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When I was young, sunscreen was greasy and my mom's hands were cold. I fought its application every step of the way.

But I was just a child and my mother always won, so as a kid I was never sunburned.

As I grew up and my mom's hands slipped out of reach, I returned home with rosy features to her disappointment. I was young and didn't care — skin cancer was something that happened to other people.

Eventually, the pain of sunburns taught me a lesson and my diligence increased to a degree. But I was shy and unconvinced. I rarely asked anyone to put sunscreen on my back.

I remember coming home from a cottage when I was 15 after having foolishly napped facedown in the sun. I remember trying to hide my back from my mom and how she cried when she saw my pink and flaking skin.

Sunburns may not seem like something to cry about, but to my mom they are life and death. Her brother died at 30 when melanoma spread from his skin to his bones. He was a father, a husband, a brother and a son, and his loss was devastating.

Because of our family history, my mother takes my sisters and me to a specialist every year to have our fair skin and moles checked for melanoma. The doctors cut my first moles off when I was 16, the same age they cut the first off my uncle. But my pathology came back clean.

In the 10 years since that first surgery, I've had seven moles removed. The last three came off in June, but this time only two came back clean.

Two weeks after the surgery, when I was happy to be free of stitches and able to play rugby again, the phone rang. It was my doctor. "One of your biopsies came back positive for melanoma," she said. "We need you to come back in for a margin surgery."

I was stunned, too stunned to ask any of the hundred questions that could have helped me through the next three weeks.

In my fear and ignorance I turned to the Internet. And the first thing I read, the very first line I picked to read out of an entire article, said that widely metastasized melanoma is incurable, with survival rates of six to 12 months. I felt reasonably sure this was not the same as my condition, but it was far from what I needed to see.

As I read on, my fears were calmed but made more real. What I had was technically Stage 1 cancer, real cancer. From what I could tell, the survival rate was 95 per cent.

Leading up to my surgery I felt good — 95-per-cent good. But something was off. When I thought of the future the images were less clear. The home I would own, my job, my family, my friends — they appeared faded and grey. My future had become a probability.

As I lined up to check in for my surgery, my health card squeezed in my sweaty hand, I began to feel that other 5 per cent. I started to make plans for my death.

If they told me I had six months, I'd stay put. I'd have all my friends and family come to me. I'd make them laugh and smile and eat and drink with me for every second of every day until the end.

If they told me I had a year or more, then maybe I would travel. Maybe try to fall in love. Perhaps even try to write a book, to create something that would last after I was gone. But I quickly nixed the book idea. It was horrifying to imagine I might spend the last days of my life creating something that could end up being terrible.

I know that many people who die of cancer are young. But when it was me sitting in the cancer ward, surrounded by the scared and tired faces of people whose hopes and dreams hang on the words of their doctors, it became all too real. I was torn between grief and rage. I thought the hospital should have a room full of cardboard boxes and cheap breakables so I could harmlessly smash my way through my frustration.

When I went in to see my doctor she almost laughed at me. She had caught my melanoma early. "I've never seen one so small go bad before," she said. I burst out crying in front of her and the surgeon and the nurse.

I was awake during the surgery while a six-inch slab of my back was removed. The surgeon talked with me the whole time, as if nothing weird was going on. As if people having large chunks of their flesh removed to save their lives was entirely normal.

Why did my body do this to me? Why does it grow these clusters of suicide cells that need to be cut off? It's difficult knowing that for the rest of my life, I'm going to have to remove pieces of myself so I can keep living.

For now I'm clear. There was no trace of melanoma in my margin surgery. Most of my fears were overblown. But I have checkups every six months now, instead of once a year. And there are things I'm more afraid of than cold, greasy hands.

Doug Howat lives in Toronto.

Illustration by Tanitoc.