may is melanoma awareness month :: DermTech

Hi, I’m Ginny, and I’m a melanoma skin cancer survivor. 🖤  

May is Melanoma 🖤 Awareness Month and I feel deeply humbled to be alive to spread awareness. Did you know that if melanoma is caught early there is a 99% survival rate, but if it spreads distantly it drops to 27%? 💔 That is a very sobering statistic. 

In 2013, I had my hands full with a brand new chubby baby boy. While I was pregnant with Charlie, I noticed a new freckle on my chest. I chalked it up to a random pregnancy skin thing. However, 3 months after he was born I kept noticing this freckle and it perplexed me why I didn’t remember it. 

• Was I imagining that it was changing in shape and color?
• Is it the size of an eraser now? 
• Did it always feel a tiny bit raised? 
• Am I a sleep deprived mom that is getting myself worried over nothing?

Always trust your gut. I emailed my doctor and they got me in the next day to have it checked. I was already dismissing it, but I needed a doctor to confirm that it was nothing. Well, the dermatologist decided it did warrant a biopsy. They photographed the mole, took a sample, and got it off to the lab.

Let’s pause here and zip from 2013 to 2021. Here is a shameless plug (AD) for DermTech. Did you know there is now a test as simple as a sticker that lifts cells? This test from DermTech looks for melanoma at the gene level, 10,000 times closer than the traditional biopsy care pathway. I haven’t had the DermTech Melanoma Test, but I’m so happy for this technology because it’s not only a way to find melanoma even sooner, but it’s far less invasive! I have so many scars from biopsies over the years. I can walk out of the dermatologist office with 5 new scars every 3-6 months. 

When I was informed I had melanoma, my heart dropped and I thought I was not going to see my babies grow up. I was only 32 years old, I was fearful, sad, and incredibly disappointed in myself for frequenting tanning beds during college. However, I was given the gift of early detection. It was stage 1a, which required a wide excision surgery to remove all the cells, but no other treatments were needed. While melanoma is very deadly, it is also very treatable if caught early. That is why I tell my story over and over. Melanoma takes mothers with young families and I want to be sure that doesn’t happen. It steals other lives too, but I know that the majority of you reading this post are moms around my age. 

Will you take a pledge ✋ to get a skin exam with a dermatologist?  @DermTech is launching the #StickIt2Melanoma campaign which makes a skin exam far less invasive if a sample is needed to test for melanoma. Join the fight against melanoma. Make the pledge today to get a skin exam with a dermatologist at Dermtech.com/pledge. If I had waited, statistically speaking, it’s very possible that I wouldn’t be here today to watch my babies grow up. I’m so thankful for the gift of life that I have been given thanks to early detection of melanoma. Hey, I made it to 40 and I’m not ashamed of my age, I’m grateful.