work on Monday, and if I wasn’t sunburned, I didn’t have a great weekend,” Langill recalls.
May is Skin Cancer Awareness Month, and Langill is now speaking out as part of a campaign to get people to protect themselves from the sun and have their skin checked regularly.
Her melanoma diagnosis came in September 2016. A biopsy found cancer in the lymph nodes near her hip, and doctors eventually tracked the cancer to a “really small mole on the outside of my right calf,” Langill said.
She soon underwent surgery to remove the cancerous lymph nodes as well as the original tumor on her calf. Langill now bears a 6-inch scar down the front of her hip bone, from where they took out the lymph nodes. “They also took about a golf ball out of the side of my calf that looks like I have a shark bite now,” Langill said.
It’s not unusual for someone to have advanced melanoma without any clue of their cancer, said Dr. Melanie Palm, a dermatologist in San Diego. “I recently had a three-month
