A melanoma unrelated to sun exposure began as a black smudge on the ball of Tim Roberts’ right foot.
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Not that the Yackandandah resident realised initially, his wife Phillippa noticed it first.
“I didn’t even know it was there,” Mr Roberts, 53, said.
“I’d had a shower, thought I hadn’t cleaned it properly.”
But the smudge had a tiny sore that didn’t heal, so soon he visited his doctor and then later a specialist.
“Quite literally I was told by the specialist I had to drop everything and get this thing removed,” Mr Roberts said.
“So there was no mucking around in terms of what had to be done. This thing in the space of six weeks went from apparently nothing to 2.2 millimetres deep.”
The black smudge turned out to be an acral lentiginous melanoma, an aggressive form of skin cancer.
According to Melanoma Institute Australia, acral tends to grow on the palms of hands, soles of feet or under the nails and accounts for about 3 per cent of all melanomas.
The institute said a genetic study as part of the Australian melanoma genome project found such melanomas were not linked to ultraviolet radiation, unlike melanoma of the skin. Every year in Australia, up to 420 people are diagnosed with acral or mucosal (on internal surfaces) melanomas, out of about 14,000 cases overall.
Mr Roberts said he had “a sizeable chunk” taken out of his foot and then a major skin graft and a long recovery process of 12 weeks on crutches and twice-weekly wound dressing.
“It’s on the ball of my foot, so where they put the skin graft in, you can’t put any pressure on it, you can’t walk on it, it’s just a real tricky spot to have it appear,” he said.
“Fortunately it was caught in time, I didn’t have to have any sort of drugs or radiotherapy or anything like that.”
Still recovering from his surgery in September, Mr Roberts wanted to increase awareness of acral lentiginous melanoma.
“You constantly hear this talk about skin cancer and melanoma by sunlight, but there is this other type that’s out there,” he said.
“Everybody I tell is like, ‘Wow, I didn’t know there were melanomas that were not sun-related’ – I was exactly the same.
“If it brings this to the attention of one person and makes them go and get checked, that gets the message out. If you ignore it, unfortunately this one is very aggressive.”
