Stephenson says, 'What you see is what you get'
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| Eileen Stephenson of Princeton looks over a brochure about skin cancer. Stephenson has had basal cell carcinoma skin cancer since 1968, in part due to sun exposure and perhaps, radium treatments she received as a child. (BCR photo/Kevin Marsh) |
Editor’s note: This is the final installment in a series on skin cancer.
PRINCETON — Eileen Stephenson of Princeton isn’t going to let a little thing like skin cancer keep her from living her life.
Stephenson, 80, has lived with basal cell carcinoma, the most common form of skin cancer, for nearly 40 years. Since then, she’s had around 12 bumps removed from her face and body.
But Stephenson’s story doesn’t stop there, and interestingly, it didn’t start with exposure to the sun, either.
A dangerous treatment
Around 1939 when she was 13 years old, Stephenson suffered from acne on her face. Her mother took her to a dermatologist — and that in itself was no easy task.
“My mother took me by bus because she didn’t drive a car, to Cincinnati, Ohio, to a dermatologist,” she said.
Stephenson said the doctor gave her radium treatments for her acne by placing a heat lamp above her face. After 67 years, she doesn’t remember a lot about the treatments or how many times she received them.
20 years later
She does however, remember a troubling diagnosis she received in 1968. By that time she’d raised five children and was living with her family in the Chicagoland area. One day she noticed a pimple on her face that just wouldn’t go away.
“Every time I’d put my make-up on, I’d knock it, and it would bleed. I couldn’t get it to stop. I went to the doctor, and he asked me about the radium treatments, and I said, ‘Yes, I had them,’” she said.
“He said, ‘I hate to tell you this, but 20 years later, those radium treatments have given you skin cancer,’” she said.
The doctor later performed her first surgery and removed the pimple from her face. Though it was smaller than a dime, underneath the skin was a basal cell tumor the size of a half dollar.
Since then every three to five years, she’s had another bump removed.
“It’s just something I have to live with. You stay on top of it, and you have them removed. You can’t let it ruin your life. I’ve got a life to live. I’m going to live it to the fullest,” she said smiling.
Outdoor living
Though the radium probably contributed to her skin cancer, so did her exposure to the sun. Stephenson was raised on the Ohio River in southern Indiana and proudly calls herself a “river rat.” She spent so many days of her youth swimming, boating or sitting out in the sun and even later with her children and husband.
“Even when I was a teenager and didn’t know how to swim, I still loved to be in the sun. I have blue eyes, of course, and light skin, and I would sunburn and peel, sunburn and peel,” she said.
Stephenson estimates she’s had about a dozen sunburns in her lifetime and thought she probably had a burn as a child.
According to the Skin Cancer Foundation, a person’s risk for skin cancer doubles if they’ve had five or more burns in their lifetime, and one blistering sunburn in childhood will more than double a person’s chance of developing melanoma later in life.
Though today you can find Stephenson at the pool or out in her yard with a hat, sunglasses and loads of suntan lotion, growing up things were different.
“Years ago, there wasn’t such a thing as suntan lotion. We used baby oil and iodine. That’s the best we could do at the time to block the sun. How much good it did I don’t know. I doubt it did very much,” she said.
Stephenson said young men and women today need to protect themselves by wearing sunscreen and avoiding tanning beds.
“New technology has changed a lot. What worries me the most are the tanning beds. Why they were ever allowed, I don’t know. I worry about the results, years down the road, that are going to come out of these tanning beds,” she said.
Living with memories
Despite the cancer, Stephenson isn’t too upset about the radium treatments.
“I don’t blame my mother. Cincinnati was probably 40 miles away, and she thought she was doing me a favor. She was doing something nice for me,” she said.
And she makes no apologies for her past, not one day she spent in the sun.
“I don’t regret one bit of it. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. It’s something I’ve had to learn to live with and accept, and I put my make-up on and what you see is what you get,” she added, smiling.
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