Katherine Ryan diagnosed with cancer for the second time in her life
Katherine Ryan has been diagnosed with cancer for the second time in her life.
The 41-year-old Canadian comedian revealed the news on her Telling Everybody Everything podcast, explaining that she was originally concerned about a mole on her arm but was told by a doctor that it was nothing to worry about.
She then paid £1,000 to have it removed at a “fancy private place in South Kensington”.
The TV star admitted that she wasn’t confident the NHS would remove it for her, but said she also faced challenges when it came to private healthcare: Ryan spent £300 on a seven-minute consultation and was incorrectly told the mole was not cancerous.
She said: “He gave me the news that I wanted! I think it’s really easy to take a diagnosis of you’re healthy and walk away, you go, ‘Great, I’m healthy’ and you don’t think about it again because that is the easiest news.
“But the mole kept changing. I know a lot about melanoma. I had a melanoma as a very young woman, stage two on my leg, and I’ve spoken about that before.
Ryan continued: “Even that didn’t look traditionally like melanoma to me. Fair enough, it had some discolouration and asymmetry and a bit of black and red. It was a flat mole, not that bad and not that big, but it was stage two melanoma so that was bad.
“I had to have full general anaesthetic and surgery to have a golf-ball size of my leg because…if you know about melanoma, you know it’s a deadly form of skin cancer and it spreads quickly.”
Ryan added: “I just thought that this mole wasn’t right. It’s on my arm. I showed pictures of it on my social media. I went in and I wanted the doctor to remove it and stitch it up in a straight line. But even when he looked at it, he was like, ‘not melanoma, totally fine, I will do the shave and send it away for histology and if there’s any borders that we missed, then we will do the deeper cut’.”
After trusting her instincts, Ryan’s doctor confirmed after tests that the mark was indeed melanoma and would require further surgery.
Ryan continued: “He rang me today and it did come back as melanoma. Early melanoma. The doctor was shocked and told me I need to go back.
“It just feels crazy to me, like what could have happened if I hadn’t been my own advocate – and I will continue to be my own advocate. If I hadn’t pushed, if I had taken that good answer the first time and walked away, then I would have had melanoma just growing and spreading in my arm. And I would say, ‘Oh no, the doctor says it’s fine, it’s fine,’ and god knows how far that would have gone.”
It’s the second time Ryan has fought the disease, having been diagnosed with Stage 2 cancer in 2004.
Speaking on the subject previously she said: “The cancer wasn’t that serious. It wasn’t into my lymph nodes, I didn’t have to have chemotherapy.
“It did recur, but it was easily dealt with. I feel like I was really lucky just to get that lesson, that little smack on the arse of “Hey, wait a minute. Listen to your body, here.”’
