Katherine Ryan diagnosed with skin cancer for the second time
Katherine Ryan has confirmed that she has been diagnosed with skin cancer again.
The actress and comedian has announced that she has been diagnosed with melanoma for the second time in her life.
Speaking on the latest episode of her Telling Everybody Everything podcast, the 41-year-old decided to open up about her diagnosis.
Katherine began by sharing that her ordeal started in 2022, when she spotted a mole on her arm, but had to push for a diagnosis for three years.
“The mole kept changing. I know a lot about melanoma, I’ve had stage two melanoma as a very young woman, age 21 on my leg. I’ve spoken about that before,” she explained, recalling: “It was stage two melanoma, so that was bad. I had to have a full general anesthetic surgery to remove a golfball size of my leg.”
“If you know about melanoma, you know that it is a deadly form of skin cancer. It does spread quickly, and I just felt like this [second] mole wasn’t right. 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,’” she detailed.
Katherine continued: “He rang me today and it did come back as melanoma. It’s early melanoma, and he was shocked. He was like, ‘It doesn’t look like melanoma, but it is melanoma, and you need to come back on Monday.’”
The Taskmaster star then went on to reflect on her emotions surrounding her diagnosis.
“It just feels crazy to me, what could have happened if I hadn’t been my own advocate. If I hadn’t pushed, if I had taken the good answer the first time and walked away, then I could’ve had melanoma just growing and spreading in my arm,” she confessed.
“It’s not ideal to have melanoma twice in your life. I obviously have a genetic predisposition. I am someone with type 1, very fair, Celtic skin. I have over 100 moles. That is the criteria. I don’t go in the sun, that’s the thing. I wear SPF all the time. I cover my body, I cover my arms, I cover my face,” Katherine insisted, before concluding: “Every fair-skinned person just needs to be careful about that."
