Although 3rd or 4th generation American I’m ethnically ~50% each English and German. So kinda pale as white folks go. I’ve also lived 45+ of my 65+ years in earshot of the ocean in warm weather climates.
I’ve had, no exaggeration, dozens of skin cancer excisions. Dating back 40 years. One more set for ~2 weeks hence. And literally hundreds of precancers frozen off at the incipient stage.
I’ll quit glorying in being out in the sun when I’m dead. And not a day before.
Whatever finally kills me, it ain’t gonna be skin cancer.
What do you mean, “all”? Face recognition is important, to be sure, but it is also combined with gait recognition, body shape, and other biometrics, and of course monitoring of all electronics (mobile phones and computers, natch, but I hope you don’t have any RFID cards or even paid for anything with a bank card, etc.)
My father’s dermatologist referred to “harvesting” my father’s skin cancers. The ones that are associated with total sun exposure aren’t very dangerous if you keep on top of things. Melanoma is associated with burning, not with total lifetime exposure. A tan may be protective. (And some sunscreens probably make matters worse, by selectively protecting you from the rays that hurt and not the rays that trigger melanoma. UVA and UVB, although i didn’t recall which is which.)
I don’t especially like sitting in the sun. But the cult of sunscreen is overblown, imho.
When I was quite a bit younger, I used to tan on purpose (in the sun, not a tan bed) so that I wouldn’t burn later or get weird tan lines, and because I preferred the look. But after a decade or so, I realised it was damaging my skin, and stopped. It sucks because I really hate wearing suncream, and I enjoy lying in the sun.
However, my husband burns easily and still gets sunburnt pretty regularly, which is why I worry about him.
Does it really not bother you, having cancer and needing treatment so many times?
I, also, hate sunscreen. But since i also dislike sitting in the sun, i can generally avoid it. I have a lot of very lightweight long sleeve shirts and a huge floppy hat that i refer to as “sunscreen”. I used to have very lightweight pants, too (both the pants and the shirts are SPF rated), but sadly, those have worn out. And it’s harder to buy pants than shirts.
Nope. This stuff has a name in common with the serious cancers, but that’s about the extent of the commonality. Assuming diligent maintenance.
Every 6 months the dental hygienist scrapes the accumulated gunk off my teeth and every 6 months the dermo scrapes the accumulated malfunctioning skin spots off. Both accumulations are simply a consequence of normal living. Yes, I brush my teeth regularly. And yes, I manage my sun exposure to not get peeling burns. Beyond that I eat what I want when I want it with no concern for it being possibly cavity-genic and I spend time outdoors in the sun with no concern for it being possibly skin cancer-genic.
I did not move to a world famous sun & beach & boating resort to live hidden indoors, nor to wear an SPF burkha.
If solar radiation got to the point where peeling burns happened after just a few minutes of unprotected exposure, well, I’d have to reevaluate my stance. But so far that’s not the case.
TBF, almost all of the US is hotter in summer than the UK and gets a lot more sunshine, so there’s less temptation to lie out in it.
The problem here is that if it does get sunny, you’ll see a bunch of people going out to enjoy it, exposing areas of skin that aren’t usually exposed. They start off super-white, and after a few hours turn into cooked lobsters.
Outdoor shops usually have SPF rated clothing, but if I want to cover up I wear loose linen trousers. They probably aren’t strongly protective, but that’s fine for the UK’s wimpy UV indexes.
According to Reddit, you can burn in under 5 minutes in Australia, and everyone is fanatical about sun protection as a result. They also claimed you can burn sitting in the shade, from reflected sunlight!
My husband’s cancer treatment was not the easy experience yours sounds like: the area had grown quite large, since his doctor stupidly dismissed it as eczema after I convinced him to get checked, so it had another 2 years to grow before finally being caught. According to him it was quite traumatic, since they had to cut out a large patch of skin on his neck and pull together the gap with stitches, and they also did some kind of burning, which he could smell.
