscle, then closed the incision with 16 stitches. A few days later, the doctor told Weed he was "all clear."
Sagarin says he had noticed his suspicious mole as he rode his bike to work. When his wife saw it, she said he should get it checked. His physician took the mole off, and Sagarin was as shocked as Weed was when the lab report came back: malignant melanoma. And the two weeks from diagnosis to surgery, he says, was a time of "extreme anxiety." His surgery, while similar to Weed's, included the removal of a lymph node that would indicate if the cancer had spread. Luckily, that turned out negative. He was 33 years old. He's changed his tune about the sun now, he says: "I just got back from a trip to Mexico as pale as when I left!"
Advertisement 
Your Comments
See all
...