A 40-year-old US woman who has had nine different skin cancers removed has revealed that every single time she went to get them checked, she had initially thought they were harmless blemishes.
Acne, bug bites, and even ingrown hairs were the TikToker’s immediate concerns, but doctors revealed each time they were all basal cell carcinomas (BCC) — and now she has a warning.
Molly was 35 when she became aware of her first cancer. She had gone to a dermatologist to check on an itchy, occasionally bleeding, bump on her leg, but the doctor dismissed it as normal and asked if she had any other concerns.
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She then decided to ask for some pimple cream to treat a persistent spot on her top lip — but she was surprised to find it was this query which would pique her dermatologist’s interest.
“I have this little, tiny pimple on my lip that is just slow to go away,” Molly said.
“It kind of had the tiniest little whitehead, so I picked the whitehead off, and it bled a little, and I put some pimple cream on it, and then it got a little bit better, but then it came back, and it just won’t go away.
“(The dermatologist) gave me the look. If you know, you know.
“He leans in, and then he’s like, ‘That’s probably skin cancer, I mean, we’ll biopsy it, but from me to you, that’s skin cancer’.
“It was scary, and kind of like mentally traumatising.”
Molly tried chemo cream which made her ill “24/7”, and had six-hour Mohs surgery — a micrographic surgery technique used to treat skin cancer — to remove it. But nearly two years later, BCC returned to the same spot, and would require an eight-hour surgery to be removed, leaving behind major scarring.
“I went in for a spot on my leg and got like 75 stitches in my face instead. I just wanted a pimple cream.”
But Molly would come to discover eight more BCCs in the next five years.
She spoke through tears in a video following the latest BCC removal of a skin cancer on her chest, explaining how she usually takes antianxiety medication for the procedures. If she doesn’t, she suffers panic attacks during the treatment.
“It just feels like I’m going to have to always be doing this,” she said.
“Physically, it’s really hard on me to hear the pulling of your skin, and you can hear the cutting.
“I just keep thinking how many more times am I going to have these?”
Molly said skin cancers all look different, but hers have always appeared harmless.
“My skin cancer looks like little red pimples or bug bites that won’t go away, sometimes, not always, it itches, and sometimes, not always, it flakes, and it will have the slightest like opal sheen to it,” she said.
“Each time it has been like, is it a pimple, is it a bug bite, is it an ingrown hair, is it something else?
“They all came back as skin cancer.
“I even had one that looked like a scar, like a scratch that had kind of healed into a tiny scar, like if you banged your shin on a table.”
BCC is the most common and least deadly form of skin cancer, with just a 0.05 per cent mortality rate. But, it also heavily increases the risk of repeatedly developing more BCC, and developing squamous cell carcinoma, or the most dangerous form of skin cancer, melanoma, according to the Kelowna Skin Cancer Clinic.
“(BCC patients’) risk of developing Melanoma is more than three times higher than the general population,” the clinic said.
Molly, who has also spent $US4000 on skin treatments for scar reduction following her top lip surgeries, said: “Non-deadly skin cancer can still be painful, disfiguring, and really expensive.”
Left unchecked, or depending on external factors, BCC also has the potential to develop into an even more horrific experience for patients.
One netizen shared her mother’s experience with BCC in Molly’s comments section, noting her BCC in its advanced stage had “metastasised and gone through her skull, and now is attaching to her brain.”
Molly urges anyone who is unsure about the bumps or spots on their skin to immediately visit a dermatologist.
“Get checked”, “Make sure to see a (dermatologist)”, and “Better make an appointment ASAP,” Molly warned her followers.
She also advised people visiting their OBGYN to ask them to check their labia, and people visiting their hairdresser to ask them to point out any spots or bumps on their head, should they see any.
“That’s actually how my mum found out she had skin cancer,” she said.
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