I’d had that mole on my right cheek since I was young and only when my mother noticed it had gotten bigger did I go to a dermatologist. I was living in Rome, Ga., at the time. The doctor looked at it, numbed my cheek and sliced a tiny piece off. The nurse stuck a Band-Aid on it and off I went back to work.

That was on Monday. By Friday, I had forgotten about it. The spot had scabbed over and was beginning to heal.

Funny, but I can still remember the feeling in the pit of my stomach when the nurse called me at work that day.

“We need to schedule you to come in so we can remove the rest of your mole.”

“Sure,” I said, phone tucked on my shoulder, fingers going 90 to nothing on my keyboard. “I can come some time next week.”

After all, I thought, I was a busy person. I had things to do, people to see.

“No, ma’am, we can’t wait until next week. We’ve got you scheduled to come in next Thursday morning.”

OK, I thought. This is going a little overboard. So I asked the question I had been trained to ask: Why? We think it’s melanoma, she replied.

You could have knocked me over with a feather. I knew melanoma was skin cancer. I just didn’t know how serious a skin cancer it was. But thanks to the Internet and the wonderful world of search engines, I soon knew: “Most deadly form of skin cancer” still sticks with me.

I had all weekend to fret. And I did. My father had died of cancer in 1987. I had lost my brother to kidney disease in 1994. It was 1999, the eve of a new decade. I couldn’t have cancer. But I did.

I went that next Thursday and had a decent size chunk of my right cheek removed. I equate it to cutting the bad part of an apple out – you want to make sure you get all of the bad and leave nothing but clean apple. When the doctor was done, I was missing a piece that looked like, well, a slice of apple. He dropped it into a jar and off it went to the pathologist. He put tiny, tiny stitches in, slapped a butterfly bandage on it and sent me on my way.

My face was worse for the wear. I had a scar about 2 and a half inches long running long ways up my cheek and my right ear felt like it was now on the side of my face, kinda like a Mrs. Potato Head with the wrong part in the wrong place. I went back the following day, had my stitches removed and found out I did indeed have melanoma.

I went home and cried. A lot. I called my mother in South Carolina and she cried. A lot.

Then I commenced to learning all I could about melanoma and other types of skin cancer. It paid off, too. Less than three years later, in 2002, I had another mole that began to look odd. This one, on my left shoulder, had also been there since I was young. But it didn’t look right. I was living in Milledgeville, Ga., at the time and went to my dermatologist there. Short version: She snipped, they tested, I went back, she cut a wedge out of my shoulder, sewed me up and sent me on my way – another melanoma gone.

In the ensuing years, I have had moles removed from virtually every part of my body. I have been lucky in that they have all been either melanoma insitu – meaning they have not spread – or had not turned into cancerous cells.

I still maintain a vigil over my skin. I get checked regularly and I try to stay out of the sun for prolonged periods of time. But being fair-haired, fair-skinned and blue-eyed is like a trifecta when it comes to skin cancer, you know?

As I said, my father died from cancer. One uncle and one aunt on my mother’s side died from cancer. My best friend’s mother died from bone cancer that was the result of breast cancer. One of my mother’s best friends is a breast cancer survivor. Odds are, more than a few people reading this are either cancer survivors, know someone who is or has lost someone to cancer.

It’s amazing to me that we can put a man on the moon but we can’t find a cure for cancer. We can genetically engineer food and clone animals but we haven’t been able to figure out how to stop cancer in its tracks. We can build machines that can destroy villages in a split second, but we can’t come up with a way to eradicate cancer cells. We can spy on people from thousands of miles away but we can’t get cancer cells to give up their awful secrets.

But there will come a day when we will. I doubt it will be in my lifetime. But that’s OK. To know there are people searching for answers and solutions gives me hope. And it should give you hope.

Thanks to events like Relay For Life, the gap between cancer and a cure is narrowing every year. But we need your help. Relay For Life will be held May 14. I urge you to get involved somehow. You might think your involvement won’t matter. But to me and the millions of other people affected by cancer, it will.

Won’t you help us find a cure?



Patricia M. Edwards is the publisher of The Randolph Guide. She can be reached at (336) 625-5576 or by e-mail at pedwards@randolphguide.com