High Price

The date was January 3, 2001. My husband was on Christmas vacation, so he was taking his off time to build a chicken house. Losing his balance, he fell and broke his left arm. Melanoma cancer was found in the bone. He died on May 28, 2001.

The doctor said that melanoma can begin with a severe sunburn as a child. Sunburn that causes water blisters is especially dangerous.

Recently, I was thumbing through a magazine and came across an article about tanning salons. It was entitled, "The Price of Staying Bronzed". This is what it said:

• As the pale-skin season approaches, consider these stats before signing up for sessions at a tanning salon. Twenty hours or more if indoor tanning  -spread over a lifetime- doubles your risk of melanoma. At 50 hours or more, you've tripled your chance of getting the deadliest form of skin cancer, report University of Minnesota researchers. When they compared melanoma patients with cancer-free individuals, they were able to bust many "safety" myths. The researchers' findings:

1. You can't buy a protective base tan. That glow from the salon won't keep you safe at the beach. Plus, people who got sunburned despite salon tanning were at even higher cancer risk.
2. There is no safe device. Differenct types of tanning beds and booths emit different amounts of ultraviolet A and B radiation, but they all increased the risk of melanoma.
3. It's not just a blond thing. Indoor tanning boosted melanoma risk by the same proportion in everyone, no matter their hair color, age, skin tone, or number of moles and freckles.

The risk comes at a high price.