A dad-of-two has been left with a gigantic scar at the back of his neck after having to remove huge portions of it because of skin cancer. The 37-year-old is now advocating for awareness about the disease and its aftereffects by going public about his experience.
It all started when Ryan Glossop went for a routine checkup to the hospital. A friend of his had recently died due to skin cancer and he wanted to be safer than sorry. That checkup happened last November. Unfortunately, the doctors found a seemingly harmless mole as cancerous.
He underwent surgery to get rid of it. But the first one wasn’t enough and so he had to undergo a second operation. However, even then the results from his scans came back abnormal. The doctors then performed a third surgery on Glossop’s neck to remove some of the scarring and the extra cancerous tissue on the neck.
When the hospital scanned him after that, they found that a fourth operation is needed to be done. Therefore, in May he had a large chunk measuring 40 cm x 8 cm taken out from the back of his neck. To compensate for the loss of skin, the doctors had to cut some layers of skin from his legs to replace it.
From Australia, the dad-of-two finally got rid of cancer after the surgery in May. Talking to Yahoo News Australia, he admitted that the whole ordeal was quite scary. At first, he only worried about removing cancer but afterward began to worry about the leftover scars from the four surgeries as well.
He is now trying to spread awareness that melanoma surgeries are swift and the scars imperceptible. Ryan has encouraged other people to go for a skin checkup if they see any new freckle and mole popping up. The father is currently screening both of his children for the risk of them developing skin cancer in the future.