Cancer

Back to HomeFeature Article - April 26, 2012 Snow Road woman’s experience highlights skin-cancer dangerBy Gena Gibson, courtesy of the Lanark Era

Denyse Cooper remembers one particularly bad sunburn she suffered the summer after she graduated from Grade 8. It was painful and memorable, but once it was gone, the Snow Road-area resident thought nothing of it.

Nothing, that is, until she noticed a small mole about the size of the tip of her baby finger on the back of her arm. The mole was raised a little, and then started to drain now and then, bleeding with little cause. Cooper went to her doctor in Smiths Falls in September of 2010, and while he thought it was nothing dangerous, he suggested that she have it taken off.

She had it taken off Sept. 10, and the results came back as a six-millimetre malignant melanoma, the worst of the skin cancers. She went to a surgeon in Kingston at the end of October, who took a larger piece out, and that December, the 47-year-old started a round of intravenous treatments that continued off and on until last October.

“I was off of it and started feeling really good,” Cooper said. “Then I got four bad headaches.”

A scan at the hospital in Smiths Falls revealed a five-by-five-centimetre tumour in her head, at the left front side. Cooper explained that while Interferon, the drug she was taking, works throughout the body, the brain blocks it out.

On Dec. 7, Cooper had her first surgery in Kingston. Doctors there gave her the impression that if the tumour returned, the prognosis wouldn't be good – and it did grow back on the left side, along with a new one on the right side of her head.

She said Kingston doctors suggested she go to Ottawa hospital for CyberKnife treatments. The CyberKnife is a robotic radiosurgery system, according to the Ottawa Hospital, using image-guided software and a three-metre-long robotic arm to deliver hundreds of beams of high-dose radiation directly to a tumour with “surgical precision” from all angles.

The tumour is bombarded with radiation, it says, while the delicate healthy tissue surrounding it is spared.

Following her last treatment on Tuesday, April 17, Cooper said, the small tumour on her irght side keeps shrinking, and the tumour on her left side seems to be gone. Fluid had collected in that area which needed to be drained, but doctors said no tumour was evident.

“I'm very hopeful,” Cooper said. “I keep jumping hurdles.”

That attitude is a big change from January, when Kingston doctors had told her she might have four to six months to live.

“Kingston seemed to be more concerned with my quality of life,” Cooper explained. She said she was under anesthesia with her first Ottawa surgery, but was awake with her second one to make sure she would still be able to move her left side following the brain surgery.

Cooper's message to parents, and everyone else, is to make sure they apply sunscreen from childhood through adulthood.

“I'm white as a ghost,” she admitted, saying that she has never tanned as an adult, but those sunburns as a child increase your risk of skin cancer.

She also stressed the importance of watching moles and spots on the skin, and going to a doctor immediately if anything seems suspicious.

“Anything they've got on them, insist that it comes off,” she said. “If you could have seen how small mine was....”

Being on the back of her arm, the mole was difficult to notice.

“I happened to turn and wipe my arm,” she said, and then noticed some draining of the mole – while looked as though a paring knife had jabbed it on the edge. “And it wasn't black – melanoma is known as black. Around the edge, it was gray-looking.”

Cooper hasn't been able to work in her jobs at Lanark Lodge and at the Perth and Smiths Falls District Hospital since she began treatments. She had planned to go back following her round of Interferon treatments, but then the brain tumours appeared.

As a regular at the Snow Road Snowmobile Club fundraiser breakfasts, as well as a sister-in-law to club president Ruth Wark, club members decided it was a natural fit to host a breakfast in Cooper's honour, with the funds going to the Canadian Cancer Society to help treat malignant melanoma.

The cancer society allows donations to be designated to specific cancers if there is current research being done – the funds from the Snow Road fundraiser will be directed to skin-cancer research, which includes melanoma.

The breakfast is set for Saturday, May 5 at the clubhouse at 1106 Gemmill Rd.