She had to push for a diagnosis
Comedian Katherine Ryan has announced she’s been diagnosed with skin cancer.
Ryan announced the news on her Telling Everybody Everything podcast after previously revealing she was getting a mole removed.
She said: “I’ve had a mole on my arm – that I told you about last week – removed.
“The only reason that they agreed to remove it was because I went to a fancy private place in South Kensington and I paid them a grand.
“I don’t know if on the NHS they ever would have removed this mole.”
Ryan revealed she had difficulty with seeing a private doctor as, after paying for a consultation, the doctor told her the mole was not cancerous.
The 41-year-old said: “He gave me the news that I wanted!”
However, she warned about the dangers of assuming that things would be fine even if you know something is wrong.
“I think it’s really easy to take a diagnosis of you’re healthy and walk away, you go ‘great I’m healthy’ and you don’t think about it again because that is the easiest news.
“But the mole kept changing – I know a lot about melanoma, I had a melanoma as a very young woman, stage two on my leg – and I’ve spoken about that before.
“Even that didn’t look traditionally like melanoma to me, fair enough it had some discolouration and asymmetry and a bit of black and red. It was a flat mole, not that bad and not that big, but it was stage two melanoma so that was bad.”
The comedian continued: “I went in and I wanted the doctor to remove a bigger piece of it and stitch it up in a straight line.
“But even when he looked at it, he was like ‘not melanoma, totally fine, I will do the shave and send it away for histology and if there’s any borders that we missed, then we will do the deeper cut’.”
Further testing confirmed that the mole needed further attention, and Ryan wondered ‘what could have happened if I hadn’t been my own advocate’.
“If I hadn’t pushed, if I had taken that good answer the first time and walked away then I would have had melanoma just growing and spreading in my arm and I would say ‘oh no the doctor says it’s fine, it’s fine’ and god knows how far that would have gone,” she said.
This is the second time she’s been diagnosed with skin cancer.
