When Mariena Browning of Pocatello, Idaho, was 22, she was in the best shape of her life and busy thinking about other things: ready to buy a house and start a family with her husband.
Weeks later, she would discover that she had stage 4 melanoma, despite having no moles or marks on her body.
This led to three years of harrowing treatments, which turned her eyes yellow, gave her a nasty colon infection and changed her life forever.
Ms Browning, now 28 and a new mother, wants people to know about the risks they take when they give up daily use of sunscreen, and she wants people to know that you can get melanoma without even having a mole. .
Mrs. Browning was diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma when she was just 22 years old. Only about 22 percent of people diagnosed with this cancer survive five years after diagnosis.
“Now that I know how unpleasant and intense melanoma and its treatment can be, I’m a big advocate of sun protection, using sunscreen, and annual skin checks with a dermatologist, even though mine didn’t present the most traditional”. ‘Mrs Browning, told SELF magazine.
Melanoma is a type of skin cancer that affects the skin cells that produce the brown pigment that gives skin its tan or brown color.
About 1.4 Millions of Americans live with the disease.
Most commonly, people discover they have skin cancer when they develop a strange-looking spot on their skin or when a mole they previously had begins to change shape, color, or size.
Browning was one of the 3 percent of skin cancer patients who do not have a “primary site” that doctors can use to identify their skin cancer.
When detected early, melanoma is easily treatable. But Ms Browning was allowed to grow quietly, spreading from her skin to her lymph nodes, where doctors first found it as a lump on her leg in 2018.
She was initially diagnosed with stage 3, which is an indication that her cancer had begun to spread.
He tried to participate in a clinical trial in the hope that it would work faster than other treatments. Just before she began the experimental treatment, her doctors took her back to check for a new growth in her stomach.
In the time it was delayed, just a few hours, the trial was canceled because it was causing people to have negative side effects, which she called “divine intervention.”
This delay also brought bad news: The new growth in her stomach was cancerous, which officially meant she had stage 4 cancer, even more advanced than originally thought.
That dramatically reduced their survival rate: About eight in ten patients diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma die within five years.
Four days after her new diagnosis, Mrs Browning underwent invasive surgery to remove all the lymph nodes in her left groin, the lump in her stomach and a lump in her neck.
Over the course of her illness, Ms. Browning was treated with chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, steroids and more. This leads to countless doctor visits and sometimes strange side effects.
In November 2018, she began oral chemotherapy, which involved taking 18 pills daily for nine months.
Months later, when she went to the bathroom, all that came out was blood, which “looked like a crime scene” and made her pass out. It turns out that she had contracted a serious bacterial infection that devastated her colon.
“I don’t even have words to express how stressful and scary that moment was,” she said.
He recovered from the infection, but in October 2019 discovered that the cancer had spread to his brain. She then had to receive radiation treatment.
After this, she was given a steroid treatment that made her irritable and hungry and dealt with temporary but alarming liver problems that gave her bright yellow eyes with jaundice.
Finally, in February 2020, he received news that his doctors could not detect any tumor in his body.
He began full treatment in October 2021.
Since this news, she has moved on with her life and finally returned to some of the things she had focused on before her diagnosis.
In June 2023, she and her husband had a baby girl named Kiya.
Kiya was an “absolute blessing” to Mrs Browning, in part because newer cancer patients find it difficult to conceive.
Through it all, she has maintained a positive attitude and wants to use what she has learned to help raise awareness about melanoma among other young people.
“I would still love more than anything to spread awareness about melanoma.” she shared in a 2021 Instagram post, ‘and help women know that even though sometimes the world turns upside down, it is still possible to find happy people and, as my grandfather always says, “keep smiling,” even when you feel like life isn’t fair or You are far behind everyone. the rest.’