Mom’s ‘hairbrush scratch’ turned out to be cancer
It was as serious as cancer.
A United Kingdom woman who blamed her scratch on a hairbrush was horrified after finding out she had skin cancer — which left her with a “volcanic crater” in her forehead.
“I just thought I’d scratched myself or it was a beauty spot,” Rachel Collett, 48, told Kennedy News of the wound.
She reportedly suffers from basal cell carcinoma, a strain of skin cancer “thought to be caused by long-term exposure to ultraviolet radiation from sunlight,” per the Mayo Clinic.
“Basal cell carcinoma occurs most often on areas of the skin that are exposed to the sun, such as your head and neck,” the medical center explained.
BCC is one of the most common strains, comprising 75% of skin cancers. “Avoiding the sun and using sunscreen may help protect against basal cell carcinoma,” Mayo Clinic noted.
The Bideford, Devon, native reportedly first noticed the spot in 2014 and initially believed it was caused by her comb as she had “long hair” that she brushed back all the time.
However, alarm bells went off after the blemish began to scab over. “[The sore] scabbed, the scab would fall off and the sore would still be there,” said Collett, who works at a school. “Eventually it gradually started puckering around it and what I describe as a volcanic crater started dipping into my head.”
She added, “But it kept getting bigger and then the red bit in the middle disappeared and it was just pearly white.”
Alarmed over the snowballing spot, the aghast mom reported to a doctor, who referred her to a dermatologist, Kennedy reported.
It was there that the Brit first learned she might have skin cancer from neglecting to wear sunscreen in her youth. “She was 98% sure when I got there that it was basal cell carcinoma and asked me questions like ‘Did I go on sunbeds?’ And I told her, ‘No,’” Collett explained. “She asked if I used sun cream and I didn’t in my youth because I was born in 1974 when skin cancer wasn’t known about.”
She added: “And because I was olive-skinned my mum would put coconut oil on me, rather than sun cream because she was unaware of the effects of skin cancer.”
When Collett did wear sun cream, she’d only put on SPF 15, which was not enough to protect her during her annual trips to the Greek Islands in her 20s.
Either way, the possibility that she had skin cancer terrified her. “[The diagnosis] was a bit worrying because I’d never heard of it before,” said Collett, who was told it was “very rare” for doctors to see the disease in someone her age as it generally affects older people. They added that she’d likely sprout more BCC bumps in her life like an epidermal hydra.
Her fears were assuaged somewhat after doctors gave her a leaflet stating that it was very rare for cancer to metastasize to other organs.
Nonetheless, surgeons excised the problematic spot in 2015.
“They described [the procedure] as they cut my forehead across, down and across, opened it up like a window to remove the cancer and tissue around it to make sure they’ve got rid of the whole cancer,” Collett said, detailing the procedure.
She said medics “then put it back together,” leaving a massive 4-inch “anchor”-shaped scar. Accompanying photos show the epidermal memento, which looks like an upside-down “T” or a cross burned into the scalp of a vampire.
“It’s the scar that everyone notices,” lamented the parent. “In the school that I work in all the young people say ‘What’s that scar on your head for miss?’”
She added, “It’s affected my self-confidence. I see people stare which makes me feel uncomfortable.
Not to mention that despite getting the spot excised, Collett wasn’t out of the woods yet. During the operation, the mom mentioned that she also had a nearly inch-long mark on the side of her face, which doctors told the patient to monitor.
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