After battling skin cancer for more than 20 years, a mother-of-two has bravely decided to share graphic photos of her daily fight with the deadly disease in hopes of stopping others from ignoring their tans and sunburns.
Like most people, Judy Cloud remembers getting pretty painful sunburns as a child, but they never really slowed her down.
As a young woman, Judy even tried out tanning beds here and there, though she was never a religious tanner.
“I was never a ‘heavy’ user of tanning beds…once a week for three to four weeks, three or four times a year prior to vacation,” she explained to BuzzFeed News. “It doesn’t take much to do a lifetime of damage.”
Judy never even thought twice about the harmful effects of sun damage until 1995, when she was first diagnosed with skin cancer.
Since then, she’s undergone at least four serious surgeries to fight the disease, all while working and raising her two daughters, ages 26 and 17.
Last September, Judy spent three hours under the knife to remove 23 cancerous spots all around her entire body.
“I had to take two weeks off work because I was to spend the two weeks following surgery immobile, lying on a couch during the day with my legs elevated and lying in bed at night with my legs elevated,” she said in a post on Facebook. “I worried about blood clots and I worried about getting pneumonia, both of which could happen post-surgery with immobility.”
After all this time, Judy considers herself lucky, since most of her bouts with skin cancer have been from basal cell carcinoma, rather than the far more deadly melanoma.
“Far too many people are faced with melanoma, especially more and more younger people,” she said.
Since her last surgery in September, Judy has decided to share candid photos of herself on social media to warn others about the serious dangers of sun damage.
“I hear too many people say that they feel better about how they look after they go to a tanning bed or after they bake in the sun for hours on end,” she wrote. “Look at the pictures. This could be you. Anyone can get skin cancer, even people who have darker skin tones.”
