Comedian Katherine Ryan announces she's been diagnosed with skin cancer
Katherine Ryan has announced that she's been diagnosed with skin cancer, making it her second time with the disease.
The comedian had been speaking on her Telling Everybody Everything podcast when she talked about getting a mole removed that she'd previously been discussing.
She said: "I've had a mole on my arm - that I told you about last week - removed.
"The only reason that they agreed to remove it was because I went to a fancy private place in South Kensington and I paid them a grand.
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"I don't know if on the NHS they ever would have removed this mole."
Ryan explained that she also had issues with seeing a private doctor, as she paid for a consultation with a doctor who told her that the mole on her skin wasn't cancerous.
"He gave me the news that I wanted!", the comedian said, before warning about the dangers of assuming that things would be fine even if you know something is wrong.
"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."
Ryan went on to explain that she still didn't feel at ease, especially as she'd already dealt with a skin cancer diagnosis in the past.
"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.
"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."
Ryan said she 'just felt like this mole wasn't right', and wanted a doctor to remove part of it, but was told that it'd be 'totally fine'.
She said: "I went in and I wanted the doctor to remove a bigger piece of 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'."
Further testing confirmed that there was more to the mole that needed attention, and Ryan wondered 'what could have happened if I hadn't been 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," she said.
Joe Harker