“Our lives came crashing around us, myself, my wife and my kids. Everything just fell apart at that stage.”
Aidan McKay is a stage four melanoma patient.
First diagnosed in 2019, he had successful treatment, but in 2022 he found out it had returned and was in his brain and lungs.
He blames his skin cancer diagnosis on his childhood growing up on a farm.
New research from Melanoma Focus shows that one bad episode of sunburn in childhood or adolescence more than doubles your chances of developing melanoma skin cancer later in life.
Some farmers attending the Balmoral Show agricultural event are sporting some worrying moles. But not all of them are real.
It is part of a campaign from Action Cancer and The Agri Rural Health Forum to raise awareness of the risk of skin cancer for farmers by offering them temporary melanoma tattoos.
Aidan McKay said when he was a child sun cream was not used.
“We were brought up, baling hay, stooking corn, doing all the things during the summer. There was no sunscreen then and getting a good roast during your summer holidays was just part of the process.
“The only thing we had was calamine lotion as the cure for it afterwards,” he told BBC News NI.
