When I heard that song that was made from a guy delivering a commencement speech to a graduating class at some college some years back, I said to myself, “Oh my goodness, if I knew then what I know now!” After giving a bunch of corny one-line bits of advice, the guy says, “Trust me on the sunscreen.” I think it was the last line of the song/speech, like the grand finale. Well, I am here to tell you why.
Sunscreen, are you kidding me? When I was a teenager in the early seventies, we didn’t even know what sunscreen was. I was a lifeguard, and not only did we NOT use sunscreen, we used baby oil to attract more of the sun’s damaging rays. We could not get a dark enough tan, no matter how tan we were, we wanted more sun. Umbrellas on our lifeguard chairs? Ha! Maybe when it’s raining, but to block the sun? Why that’s blasphemy to the ears of the Sun God. I’m not sure why, but some of the female lifeguards would mix iodine in with the baby oil for some reason or another, maybe to make them look even more tan, or red, I don’t really know.
Sunburn, are you kidding me? I got burned so bad at the beginning of each season that I would blister. I figured it was just part of the normal, necessary, and inevitable procedure for toughening up my hide to prepare it for the endless hours of basking in the sun. I am Caucasian, but since I have brown hair and brown eyes, I thought I was immune to this thing I’d heard of called “skin cancer” that blond kids might get when they get older. But not me, of course, bring on the sun. The tanner, the better. Blisters be damned. That’s what Solarcaine was for, and at some point, aloe was added to it. How organic, how natural, a sure cure for skin cancer. Bring on the sun.
I continued to lifeguard summers during college and continued to seek the sun’s rays every chance I got. For spring break, my very best buddies and I decided to head south. Great, this would give me a chance to get a head start on toughing up the hide. All day the first day, we were on the beach in the sun. The next day I had blisters on my chest and on my shoulders, some the size of quarters, and they were the small ones. Looking back now, what an idiot. The guy in the song/speech was right.
Fast forward to April of 2005, my wife notices a funny looking spot almost the size of a dime on the back of my thigh, in a place where the sun doesn’t really shine when you’re seated in a lifeguard chair. The place on my body (that wasn’t covered by my suit) that was least tan, least burnt, and never blistered. So in June, I finally got around to showing it to a doctor, who said, “You need to come in tomorrow because we need to get that biopsied along with the spot on the back of your neck.” The results came back, melanoma on my leg, and melanoma in situ on my neck. Melanoma, that’s the stuff that kills you. Holy shit, I mean, Oh my goodness! A skilled surgeon removed the melanoma lesions with extra wide margins leaving me a huge scar on my leg, and just a small scar on my neck, a very small price to pay for years of absolute stupidity. Melanoma can return along with the grim reaper, so I have follow-up exams every six months. On my first follow up with a dermatologist, I had another melanoma in situ on my left arm. The dermatologist was able to remove that one too. Now, sixteen years later, it seems my wife caught it early enough and the doctors did great since excision appears to have been curative. But … Oh my goodness, if I knew then what I know now, I’d have still been a lifeguard, but I would have used some goddamn sunscreen. But come to think of it, sunscreen may not have even existed then, but it does now, so use it!
RH – HS ’71, BS ’75, MEd ’86, EdD ’83, Web Dev Tech Cert ’03
