Skin Cancer

If someone would have asked me a year ago whether I thought I would ever get cancer, my answer would have been an emphatic "Yes." The only difference is that I have always feared that I would get skin cancer -- colon cancer never crossed my mind!

Like practically every other image-conscious girl growing up in the 80's, I laid out religiously every day in the summer (but only after carefully slathering myself in baby oil, of course!) Once I got to college, I scored what I thought was the "ideal" job working at a tanning salon. This of course allowed me to keep my summer tan going all year-round -- which is quite a feat in Chicago! Now I look back on the pictures of me with a deep tan in the middle of winter and cringe!

Needless to say, now that I am older with a family that I love and children whom I desperately want to watch grow up, I shudder at the thought of how much sun exposure my poor skin has gotten. I could care less about being tan now -- in fact, I see people with a tan and I can't help but think of skin cancer -- and so I have switched to applying sunscreen religiously every morning, seeking out shade, and wearing baseball caps and sunglasses to protect my face.

During the course of chemotherapy, a few strange brown spots appeared on my hands which were really itchy and flaky. Of course, I immediately freaked out and made an appointment with a dermotologist (actually, not just any dermotologist...I begged and pleaded my way in to an appointment with my oncologist's dermotologist -- I figured that if my oncologist trusted her, she was the doctor for me!) Anyway, I had my appointment with her yesterday and it was very eye-opening. First of all, she removed three suspicious moles from my back and neck that she said "are better off my body than on." These were moles that I never thought twice about so I was shocked to hear that she wanted to remove them!! We'll know in a couple weeks whether they are anything to worry about. But even more interesting was the fact that she told me the spots that appeared on my hands were probably pre-cancer spots that reacted to the chemo drugs during my treatment. She explained that the same chemo drug that I was on for my colon cancer (5-FU) is also used to treat skin cancer and so I kind of got a "two for one deal" (her quote exactly!). I am not sure whether to be scared to death of the fact that I obviously had pre-cancerous skin spots or whether I should jump for joy that they got treated by the 5-FU drugs!! Probably a little bit of both.

The really scary thing, though, is that the brown spots appeared in places on my hands where I never would have suspected -- these parts looked completely normal!!! By contrast, I have a ton of freckles and moles all over my body and those are the places that every dermotologist focuses on when I go in for an exam. But how in the world are my doctor and I supposed to know to monitor places that appear completely normal?? Ohhhh, cancer is so evil!!!

I guess the blessing in all of this is that I was able to see with my own eyes the impact of 5-FU. The spots on my hands clearly got fried during treatment and now, since treatment has ended, the spots have slowly healed and gone away. Granted the tumor in my colon is much bigger, more invasive, and more advanced, but if the spots on my hands are any indication, then the Bitch is fading fast.