Before the wrestling tournament in 2020 Initially, Samuel Gee, then 15 years, carried out a skin screening to make sure she did not have a circular worm that could spread to others. During the inspection, the judge drew something to GEE.
“They’re like, ‘What is it?’ I was, ‘I don’t know.’ They were,” Well, we’ll let you fight this time, but you have to check it out. “
Gee visited a dermatologist and learned that the birthmark was cancerous. Shortly after he was diagnosed with stage 3 melanoma.
Now, for nearly 20 years, Sam Gee has been healthy since healing melanoma at the age of 15. He is studying biomedical engineering in college. (GEE FAMILY OF MEMBERS)
“I was really surprised,” he says. – I was a shock.
A changing place
Although Gee had a mark on his back as long as he could remember, he began to look different for a few months before the wrestling tournament.
“It almost seemed to dry,” he says. “I had a birthmark since I was young, but over the years it gradually (became).”
Still, he thought little about it. At the time, he was fighting another unusual change in health. About a month before the tournament, Gee, he noticed a furry bump in the upper right leg.
“I had serious swelling,” he says. “I thought it is a groin hernia.”
According to Mayo Clinic, inion hernias occur when some intestinal spreads through the abdomen near the groin and may look like a bump. A visit with a pediatric surgeon revealed what it was.
“He was, ‘It’s not a groin hernia, but you probably swollen the lymph node,” Gee recalls. “He’s like, ‘It’s just from puberty. … come back in a few weeks if it didn’t disappear.’
Then Gee visited the doctor about a birthmark and performed a biopsy, which revealed that he had melanoma. He spread in place, causing a swollen lymph node in the leg. Doctors considered the MoHS surgery when the skin is cut in a layer to remove transparent margins, but gee first needed immunotherapy.
At the same time, the school moved to the Internet as the Covid-19 pandemic offs began. This helped GEE control some of the symptoms he experienced from immunotherapy.
“I’m a little tired. It’ll be nausea,” he says. “It was a very everyday thing. Some days I would feel fantastic. Some days I would feel like I needed to quit, or I was really tired.”
2021 January Gee was undergoing surgery and melanoma and lymph nodes were removed. After surgery, he completed a few more rounds of immunotherapy before finishing treatment.
“I was not ill,” he says. “It was when they said, ‘Okay, you cured.’
Melanoma
Melanoma usually occurs in “older white men”, and the average age of a patient with metastatic melanoma is 60, says Dr. Hussein tawbi. But this occurs in younger populations.
“For example, the causes of cancer aged 30-40 are, for example, melanoma,” says Texas University MD anderson Cancer, a Personalized Cancer Therapy Director of the Melanoma Medical Oncology Division of Tawbi, Texas University in Anderson Cancer University.
But “children’s melanoma is quite rare,” he adds.
Since being diagnosed with melanoma, Sam GEE has become a “full sunscreen protection cream”. (GEE FAMILY OF MEMBERS)
People often suffer from skin cancer, including melanoma, due to sun exposure. Tawbi urges people to use sunscreen regularly in childhood, as the exposure to the sun in adolescence and in a young adult city increases the risk of metastatic melanoma later.
“This is a very direct connection between the sun’s exposure and the higher frequency of melanoma,” he says. “We recommend people to start using sunscreen as early as possible.”
He also calls people to visit a dermatologist regularly to check the skin.
“Early diagnosis is still the main one,” says Tawbi. “If you find melanoma early enough, it is still cured only during surgery.”
Experts talk about skin cancer ABCDES to help assess whether they are worried about skin clay or tag on the skin. Any of these qualities should encourage you to visit your doctor:
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A: Asymmetry when clay is not the same on both sides
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B: A wall when the exterior looks uneven or uneven
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C: The color when the shade of the birthmark changes becomes lighter, darker, white, red or blue
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D: Diameter when a birthmark is larger than the size of a pencil eraser
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E: Evolution when clay changes or looks different
Surgery can cure 95-99% of early melanomas, tawbi notes. For those with advanced stage melanoma, stage 3 or 4 immunotherapy can often extend life. From around 2010 The checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy – a treatment that uses the body’s immune system for better anti -cancer – has changed the treatment of melanoma.
“(They) have changed absolutely everything and began long-term survival for patients,” says Tawbi. “The survival of melanoma has actually increased 10 times.”
Before the inspection point inhibitor, the median survival time for metastatic melanomes such as GEE was seven months. He now adds 72 months.
“It’s quite impressive,” he says. “The only way we have attracted better survival for patients in the last 10 years has been done only during research.”
“All Sun Cream”
Before diagnosing cancer, Gee thought he would seek electrical engineering or informatics. After his experience as a patient and see how technology improves medicine, he is engaged in biomedical engineering.
“Seeing all those cool cars and making them intolection into biomed engineering,” he says.
Today it is a “complete sunscreen cream”.
Since being diagnosed with melanoma for 15 years, Sam GEE has always been using sunscreen to protect himself. (GEE FAMILY OF MEMBERS)
“I’m now about sun protection,” he says. “I hope people start wearing a sunscreen. … That’s what I want to bypass is to wear sunscreens.
Gee also expects his story to help other young men with melanoma feel less isolated.
“You really don’t see it too much. When I first started, they were surprised. They didn’t know who they gave me to the doctor. You just don’t see it,” he says. “So rarely… Teenage men get melanoma and can cause stress.”
Cancer at a young age provided a new insight into what is important.
“I have a new approach to life,” he says. “It is very important that we take care of ourselves, and I think a lot of young people ignore it.”
This article was originally published today.com.com