Surviving skin cancer: How one Canadian woman battled melanoma

Mary Lynn LeBlanc first noticed a mole on her left shoulder about seven years ago. At first, doctors didn't find anything worrying about it. But in 2020, she noticed it looked different and grew to the size of a nickel.

Mary Lynn LeBlanc first noticed a mole on her left shoulder about seven years ago.

At first, doctors didn't find anything worrying about it. She said the mole didn't have any distinguishing features. Initially about the size of a penny, around 2019, she noticed it looked different and grew. It was round with bumpy edges. The top part was reddish-brown.

"I call it going rogue," the 70-year-old retired teacher from London, Ont., said in a video interview with CTVNews.ca. "It didn't hurt, but it was irritating because there was a little bit of a piece, like a skin tag, that was there. It had changed a little bit and I needed it to be looked at."

Since she was new to the city and didn't have a family doctor, she went to a nearby walk-in clinic.

The dermatologist did a biopsy and she was diagnosed with nodular melanoma, a less common but one of the most dangerous kinds of skin cancer, in January 2020.

She got surgery to remove the tumour as the melanoma had spread to her back but it returned, though smaller. After removing it, the cancer spread to her left lung and she had to get surgery again.

"The melanoma hides and it's talked about as being very sneaky, and so it can come back and it metastasizes," she said. "It's a disease that definitely is difficult to identify at first and that's why you have to be extra careful."