Sarah Goldup was 19 when she flew to Tenerife with friends, rubbed oil on her skin instead of sunscreen and burned badly. She is Irish by background and burns easily. Nobody told her what that afternoon in the sun might cost.
The bill arrived years later, in the form of a mark on her neck. She had carried it since her teens and filed it under birthmark. Her parents disagreed. They kept telling her to have it looked at. Then it began to change shape and colour, and she finally went to the doctor.
“The doctor said it ticked every box for melanoma using the ABCD rule,” she told the Alton Herald. The checklist covers asymmetry, an irregular border, mixed colours and a width above 6mm. The doctor called it an “ugly duckling” marking.
The wait
A biopsy was fast-tracked, but the results took six weeks. “During that time, I told myself it was nothing to worry about,” Goldup said. “But then I got a call asking me to go into the surgery and was told it was malignant melanoma. It was both shocking and upsetting.” She was 38.
Surgeons removed the cancer from her neck and found a second melanoma, this one on her chest. Scans showed no spread to her organs, and doctors believed cells had travelled from the neck tumour to the chest and nowhere else. She was given the all clear, then began a year of immunotherapy in August as a precaution.
It was not enough. Months after the course ended, she found a swollen lymph node on the same side of her neck. In November 2024 a needle biopsy confirmed that the melanoma was back. Surgeons took out 35 lymph nodes, and 25 of them held cancer. That put her at stage three.
In April 2025 she started three months of combination immunotherapy. Now she has treatment every four weeks, due to run through April 2027, and her scans remain clear.
Looking back at the sun
Goldup, a 42-year-old freelance copywriter from Farnham in Surrey, has her own theory about the origin. “I was never a sunbed user, but it was the era of girls’ holidays where it was all about flying off somewhere sunny and coming home with a tan,” she said. She is fairly sure the damage was done on that first trip, even though it took years to show.
These days she eats well, exercises daily and wears factor 50 every day, winter included. At home, her husband Lee and their sons Lucien, 10, and Rafferty, seven, get the same rules. “They don’t always like wearing hats or sunscreen, but it’s so important,” she said. She also wants people to know that darker skin can develop the disease, and that you do not need a plane ticket to get burned.
She is backing a sun-safety drive that Cancer Research UK is staging with Nivea Sun. Its health information manager Claire Knight said sunburn is no reason to give up on protection, and warned that the sun in Surrey is strong enough to burn between mid-March and mid-October. Cancer Research UK figures show melanoma ranks fifth among cancers in Britain, with almost 20,000 new cases.
Sources
- I was given nightmare diagnosis after ignoring 'birthmark' I'd had since my teens
- Girls' holidays in the sun probably caused my skin cancer
- Farnham woman thought skin cancer after sunburn was birthmark
