Binarynomad

During Kristens orientation, she found a very disturbing fact. Statistics show that (1 in 2) people in Australia get some form of Skin Cancer. This is a pretty sobering fact for me, you see I grew up in Cyprus (nice sunny greek island) where I ran around most of the time bare backed. I always hated (and still do) sunscreen because it was so slimy and oily, but I only remember getting really burned a few times in my 10+ years there. One price I ended up paying was that I have a large number of freckles and moles (compared to most Americans). Then a few years ago during a checkup, a doctor mentioned to me that he saw a few spots he was concerned about. We decided it would be best to remove them and do a biopsy, and much to my happiness, nothing was found. Well the other night I noticed one very dark mole on my leg that got me concerned and I figured I should to the smart thing and have myself checked out. Since skin cancer is so prevalent here, I wasn’t too surprised to see a number of “Skin Cancer Clinics” while driving around, so today I picked one to visit in Surfers Paradise. I didn’t know if they could do anything for me since I was not covered by Australian health care, but it turns out that a full body check was only ($60 AUD), so I dove in. After a full body check, the doctor said I was pretty healthy and that most of my spots are pretty normal. She did find (3) that she wanted to check out, so she gave me a local anesthetic and then cored out each of the spots. I am to call back in a week to see what the results are (wish me luck).

Over all I’m very glad I decided to have this checkup, it only cost me a total of ($160 AUD which is only $117 USD) for a better piece of mind.

BTW: nowadays, they have non-oily (not really, but close enough) sunscreen which I wear anytime I play in the sun. Take care of your skin, it is one of the most abused organs of your whole body.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 9th, 2006 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Australia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.