How to Cope with Melanoma

In this video by TV360, Jill tells you how she coped after being told she had melanoma, a form of skin cancer.

The moral of the story is. That physical beauty or good looks is not worth it in the long run if you're sitting across a table from a guy who says to you “I'm sorry to tell you but the biopsy says you’ve got melanoma”. I was just about to take my youngest of two children to college for a senior year. And I thought “Well this can’t happening to me, you know, I'm 52 years old” I mean, I kind of thought melanoma meant a death sentence. And so I was completely terrified. I noticed one day on my face there was a mole that kind of looked a little different to me and the plastic surgeon did the surgery because it was, you know, right on my face. The surgery went all across my eye to my cheek bone and around my ear and he literally took out a piece of my face. And made me looked hole and took out enough of the borders for me to survive and hopefully be cured. Well I had a really hard time with the fear of dying in the beginning. I went to a psychologist and really talked it out. The emotion that was involved between biopsy waiting for the results and getting the results can be summed up in one word “Terror”. It was “Sheer Terror”. I was so angry at myself. I was angry at myself. I was terrified about my kids who would also baked from time to time in the sun. You know, there was no awareness in those days. So I felt both frightened, I felt guilty and I felt angry that there was just no precaution taken by me for myself or for my children for that matter. You don’t leave your house any season of the year without sunscreen on. Whether it's your hands and arms because you're driving with your window open and your arm is you know sitting on your car door or you know, you must have sun glasses on when you're in the bright sun because there’s actually melanoma of the eye which I've learned since then. Look if you’ve satins on your whole life and been silly about being protective from the sun and you’d get away, you know, without ever getting melanoma in your life you're lucky. I have a lot of great pictures of how I looked in my wide outfits all young and tanned and on top of the world in Miami Beach. And you know what? It wasn’t worth it.