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Comedian Katherine Ryan has revealed she’s battling skin cancer.
She made the revelation in her latest podcast, explaining: ‘I’ve had a mole on my arm – that I told you about last week – removed.
‘The only reason that they agreed to remove it was because I went to a fancy private place in South Kensington and I paid them a grand.
‘I don’t know if on the NHS they ever would have removed this mole.’
While the Canadian comic did not trust the NHS would have removed the mole, she also struggled while seeing private doctors.
She explained that she had £300 for a seven-minute consultation with a doctor who wrongly informed her the mole wasn’t cancerous.
Comedian Katherine Ryan has revealed she’s battling skin cancer (pictured in February)
Katherine recalled: ‘He gave me the news that I wanted! I think it’s really easy to take a diagnosis of you’re healthy and walk away, you go ”great I’m healthy” and you don’t think about it again because that is the easiest news.
‘But the mole kept changing – I know a lot about melanoma, I had a melanoma as a very young woman, stage two on my leg – and I’ve spoken about that before.
‘Even that didn’t look traditionally like melanoma to me, fair enough it had some discolouration and asymmetry and a bit of black and red. It was a flat mole, not that bad and not that big, but it was stage two melanoma so that was bad.
‘I had to have full general anesthetic and surgery to have a golf-ball size of my leg because – if you know about melanoma, you know it’s a deadly form of skin cancer and it spreads quickly.
‘I just felt like this mole wasn’t right. It’s on my arm, I showed pictures of it on social media, this is like the hole from having it removed.
‘I went in and I wanted the doctor to remove a bigger piece of it and stitch it up in a straight line.
‘But even when he looked at it, he was like ”not melanoma, totally fine, I will do the shave and send it away for histology and if there’s any borders that we missed, then we will do the deeper cut”.’
It’s the second time Katherine has been diagnosed with the disease, having been diagnosed with Stage 2 cancer in 2004.
She said previously: ‘The cancer wasn’t that serious. It wasn’t into my lymph nodes, I didn’t have to have chemotherapy.
‘It did recur, but it was easily dealt with. I feel like I was really lucky just to get that lesson, that little smack on the a**e of “Hey, wait a minute. Listen to your body, here.”’
Katherine has also been battling Lupus and previously discussed her struggle with the disease – having first experienced symptoms of the condition back in 2007.
She had just moved to London when she first began to suffer with sore joints, fatigue and rashes.
In an interview with The Mirror she explained: ‘I had really low white blood cells, but no one seemed particularly alarmed about that. There was a lot of frustration with doctors who didn’t know what was wrong and didn’t investigate. I felt quite fobbed off.’
Following various appointments with an array of specialists, she added that she was told she could have ‘ringworm’ whilst another took a guess with ‘leprosy.’
Desperately Katherine visited A&E, where a nurse there first suggested that she might have Lupus.
After almost a year of trying to get a professional diagnosis she was finally told by a dermatologist that she had systemic lupus erythematosus.
Whilst there is no cure for the long-term condition, it can be treated and controlled with medication to prevent it from getting worse and lessen flare-ups.
After her diagnosis Katherine detailed: ‘I realised life’s not fair and I had to take responsibility for my own health. Everyone’s different, but for me it was either I calm down or I get a fever, so the reward was high. I didn’t do yoga or mindfulness techniques – I went for a lot of walks.
‘I became really Zen and focused on the things that matter. I just didn’t sweat the small stuff any more.’
The actress believed that stress was a contributing factor to the cause of her lupus and has since successfully managed her condition by focussing on de-stressing.
After suffering a series of tragic miscarriages Katherine began taking medication again in 2020, but admitted that she was ‘just guessing’ that it was an autoimmune response.