UK Skin Cancer and Melanoma Patients

[shaggy]

Hi gang.
My name is Ian.Already seen my old mate Jim on here.Im a 40yr old firefighter from Lincolnshire.I was diagnosed in 1995,had surgery to the left side of my neck,stage 3,but not a clue about clarks etc.Still enjoying life to the full..


Good luck with the site.About time we had a site over here.

Ian

[Iain Mack]

Thanks for your support Ian. Good luck for the future.

[slidge]

Hi, my name is Selina and I was diagnosed with Malignant Melanoma in April. It was just a mole I kept catching on my bra strap and just wanted it removed. Well, since then, I have been to Tooting for tests, including wider excision under general anesthetic on Thursday last week. The doctors are not sure if the melanoma has spread or not, but I will be going back & forth to Tooting for the next 3 years for regular check-ups.
The mole I had removed was nothing like they show you a melanoma looks like, it was a lumpy pink mole but looked like a cauliflower. There was no black or different colours or jagged edges, but then, I am no expert and even the doctor who removed it was shocked when it came back positive.
Anyway, I just want to thank you administrator for setting up this site and am pleased now that there is somewhere I can go for possible answers

[leejordan]

No we shouldn't educate about the dangers (the dangers of the sun or the dangers of metastasis to the lungs if you don't act quick enough?), because that's going to scare or worry people even more. However people need to know that moles grow into the skin, and that might prompt more people to get to the GP faster.

There has to be a campaign around the idea that "every millimeter counts" if it was done as a parady of the game show in a jovial way I'm pretty sure that would educate towards an understanding of how cancerous moles grow. As it is the target audience who need to go to the GP with suspect moles are 20 to 30 year olds and they will connect with every second counts.

Why is nobody doing the ABC of melanoma, I've tried my best in this area. breast cancer gets the TLC campaign and thousands of pounds along with it, unfortunatly our wristband is black and we don't have lance armstrong.

[ally]

I strongly disagree - we need to educate, children are not as scared by anything as they used to be. Education is the way forward, as for a target audience being 20 to 30 year olds, I was unaware that melanoma had age limits.

[leejordan]

I agree about children, but to a point it's firstly about parents, and then in teenhood the child takes over repsonsibility and I think that's where it can go wrong.

What kind of things would you tell children, would you tell them about moles or the sun protection?

There's an age related to sun exposure, in that you get 80% of your life time UV by the age of 21, in theroy anything you do after 21 is saving the remaining 20% of damage. I don't think many people know that aspect of it, so that could be one drive on teens.

However Melanoma is hitting more and more people in their 20's and some barely make it into the mid 30's, a famous example being Eva Cassidy, once though an old man's disease, younger people are turning up at dermatology.

I always thought you go sunprotection on parents and young teens, by mid teens you are talking moles and skin checks and hopefully by their 20's they have the knowlegde to get the the GP faster, while stil being cautious in the sun.

I mean do you talk to 34 year old office workers, and offer free mole screenings, bevause it's too late to recover the damage done in 1975 right?

[leejordan]

Or put another way what would you tell kids in secondary school what they don't already know (that the sun is dagerous?)

I mean do we as 28 year old Melanoma patients go back to our schools to give a talk on the timescales involved in skin cancer that ok in 1995 you get sunburn at school, and go untill 2005 when the cancer is found and project into the future that you may live until 2010 but if you had gone early you could have had a better outlook towards 2015?

What I'm trying to get at is what dangers are you going to educate children about and do they have the minds to look at melanoma scars? I can't look at some melanoma's. Do you go round with flash cards, good mole, bad mole?

Or do we just talk about how dangerous the sun is and how we should really take care and do what we've done for 20 years which hasn't worked?