your life HEALTH
The Dark Side
of Tannin g
Before you work on your tan over the
summer, ask yourself, “Is it worth
dying for?” More than 1 million
Americans will find out they have skin
cancer this year, and the number of
women under 40 being diagnosed has
doubled in the past few decades.
There’s no doubt that we're paying
the price for our obsession with the
sun. As these young moms learned,
skin cancer can sneak up on anyone.
BY NANCY RONES
I thought skin cancer only happened to much older people.
As a teenager,
Heidi Popp
liked to be
Heidi Popp
AGE
Aubrey, 1
Crystal Lake, Illinois
KID
tan year-round. She’d
bake in the sun without protection during
the summer and hit
the tanning salon t wo
or three times a week in the winter—she even worked there while
in high school. “I knew tanning wasn’t healthy, but I figured that
if I did get skin cancer, it wouldn’t be until I was older,” says Popp,
now the mother of 1-year-old Aubrey. She and her husband had
even talked about opening their own tanning salon.
Her view quickly changed last summer after a visit to the
dermatologist. For a couple of months, she’d had a flesh-toned
pimple on her neck, and it started becoming irritated and
sometimes bled. The doctor immediately had it biopsied. When
he called with the results, she was shocked—so shocked that
cancer was the only word she recalls hearing during that conversation. “I thought, ‘I’m going to die, and how will my daughter
understand why I was so selfish and superficial?’ ” she says.
Fortunately, she had basal cell carcinoma, the most common type of skin cancer, which has a more than 95 percent cure
rate when caught early. Popp underwent Mohs surgery, an
outpatient procedure in which the doctor removes the tumor
and the smallest amount of surrounding skin possible (her scar
is only three quarters of an inch). In the waiting room, she saw
an elderly man with lots of sun spots, who’d had so much skin
removed that his face looked mildly deformed. She told herself
she didn’t want to end up looking like that—and was convinced
that her tanning days were over.
Since her surgery, Popp swears by SPF 55 or higher for herself and Aubrey. “It’s cover-ups and hats with brims for me
from now on,” she says. She also avoids being outside with her
daughter in the middle of the day, when the sun is strongest.
Popp’s doctor warned that she had about a 40 percent chance
of developing another skin cancer. “I’ve got to be smart,
especially since I have another life to think about now—and I’m
expecting my second child in September,” she says.
