It was right in the corner of my left eyelid (the picture above is not my eye, but that bubble you see on the eyelid is exactly what mine looked like). My first skin cancer showed up when I was 38 years old. (These burned feet and other photos of sun burn are on Ellen Degeneres’ website.I don’t have photos of me all burned up as a kid.) It seems ridiculous now, but it was what we did then, when no one ever talked about skin cancer. We wouldn’t come in until our skin was so red it seemed radioactive. We would slather our bodies with baby oil to “speed the burn” then make sure we were out in the sun during the most intense hours of the day – 10 a.m. Getting a tan in the summer was as important to us as eating ice cream or going to camp. We thought sun tans made us look “cool” (our word for “hot” in those days). It takes my skin a very long time to tan, but I can burn in half an hour.Īpart from my DNA, I’m getting skin cancer now because I spent so much time tanning and burning when I was a teenager and young adult. My ancestors were northern Europeans from Scotland and Poland, which means they were fair skinned and likely to burn if they spent too much time in the sun. Why do I get skin cancer so often? In part, I’m genetically pre-disposed. And every time, I’ve had to have it cut out or burned off in order to control it.