Sunny SA and the Big C

Yeah, I know “white South African in the heyday of apartheid” doesn’t exactly cause a rush on the Kleenex, but bear with me please, for in those long-ago summers of chlorine, green hair and tiny red mites on hot slasto around swimming pools, there was something else.

There was a lack of sunscreen. We had cocoa oil for the brave, and Factor 5 if you were fair (like me), and your mum screaming over the neighbour’s wall that you needed to get out of the sun now, upon which you’d jump back into the pool until she dragged you home by your freckled ear.

There was the holiday with friends where I fell asleep on the beach and no one realised, because everyone thought I knew what I was doing – I was 15 – and I got so sunburnt I vomited.

Then there was walking home from school at 2pm, and spending break sitting outside in the treeless wasteland, because nobody was allowed down by the bluegums, for in the shade they would surely smoke and fornicate.

There was sports day and PT in the blazing sun, and the non-athletes stayed out on the grandstand because they had to, even when mad dogs and Englishmen had long since retreated into bunkers. Oh, the sunburn; the sock-tans; the girls who cut out the paper initials of the boys they liked and shadow-sunburnt them onto their thighs. Oh, the fun.

So that then is why I was diagnosed with “a little bit of cancer” on my face last week. That then is why I had carcinoma frozen off my forehead, with liquid nitrogen. It’s called cryotherapy: extreme cold blasts the damage caused by the sun.

Right now I’m blistered and darkly marked like an ugly sister, but the dermatologist says it’ll fade to white within a few weeks. If not, back I go for surgery.

And that’s why I’m popping up like the cancer fairy to say check that skin, check it regularly, fair or dark. Keep covered up. Wear hats, sit in the shade, lather on sunscreen, and then do it again in two hours.

But mostly make your kids do it because, although I have not had a tan since I was 16, the dermatologist says it was childhood damage that caused my “little bit of cancer,” caught early.

Still: cancer.

Jennie Ridyard