Atlanta woman still carries emotional scars from skin-cancer battle

By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter

(HealthDay News) -- Angie Moore noticed one day that a mole she'd always had on her left leg looked a bit different.

"It had always been the typical brownish mole and all of a sudden it started developing a black tone to it," said Moore, 41, of Atlanta , who is managing director for constituent relationship management with the American Cancer Society.

This was in July 2006, and she wasted little time taking her concerns to her doctor. His response: He removed the mole immediately. "He knew from the way it looked it was going to be a problem," Moore recalled. "He removed the mole in-office and took some wide margins around it."

Two days later, Moore learned that the mole tested positive for advanced melanoma. It had grown deep, and had advanced out to even the wide margins taken by her doctor.

Moore was told she needed to have surgery as soon as possible "because they usually catch it sooner than that," she said.

"That's when it got very real for me, when I went into the office, because he was saying this is very serious, we want you in surgery within the next two weeks," Moore said. "I went from a stage of, 'Well, how bad can this be?' to 'Wow, this is really scary.' I went through a period of shock."

X-rays of her lungs and some blood testing revealed that the cancer hadn't spread, so Moore proceeded to deep-tissue surgery to remove all the surrounding cancerous tissue.

"They took a football shape and went all the way down to the muscle," she said. The surgery left a scar about 7 inches long that resembles a shark bite. Her doctor had warned her about that ahead of time.

"He told me, 'I know you're concerned about your leg and how it looks, but we have one goal and one goal only. We need to get all of this out of your body,'" Moore recalled. "They went very deep and very wide and I have no more cancer."

The surgeon also removed a lymph node to test whether the cancer had spread. It hadn't. A subsequent scan taken two months later also revealed no cancer. "The baseline was, I was clean," Moore said.

Even though she has remained cancer-free, Moore is still troubled by her illness.

"The state that I am in now is much more intense to me than when it was when I was told I had melanoma," she said. "You worry about it coming back. I would love to get to that point where I'm not worrying about it all the time. Everybody tells me it [the fear] will go away with time, but I haven't even hit my two-year mark."

Moore also has a new appreciation for protecting her skin against the sun, and she's become a bit of a nag to her friends who sunbathe.

"I tell them that I used to bake myself just like you're doing, and look what it got me," she said. "I'm very much more aware of how I need to take care of my skin because I'm terrified of going through this again."

Copyright © 2008 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.