Alice is totally fine, but last year she was diagnosed with a skin cancer after getting a mole check. She’s not a particularly big ‘in the sun’ kind of person (she could certainly give Bella or Edward from Twilight a run for their money in the paleness stakes), so if it happened to her… well, maybe it’s time to get YOUR skin checked?
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It’s 2026 and by now you’ve hopefully had some time to relax and unwind from that end-of-year insanity. If you’re like many Kiwis, you might have even spent a decent whack of time outside, playing at the beach, soaking up the sun.
Now, I am not here to make you feel guilty at all for enjoying the sun and having a good time, and I certainly don’t want to give you something new to stress about, especially if you’re on holiday, but, now also seems like a good time for me to ask you to organise something that’s very important.
The one thing I want you to do this summer is to get a skin or mole check.
Last November, it occurred to me that I hadn’t had my skin looked at since before I was pregnant with my son – who was somehow already two-and-a-half. I’d been doing them regularly (particularly since I discovered The Mole Doctors who are in Auckland’s North Shore – the cost of the consultation is covered by the Southern Cross Health Insurance I have! Amazing!) and have otherwise been pretty good about my skin.
I wear sunblock on my face most days, I haven’t spent a lot of time out there sunbathing and I’ve never even been near a sunbed (which is actually quite surprising that I didn’t in my late teens/early 20s when everyone else seemed to be doing it AND one of my favourite things is to be warm). I haven’t been perfect though and can think of a few pretty bad sunburns I’ve had (particularly the time I used expired sunblock when I was 17 and had lobster red legs to show for it – and, a burn I got in Fiji where I’d applied sunblock too hastily and had missed an area on my leg that somehow looked exactly like an old woman riding a vespa with a scarf blowing behind her).
Anyhoo, I made an appointment. I’d been looking at a patch on my face that seemed a bit different, and maybe a mole on my neck that I couldn’t remember really noticing before. The doctor started doing a thorough check, but asked if there was anything I was concerned about – my face was fine, but when he looked at my neck, he immediately knew it wasn’t fine.
“Yip, no, that’s skin cancer,” he said.
Thankfully, it wasn’t melanoma, but it was skin cancer. His suspicion was that it was a nodular basal cell carcinoma, which generally don’t spread to other parts of your body and aren’t a particularly scary diagnosis. But I’ll admit, still hearing the word cancer, is enough to put your stomach in a loop.
I thought my mole looked a bit different, which is when you should always make an appointment. Mine looked darker to me, and on closer inspection it was no longer just an even light brown coloured mole, it now had three little very dark circles within it.
A week later I was back at the Mole Doctors where he numbed the area with local anesthetic (to be honest, that was really the only slightly sore part of the whole procedure), cut out the mole (with good margins to ensure all the cancer was removed), then sewed it up with internal stitches and then glue on the external skin.
The only WHAT moment was taking the bandage off after a week and forgetting that he warned me the glue was purple! He did a terrific job – it was just a faint line, about 2cm long, even after only a few weeks. Now, a full year on, only in the right angle in the right light can you see the vaguest of white shiny lines.
A biopsy came back confirming the margins were clear and yes, the diagnosis of a nodular basal cell carcinoma was correct.
Skin cancer is the most common cancer in NZ, and our rates of it are tied with Australia for being the highest in the world. Sadly, NZ has the world’s highest death rate from melanoma with 350 New Zealanders losing their lives to melanoma each year – that’s higher than the road toll last year.
Each year in Aotearoa an estimated 90,000 non-melanoma skin cancers are diagnose, while about 2,800 invasive melanomas are diagnosed.
It’s important to keep an eye on your skin – particularly any existing moles you have and to look out for any changes. Like mine, you might notice something like a weird pattern appearing, or a mole appearing darker. Or, maybe you might have a sore that doesn’t seem to be healing, a small, red pale or pearly lump, or a dry scaly area that is shiny and pale or bright pink in colour.
Of course, just because you have any of these symptoms, it doesn’t mean you have skin cancer, but it is so very important to get any changes checked by your doctor or a specialist.
If it’s been a while – or maybe never, please, please make an appointment to get checked out (if you have health insurance, check out where it might be covered!).
