A Youthful Mistake

I am calling this blog entry My Youthful Mistake. Wow, am I really beyond youthful? I don’t think so, but I’m sticking with the title anyway.

When I was about 13 I started lying out in the sun for purposes of tanning. My friends and I spent a lot of time just lying there in the sun’s rays. I could actually get a pretty good tan, if I do say so myself. The summer after I graduated high school I quit tanning. I think part of it was that I simply lost interest in getting a good tan, part of it was that I did not like the idea of turning into a prune at the age of 40, but to tell you the truth, most of it was that I started worrying what the sun was doing to my skin cells. I swear that is true.

About three weeks ago my boyfriend, Chris, saw a weird-looking mole on my back. He quickly mentioned it but we were both kind of too occupied to worry about it right then and there. We both sort of forgot about it. Then about two weeks ago Chris noticed the mole again, in fact, he thought it looked a little different than it did before; like it had changed its shape a little. Monday the mole started to itch. I asked Chris to look at the mole again and he said it was definitely bigger. He said it looked “spongy”. The thought of a growing, spongy mole on my back completely grossed me out.

Wednesday I went to the dermatologist and he removed the mole and some of the surrounding tissue. The biopsy has come back as “suspicious cells”. I’m not sure what that means, but the word “suspicious” just does not sound healthy.

I think tanning is for morons. I ought to know, I used to tan. But never again. Now I use sunscreen whenever I go out into the bright sun. If I am tanned in the middle of the summer, or any other time, then someone must have sold me a bad bottle of sunscreen, because there is no other way I’m going to get a tan. What bothers me is; I figured all of this out just a bit too late to save a portion of my skin. Hopefully I wasn’t too late from turning into a 40 year-old prune.