Woman shares shocking selfies showing recovery from skin cancer surgery in warning against sunbeds and not using suncream
‘Look at these pictures. This could be you. Anyone can get skin cancer’
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Your support makes all the difference.A woman has shared a series of shocking selfies and photos of her body while recovering from skin cancer surgery to warn people of the dangers of excessive tanning through sunbeds and not wearing sunscreen.
Judy Cloud, 49, from Indianapolis, told Self magazine that since she visited to doctor in 1995 to have what she assumed was a scab checked out, she has been through surgery four times to have various areas of basal cell carcinoma cancer removed from the skin on her body and face.
Ms Cloud suffers from the most common type of non-melanoma skin cancer, and has a history of skin cancer in her family, but said she did not believe it would affect her. She would use sunbeds four times a year in her 20s and would regularly spend too much time in the sun without adequate protection.
“I never thought I would show myself on Facebook without makeup on let alone without makeup on and looking so injured. But, I’m old enough now to know this is needed,” Ms Cloud told the magazine.
Ms Cloud shared a series of painful-looking photos on her Facebook page following her latest surgery last September to demonstrate the severity of dealing with skin cancer. Since then they have been shared more than 100,000 times.
The pictures show the cuts made to her legs, arms, chest and face needed to remove the cancer, while Ms Cloud describes how she spent two weeks unable to shower or move, needing to keep her legs elevated, during the immediate recovery.
“I hear too many people say that they feel better about how they look after they go to a tanning bed or after they bake in the sun for hours on end,” she wrote. “Look at the pictures. This could be you. Anyone can get skin cancer, even people who have darker skin tones. Cancer doesn’t discriminate.”
Ms Cloud’s last surgery took three hours and she had 23 areas surgically removed in one day either by incision or by lazer, and many parts of her face have been left numb due to the cancer affecting the nerves in her face.
“The wounds on my face are healing, but what you can’t tell from the pictures is that the scar on my mouth is from a cut that had to go into the muscle above my mouth because the cancer was into the muscle,” she wrote in the post. “Four weeks post-surgery, I still can’t open my mouth all the way.
“What the pictures also don’t show is the numbness I now have on my forehead and scalp. Notice the lovely 2-1/2” scar on my forehead? From that point to approximately two inches up my scalp, I have no feeling. My doctor said that a nerve was in the middle of the cancer so he had to move the nerve.”
Ms Cloud added that while she was able to have a skilled plastic surgeon perform her surgery, some of her scars will not heal – and at the end of it all her treatment cost $26,845.87 (£18,917) in medical fees.
“I’m really hoping the thought of going to a tanning bed no longer sounds quite so attractive to you,” she wrote at the end of her post.
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