‘Is This a Death Sentence?’

A mom of two credits her hairstylist with finding a deadly form of skin cancer on her scalp, after she’d dismissed the spot as a mole.

Michaela Peacock, 35, says she was rubbing her head towards the end of 2024, when she felt a raised patch. When her husband looked at the spot, he told her it looked like a mole, and the pair dismissed it as something she’s had and never noticed before.

But when a friend alerted her that it might be something else, Peacock texted her hairstylist a photo of the spot.

“She said that it looked bigger and darker than when she last saw it, that’s what made me go and get it checked,” Peacock said, according to the Daily Mail. “The fact my hairdresser could say that looks bigger meant it was changing, so she helped save my life.”

When she sought medical care this past January, Peacock says she was immediately referred to a specialist at her local hospital in the English town of Huntington.

“The mole was brown around the edges but really dark in the middle,” Peacock said, explaining, “It was the pigment in it that made the doctors worry.”

Doctors removed the mole, which was discovered to be melanoma. While skin cancer is the “most common type of cancer” in the U.S., according to the American Cancer Society and melanoma accounts for only about 1%, it “causes a large majority of skin cancer deaths.”

“I was shocked when they said it was melanoma. My first thought was, ‘Is this going to end up as a death sentence?’ “ she said. “When you hear the word ‘cancer’ you think of death.”

She shared that when she was younger, she didn’t wear sunscreen, admitting, “I didn’t like the feel of it.”

“I’m very fair-skinned and would never tan, so to get any hint of a tan I’d have to burn first and unfortunately in the past I’ve had some awful sunburn,” said Peacock, who is now awaiting results of biopsies on her lip and stomach and says she’s “terrified” to be in the sun.

“When you get a diagnosis of melanoma, you kind of feel you want to become a vampire,” she said. “I wear SPF all the time now anyway, and on sunny days I wear factor 50, a hat, and sunglasses. I went to pick the kids up from school and even just walking across the playground to get to the shady bit, I could feel the sun on my arms, it makes you so paranoid.”

“I don’t think people think of skin cancer as anything that serious,” she explained. ‘I’ve even had people say, ‘It’s only skin cancer.’ What a stupid thing to say. Melanoma is deadly. It kills people.”

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