Deborah Hutton, 58, has battled recurrent skin cancer for decades. With her latest surgery to remove two basal cell carcinomas from her face, the former model and Australian media personality shared dramatic photos on Instagram (below) adding that she’s feeling “extremely grateful” they got it all.
“It’s a very brutal shot, it’s confronting, and I thought, people need to see this, so I just posted it,” she told “A Current Affair”.
Read MoreA Wake-Up Call: Get Your Skin Checked
Hutton hopes the photos will serve as a wake-up call to those who have put off getting their skin checked by a dermatologist.
“To look at the area around my nose prior to surgery, nothing was visible to the naked eye,” Hutton, a Skin Cancer Foundation ambassador and host of “Find Me A Beach House” said in her post. “Only my dermatologist flagged it months earlier, so don’t stuff around with your health!”
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Hutton is no stranger to skin cancer. She had her first bout with it 20 years ago. Then in June 2011, she was diagnosed with an infiltrating basal cell carcinoma on her upper lip and had surgery to remove it. Her third and latest skin cancer was detected by a biopsy by her dermatologist. This time, two cancers were detected.
“The Harm Was Done Years Ago”
“I was born in the early '60s,” Hutton told Mamamia. “I'd jump on the bus to go to Bondi [beach] and getting burnt was matter of pride. I can still smell the scent of Hawaiian Tropic …baking ourselves in coconut oil and frying our skin unbeknownst to the damage we were doing.”
“You'd blister and peel and think 'Oh, great now I won't peel again this summer,'” she recalled. “Just stupid stuff that we thought was okay at the time. The damage multiplies over the years until you find it too late."
“Now I protect myself but the harm was done years ago and will be around for the rest of my life.”
Dr. Cecilia Larocca, a dermatologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, recommends checking skin for changes once a month and remembering the acronym ABCDE as a checklist
Skin Cancer Checklist:
Doing regular self-checks on your skin is important to find skin cancer early. If you're high-risk, it's especially vital. Dr. Cecilia Larocca, a dermatologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, recommends looking at your skin once a month for anything suspiciousand using the acronym ABCDE as a checklist:
- Asymmetrical moles: if you drew a line straight down the center of the mole, would the sides match?
- Borders: irregular, jagged, not smooth; can also stand for bleeding
- Colors: multiple distinct colors in the mole
- Diameter: larger than 6mm, about the size of a pencil head eraser
- Evolution: This may be the most important, anything that is changing over time such as gaining color, losing color, painful, itching, hurting, changing shape, etc…
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