Skin Cancer Is Not the Prettiest Thing Under the Sun

Here’s a look at a medical sewing project of mine that I’m sure you’ll find icky and hope you’ll also find cool. After a series of these Frankensteinian surgeries, I’ve accepted my pink-skinned, cancer-prone heritage (and confessed to roasting in baby oil as a teen), but the bandage-free healing process definitely turns heads.

Skin, being on the outside, is both grosser and harder to hide than our other organs when it becomes afflicted. When my own particular bumps come off, it’s sometimes for vanity and sometimes because they are cancerous or are expected to become so. But in none of those situations is there ever any possibility of avoiding the question, “What happened?”

I could answer, swaggering, that I wiped out on my motorcycle, but bumping into my bathroom cabinet is about a million times more likely.

My latest complaint is being forced to surrender my sunbather’s sense of fashion. Sunny days, I dress in a floppy wide-brimmed hat and long sleeves, even on Manhattan’s skyscraper-shaded sidewalks. Not to mention the top-shelf SPF. Two bouts of squamous cell cancer and a series of dramatic cicatrices have accomplished what my cancer-spotted grandmother never could by chasing me around as a child with the greasy white sunscreens of the ’60s.

My dermatologist promises the surgeries will be over soon; the older you get, the more slowly your bumps grow. And it’s true that my 75-year-old mother barely needs appointments anymore. A dozen or so spots need to come off my forehead this summer, though, so I’m busily growing out my bangs—and thinking about getting a motorcycle.