In late 2015, just after Gemma Cottam returned from a vacation with her fiancé, she noticed that a mole near her left temple had grown slightly larger, so she decided to go to the doctor to get it checked out.
After conducting tests on this spot, the doctors diagnosed Cottam with stage two melanoma. Further tests revealed that Cottam’s cancer had already begun to spread into her lymph nodes. The cancer was already at stage three.
That December, Cottam underwent surgery to have her affected lymph nodes removed. Although the doctors were successful in removing the affected parts of her body, there were other complications.
The operation ended up causing nerve damage, leaving Cottam with limited movement and sensation in her left ear, the left side of her neck, and her left arm. She is continuing to undergo physical therapy, in hopes of regaining motion in her arm, but progress has been minimal. Cottam also returns to the doctor regularly to check that her cancer has not returned.
Although Cottam’s life has returned, in part, to a state of normalcy, much of her life has been unalterably affected. She and her fiancé had planned to get married soon, but after she had to take nine months off from work to treat her cancer, the couple no longer has enough money to proceed with their wedding plans.
Cottam and her fiancé are taking the situation as it comes, but because Cottam’s experience has been so drastically life-changing, she decided that she wanted to share her experience online, in hopes of helping others avoid a similar fate.
That’s when Cottam opened a public Facebook page, Mela-no-more.
There, she shared photos of the horseshoe scar on her neck following her surgery and wrote posts to warn women about the dangers of sunbeds. She thought that by sharing her own experience candidly online, it would raise awareness of the melanoma and its causes to others who might be putting themselves at risk.
Unfortunately, Cottam’s good intentions only backfired.
Her page began to be flooded by insults and hate messages, both in the form of comments and direct messages. She had “people messaging [her] saying [she] was an attention whore and that [her] cancer wasn’t real and that [she] was trying to scam people.” Others told her she was “ugly and that the scar made [her] look better.”
The negative response made Cottam decide to leave her public Facebook page for a while, but she’s still passionate about raising awareness of skin cancer: “I want to inspire cancer sufferers to stay positive.”
