JOHN MCCAIN: Until eight years ago, it never even occurred to me that one day I’d wind up fighting cancer. That all changed in 1993. I went in for a routine checkup when the doctor noticed a lump on my back. They performed a biopsy and found it was a malignant melanoma. Cancer. It was a shock. But the treatment was fairly simple. They removed the tumor and I was pretty much on my way. I was told, though, that it might not be gone for good. The doctor warned me that once you’ve had one melanoma, the likelihood of having others increases.
CINDY MCCAIN: Looking back, it’s odd, but we didn’t really take the first one terribly seriously. I mean, John called to tell me the tests had come back positive and that they would have to take it out. And I remember crying and being frightened. But since it was a quick, outpatient surgery, it didn’t have that much impact on our lives.
JM: Then, last August, right in the middle of the presidential campaign and the Republican convention, I noticed a spot on my left temple. It had been there awhile. In fact, I’d had my doctor look at it a few months before, just in case, and it had checked out OK. No cancer. But in August, it started to bleed a little, so I went back in. This time the tests came back positive. The lump had rounded the corner, and was now a malignant melanoma. The doctor found another one on my left arm. This time it was much more serious. The treatment was going to have to be more aggressive and invasive than the last time. Still, the doctors were optimistic that we’d caught it early.
CM: That was a really hard, frightening time. We were in the middle of a media circus because of the presidential campaign. There were people around us every minute of the day, and most of the night, a lot of times, and we didn’t have time to talk privately. But I could tell by his face that something was going on. There’s a look he gets. It wasn’t until after the convention that he finally told me what was happening. And even then we didn’t know just how serious it was. They would have to do more tests and remove lymph nodes to see if the cancer had spread to other parts of his body. That was the big fear. One of the worst parts was that our kids first heard about the tumor on CNN. Our 16-year-old daughter called, crying, wanting to know what was going on.
JM: Even though I was a bit scared, as you might imagine, I really spent my time trying to keep Cindy and the kids calm about it. I’m a little bit of a fatalist, given that my life has been full of narrow escapes. But I didn’t want to let it show. My doctors told me we had to act as soon as possible. I was all for that.
CM: John tried his best to lighten the mood, telling jokes. But there was no avoiding thinking about what might happen. The day of the operation was very hard. He was in surgery for about nine hours. In the end, the surgery went well. I remember first starting to feel better when John was coming out of the anesthesia. He doesn’t remember this, because he was still pretty out of it at the time, but he started cracking off-color jokes about his Senate colleagues.
JM: The operation this time was pretty extensive. They removed the tumor on my temple, and because the incision was so large they had to take skin from my neck to cover the wound. They actually stretched skin from my neck up behind and over my ear to my temple and then stitched it in place. Quite an interesting feat–and one requiring a degree of, ah, elasticity I didn’t know I had. Healing from that took quite a bit of time, at least six months. And I recently went back in to have another minor surgery to minimize the scarring. I still don’t have feeling in parts of my face and neck, since it takes a long time for nerve endings to regenerate. I consider myself lucky. With the help of my doctors, we caught the cancer early both times and it didn’t spread. So I didn’t need chemotherapy or radiation, which would have been far more painful, and may not have been as successful against this kind of disease.
CM: You know, I used to hear the words “skin cancer” and, like most people, I didn’t think it was as serious as liver or lung cancer. But it is as deadly or more deadly than some forms of cancer.
JM: The doctors told me that many times the damage is done at a very early age. You get serious sunburns as a child, and the cancer doesn’t show up until years and years later. Sun exposure is accumulative over your lifetime, beginning in childhood. That’s certainly true in my case. I lived near the water when I was growing up. I was fair-haired and fair-skinned and I remember getting very bad sunburns, with blisters on my back. But back then, you tried to get sunburned, to get the tan that came after it. That’s one thing my kids will never do. I don’t let them go out without sunscreen on. I coat SPF 30 on myself first thing in the morning, and wear long sleeves and a hat whenever I’m in the sun.
CM: Oh, yeah. John is always dumping sunscreen on our heads. He even yells at our friends. “Put on a hat!” As you can imagine, I’m pretty vigilant about checking him over for signs of new blemishes. I’m worse than the FBI.
JM: The good thing is, the doctors now talk about me being free and clear of cancer, for now. There’s always a chance another melanoma will spring up. Every three months or so I go in to the doctor to have them remove little blemishes on my body, to check them out. So far, they’ve all been precancerous. I’m always on the lookout, giving myself the once-over fairly routinely. As unpleasant as it may be in these, my declining years, I must spend an inordinate amount of time inspecting my aging face in the mirror.
