If I end up dying of amelanotic melanoma, acne will have played a key role. That's right, in my case, acne can literally be a life-threatening condition.
I first started worrying about this lesion last year when I started thinking about melanoma and the concept of the "ugly duckling." I didn't know what this was and why it wasn't going away, but I knew I had had some acne cysts develop on my back before and thought it might be related to that. I'd ignored it for many months/a couple years, and it hadn't seemed to really change.
Here was the lesion last year in early August:
http://postimg.org/image/5v42kuord/
http://postimg.org/image/vs1mnxz0d/
As someone with many things on my skin that never went away, I didn't want to make anything of it. I had just said, "fuck it." I have had what I assumed were hypertrophic scars all over my chest for years (they came in as cysts and just never went away...just stopped being irritated), and on the back of one of my shoulders and a small one on one side of my jaw. And right now, I also have a small pink-red bump with some smaller red bumps inside it on one of my temples that never goes away, either.
But this is in a location where I don't have weird shit like that, and I don't recall the exact location of the prior acne cysts I've had on my back. What mainly caught my attention about this lesion, though, was the color. It looked more freshly inflamed than the others, and stayed that way. I would expect the lesion to at least darken or fade a little bit, rather than staying that bright red color. Then I'd expect the dark/dull red thing to stay there for basically the rest of my life.
It was strange to see a mark retain such a bright red color for so long.
And now I'm really panicking because it changed sometime since last August. After all that time, it suddenly changed to flesh-colored. I mean, if it had done this a couple years ago, I would have thought nothing of it. But now? After all this time? And it seems like it might be a tad bit more elevated than it was before (it was almost flat before).
http://postimg.org/image/64ck1x6ef/
Does this pattern sound remotely similar to anything anyone else has dealt with?
Anyway, don't ever let anyone tell you acne isn't life-threatening. It is. It literally is.
