Let’s Talk Skin Checks
A wise Maya Angelou said, “When you know better, do better.” While I doubt she was referring to sun protection, we have all learned a thing or two since the golden 80’s but not without some repercussions.
I am 53 years old. I grew up first in the Panama Canal Zone, NEAR THE EQUATOR, and then in the Panhandle of Florida. It was the 70’s and 80’s and to say that sun protection wasn’t a thing would be a gross understatement. I remember being 6 or 7 and seeing how big a piece of peeling sunburned skin I could pull off my dad’s back in one fell swoop. It was a frequent Sunday morning challenge. We spent a lot of weekends at a lake and then at the beach once we moved to Florida. I mean, come on isn’t the beach one of the main reasons people move to Florida? When my cousin Holly came to visit, we spent all day in the water, like rotisserie chickens turning over on our floaties every half hour. The golden brown Coppertone tan was the goal we all aspired to. All through high school, weekends were spent at the beach with baby oil and foil tanning blankets, as if the sugar-white sand wasn’t enough of a reflector. My gosh, we were dumb, or painfully misinformed. All of the sun-kissed models in the ads for Hawaiian Tropic, Sea&Ski, and Bain de Soliel looked so glamourous in their bikinis and promised to make us look like we too had just come back from St Tropez, not that any of us even knew where that was. But we ate it up. We even used the Sun-In or lemon juice for those coveted summer highlights and then Solarcaine for those inadvertent burns, cue the peeling frenzy. It’s almost comical to think back now at how hard we all “Worked” on our tan each year, except that now we are paying the price.
I thankfully stopped the summer bake fest once I left Florida. The beaches in Southern California are not my cup of tea so it lost its allure. We all got a little more educated about the damage midday sun can cause and I started using sunscreen religiously. I also started getting my annual skin check after two friends had skin cancer scares, made even more unsettling by the fact that these were not locations typically exposed to the sun. I had a spot on my arm taken off in my early 30’s as well as some discoloration on my cheeks and forehead burned off for precautionary reasons. My dermatologist was darling and so worried about me having what looked like the Bermuda Triangle coordinates on my face in the event I had any upcoming special occasions but I assured her I would be happy to explain the importance of taking care of your skin to anyone who might take issue with my new bright red spots. One of the perks of aging is you really do stop caring what people think for the most part.
My Southern California-raised swimmer of a husband has not been so lucky when it comes to pre-cancerous removals. His back is littered with love notes from the sun, having spent hours in a pool in his teens. He just had 4 large spots burned off of his shoulders and has had 3 Mohs surgeries in the last 5 years, one so big on his shin we jokingly refer to it as his “shark bite” because it was immense. While he opted not to have them suture that one shut, the spot on his calf he just had cut out gave him an industrial-strength zipper for three weeks. Now it just looks like a barcode but so far no one has tried to scan him for a price check.
I’ve been less diligent since the pandemic about my skin checks and should probably practice what I preach to Scott about staying on top of them. A friend I went to high school with posted a story today that she too is having Mohs surgery thanks to our days baking on those Panhandle beaches. It was a gentle reminder that I need to call and make an appointment. Can I encourage you to do the same? Our health is really the most valuable thing we have and we have to take measures to protect it. We sometimes forget that our skin is our largest organ and does a lot of work for us, let’s do our best to take care of it.
