A former sunbed enthusiast who was given a mere year to live after being diagnosed with cancer has issued a stark warning about the dangers of skin cancer, stressing it’s not just about “a mole being removed.”
Jak Howell, only 21 years old in June 2021, was confronted with the grim diagnosis of stage three advanced melanoma. The cancer had aggressively spread from a small area on his back to his groin and chest within a mere two months.
At that time, Jak was frequently using sunbeds up to five times a week for 18 minutes, a practice he started at 16. Despite undergoing two operations to excise tumours from his lower back and leg, the attempts were unsuccessful.
After enduring a year of immunotherapy, Jak received the all-clear in December 2022. Now, he is determined to shed light on the “later effects of mental health having cancer”.
The Swansea-based content creator shared: “It’s kind of surreal. I speak to my friends and say it almost feels like it didn’t happen. When they told me the surgery hadn’t worked and the last [immunotherapy] treatment was a final push, I’d been told if that didn’t work I’d have a year to live.”, reports the Mirror.
“No doctor could make sense of how it was so severe at my age. I was asked ‘did you use sunbeds?’
“I said ‘yes, quite a lot’. Doctors then said ‘we can’t physically put it down to that but it is 99.999 per cent chance that is the reason it’s so severe’ As soon as I knew that I knew that I had to get message out about using sunbeds.”
Jak was at home during the lockdown in April 2021 when he noticed a “really itchy” patch on his back that started to bleed. He recounted: “I emailed my GP just before I left for work because you couldn’t do a face-to-face appointment due to lockdown, and by the time I got to work they had replied and said ‘I don’t want to see you, go straight to the hospital’.
“For me that was immediate alarm bells.”
After undergoing a biopsy at Singleton Hospital in Swansea, Jak received news 10 days later that the skin was cancerous.
He explained: “At first, I didn’t expect it to be anything seen people with melanoma have it cut off and move on. It snowballed from there and got bigger and bigger.”
Despite being given the all clear following successful immunotherapy treatments, Jak’s mental health suffered. He said: “Recently more than ever I’ve been trying to push the late effects of mental health having cancer.
“That’s another reason I’d love to push the stopping of using sunbeds. I think for years I’ve tried to tell people ‘don’t use sunbeds’ but I want to push the message now that skin cancer isn’t just a mole being removed, it’s so much more complex than that.
“I always say when they first told me I had the all clear you could have heard a pin drop. I think you build yourself up to not make it that far.
“I think for me it was the most difficult part because my life was lived in hospitals and I knew I was always safe in a hospital, in a sense. Now that I had to just go home, I was on my own again.
“It was the most severe shock to the system I had ever experienced. My mental health declined fast at a pace I didn’t think I’ve ever experienced before.
“I couldn’t cope with what was going on and life by myself. It caused me severe distress, my anxiety I don’t think will ever settle back to a normal level.
“I was able to pull myself out of depressive episodes it put me in, but it was a lot of therapy before that was reached. Men don’t speak out as much, I encourage everyone to speak.
“A problem shared is a problem halved. The biggest problem is you take it on yourself.”