Elise commentary: Learning lessons the hard way about the sun and skin cancer

I’ve been thinking about mentoring lately, maybe because I read how Franz Joseph Haydn influenced Mozart and Johannes Brahms befriended and mentored a young Anton Dvorák.

I have no such skills or wisdom to pass on, but I have had a couple of experiences which, had I known what was to come and did differently, would have saved a great deal of heartache, anxiety and expense.

When you think of the word “sun,” what adjectives come to mind? Dazzling, splendid, radiant? That sounds about right.

The Greek word “Helios” refers to the sun god. He is often depicted as a handsome, usually beardless, man clothed in purple robes and crowned with the shining aureole of the sun. His sun-chariot was drawn by four, sometimes winged, steeds.

A heroic figure, no? Why wouldn’t we all want to worship at the feet of Helios?

Perhaps there is at least one reason.

If you have not heard of Mohs surgery, type the word into a browser search bar right away. The surgery refers to a tissue-sparing, precise method of skin cancer removal named in honor of the surgeon who developed the technique, Frederic Mohs, who lived from 1910 to 2002. People require Mohs surgery for specific types or abnormally large or recurrent skin tumors. Once the cancer is completely removed during the Mohs procedure, the individual then has a "hole" or "defect" from the excision that must be closed, usually with numerous stitches.

If that still doesn’t seem bad enough to warrant protection from Helios, think about a cancer on your nose called morpheaform carcinoma. Morpheaform refers to the process of the cancer growing larger and larger in the area where it began. It is not the same as metastasizing, the latter of which means that the cancer has spread to another part of the body. However, a tumor growing larger with each passing day signals that the cancer can overwhelm a body part that is small, such as a nose.

In 2018, after three years of misdiagnoses and the use of a chemo cream, as prescribed by a physician who thought I had a simple basal cell cancer on my nose, I received the shocking diagnosis of morpheaform carcinoma. The cells had grown so much in three years that the only option I had was to undergo Mohs surgery and reconstruction.

That prospect was frightening enough, but the real disaster was that, as large as the cancer had become, the dermatologist in the city where I live stated that the one and only procedure after Mohs would have to be a drastic reconstruction operation called a “forehead flap.” This surgery would require a strip of skin from my forehead to be diverted and stitched onto my nose to close the extremely large hole after the cancer had been excised. The dermatologist insisted that the surgery be immediate and that her spouse should do the reconstruction. Facial surgery was not the spouse’s specialty. There was no one else to whom we could turn.

My husband and I were devastated. By a twist of fate so unreal that it is too complicated to describe, we found a surgeon in Boone, North Carolina, who specializes in facial reconstruction for veterans and others who had been shot in the face and had suffered other severe trauma to their faces.

It took us 3 days to drive to Boone, a very long morning to undergo Mohs surgery by a dermatologist, then an extremely long day of reconstruction surgery the following morning.

The surgeon, a miracle worker, puzzled out a way to close the large hole in my nose without using any forehead skin. He told us after the surgery that even one millimeter more of cancer would have precluded the hole closure with other skin on my nose and would have required the forehead flap to finish the job.

The surgery and recovery were brutal. I went from being an ordinary 64-year-old woman to looking gruesome for weeks. I’m thankful for make-up, but sometimes that’s not quite enough.

With that personal account presented, I come to the purpose of this piece.

I urge – no, beg – all young people who may read or hear about this story to forego the very tempting bronzed, “healthy-looking” tan we sun worshipers could not resist.

There is no such thing as a safe tan. The increase in skin pigment, called melanin, which causes the tan color change in your skin, is a sign of damage. This happens because, once skin is exposed to UV radiation, it increases the production of melanin in an attempt to protect the skin from further destruction.

So, underneath the beautiful glow, there is a miasma of potential decay in the form of broken capillaries, unsightly brown spots, melasma, oddly-shaped freckles, angiomas, wrinkles and deep lines that will make you look at least twice your age.

And that’s only the “normal” outcome of sun damage. It does not include the potential of skin cancer of any kind, whether it be basal, squamous, morpheaform or the deadliest of all: malignant melanoma.

I remember that, as teens, my friends and I joked that we would look like leather purses when we were 40 years old or so. Forty was so far away that it might as well have been 80 or even 100.

The teen years and early 20’s often signal invincibility with the thought that, “this could never happen to me.” Except, guess what: it can and it does.

This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: Elise commentary: Breaking up is hard to do, skin cancer and a lesson