Cancer scare reminds that sun is not fun

Published 9:42 pm Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Dad’s face went blank when I told him Mom was going to be scraped a third time.

He was in the waiting room at an Everett clinic, working on a crossword puzzle. My sister and I were stationed in the innards of the medical building, where our mother was undergoing procedures to remove a cancerous growth on her nose.

It was the first time my folks, who live on Camano Island, had a cancer scare.

Mother had basal cell carcinoma right where her glasses rest. My sister came from Ellensburg to tote the folks and I joined them for a couple of hours.

Dad, 88, looked so cute. He was wearing one of his baseball caps, not the one with the photograph of his face, or the one with a Camano Crab, but the one with his pin from 50 years of service with the Shoreline Volunteer Fire Department and a patch from his first Army post.

He had a granola bar in his shirt pocket, behind one length of his suspenders, in case he got hungry.

Mom, 85, had been as healthy as Jack LaLanne. She rested in a chair after each peeling, waiting for a microscopic analysis to see if she had to have more tissue removed.

You don’t go home until the cancer is gone, they told her, and she said she felt like she was in good hands.

I thumbed a pamphlet. It read, “Overexposure to sunlight (including tanning) is the main cause of skin cancer, especially when it results in sunburn and blistering.”

What kid didn’t burn at the beach a few times?

The threat of skin cancer never stopped my husband, Chuck, and me from tanning in commercial beds once a year before we take a sunny vacation.

It’s the old theory — hit the tropics with a base tan and you won’t burn while touring ruins or whale watching.

We are going with friends in May to Puerto Vallarta. While we waited with my mother, my sister, Vicki, showed me the fading scar on her chest from her own skin cancer surgery a year ago.

Before she retired, she often visited a tanning bed at lunch. Now she keeps sunscreen in every room of the house.

“You have to in Ellensburg,” Vicki said.

She said while watching the Oscars, two of the female announcers compared tans, saying they must be using the same number. That meant they are getting spray tan applied or wiping on tan from a tube. One of my favorite shopping channels just did a special where you got 20 tan towels for under $20.

For me, those lotions stink — and turn me orange.

Chuck and I think that having bad sunburns when we were kids has already determined whether or not we’ll get cancer. We aren’t the only ones ignoring warnings about the danger of tanning beds. Whenever we go to use the sun machines, others are waiting before we get there and when we leave.

Though I am peeking at advertising coupons for various tanning salons, seeing Mom having cancer surgery was a wake-up call.

Not a rough shake of the shoulder, just a soft alarm still ringing in my ears.

Columnist Kristi O’Harran: 425-339-3451 or oharran@heraldnet.com.