Although he had a local anesthetic and couldn’t feel any pain, his body had some kind of shock-like reaction afterwards that made him shaky. Plus the wound took a long time to heal, and due to the excised skin, he could only turn his head in one direction for a long time.
Maybe yours weren’t as bad since they were caught earlier?
Yes. Skin cancer is a bit like crabgrass. Pulling up a patch of crabgrass that’s an inch across is far easier and far less disruptive to your lawn than letting it spread runners 4 feet in every direction, and then trying to pull it up. Every day it’s sitting there unnoticed or ignored, it’s growing outward.
The largest patch I’ve had removed was ~1cm square. Most are 3-4mm across. We just keep knocking back the precancers by freezing, then excising the ones that sneak past us.
Your husband had a pretty much worst-case experience because it was so large. And probably decades in the growing. That’s usually a matter of the patient neglecting themselves completely. Darn shame he was proactive but his doctor was asleep at the switch.
Yes, despite having pale skin, i simply don’t worry about UV exposure when I’m as far north as the UK, or Denmark. I dunno, should i worry in the very south of the UK? I probably don’t need to.
That’s absolutely true. I’ve gotten mild sunburns that way.
Yeah. My father’s first diagnosed skin cancer was about a centimeter across, and that was kinda a big deal, and left a big scar. The others were smaller and need have a bunch removed with nothing to show afterwards except some ordinary bandaids, if that.
The spot they’re removing for me next weekish is 3mm. The removed area will be larger & leave an even longer mark of course. But the actual volume of diseased tissue is pretty minimal.
It was on the back of his neck, so he couldn’t see it himself. And he did go to get checked after I did some googling and thought it looked like skin cancer. Unfortunately, the doctor was an idiot and didn’t bother to ask him how long it had been there without much change (months or years, I can’t recall, but a long time anyway).
Of course you should. If it’s a sunny day in summer and you aren’t tanned already, exposed skin can burn in 30 minutes, especially any parts facing the sun. Not just in the south of England, either. I remember years ago me and my now husband went for long a bike ride in May, on the first hot day of the year, and we both got burned on the backs of our hands because they were horizontal holding the handlebars. Later, my husband peeled a huge patch of skin off in one go; it looked like a flimsy and gross glove.
However, there is zero chance you are going to burn sitting in the shade, or through a closed window, or any time after September and before April (unless you go skiing, maybe?)
Right. My father died from melanoma - but in his case, it was in a part of the body that had never been exposed to the sun. THAT was the serious kind. 3 months from diagnosis to death.
I live in New England. The climate is similar to northern Germany, but we are a lot further south. I always have “a tan” for purposes of hanging out in Denmark. Also, i don’t like to sit in the sun. I’m sure i could burn if i sat for a long time in direct sunlight in June, but in fact, i visit regularly, never worry about the sun, and have never gotten a sunburn that far north.
I’ve had a sunburn that peeled once in my life. It was horrible. It was from a day on the beach near Boston, and i should have reapplied sunscreen.
We went to a beach while we were in Connecticut, and I did not reapply sunscreen after swimming and nothing happened. I think the fact we didn’t arrive until after lunch helped, but also the sun isn’t as fierce in August, and as a bonus, the sea was far warmer than last year when we visited in June.
My worst burn was on holiday in Gran Canaria. It’s deceptively temperate, and the sunscreen must have washed off in the sea. It was so painful I couldn’t bear to put any clothes on my shoulders the next day and had to stay inside.
But nowadays I’m trying to avoid too much sun exposure, not just avoid a burn. It’s difficult because my biggest hobby is gardening, and I also take my daughter to the park regularly, so I spend a lot of time outside on weekends.
Seriously, there is a time when elderly-enough skin grows back real slowly, and a person still sprouting fresh lesions like a New England farm sprouts rocks in the springtime will find themselves in a bit of a pickle.
There will come a time to taper off the Sun for sun’s sake, and I’ve probably secured a blotchy future for myself. Oh well.
