Fairport, N.Y. - A young woman's quest for color quickly became an obsession that almost cost her life.
Diana Duvall started going to a tanning bed for the prom.
For most of her life, she has looked in the mirror and seen a tan. These days, her golden glow comes from a cream.
It used to come from a tanning bed, every day for more than 10 years.
"It was all about beauty-tanned skin," Duvall said. "You looked great in any color. It was a way of life. I never thought of skin cancer. It was all about that perfect glow."
For Diana, the sun didn't do a good enough job. She found indoor tanning gave her that deep, dark color faster.
"I saw a great glow," Duvall said. "I felt happy and I felt beautiful and felt that was all i needed. I would become so dark, it was almost obsessive."
There were also sunburns, including one that may have saved her life.
"She was begging me to put lotion on her back," Diana's sister Sarah said. "She was sore and red. I looked and noticed something that didn't look right."
Sarah, a nurse, noticed a dark mole with a ragged edge. She thought it could be cancerous.
Diana, only 27 at that time, thought nothing of it.
"I tanned the morning it was removed and tanned the day I had my stitches out," Diana said.
That mole was malignant melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. The doctor didn't say cancer, so Diana was thinking about her tan.
"To be honest, I thought I could go tanning in a few months," Diana said. "I never once thought it would end my tanning career."
It wasn't until Diana's sister sat her down for a heart-to-heart, did she finally understand.
"Until the day they said, 'You have cancer, you can never go in the sun ever again without protection' did it sink in," Diana said.
"The first thing I thought was I did this to myself," she said.
Malignant melanoma skin cancer is now the leading cause of cancer deaths in women 25-30.
A free skin cancer screening takes place on May 7 at the University of Rochester's Ambulatory Care Center at 601 Elmwood Avenue from 9am-1pm.
For more information on the event, call 275-3872.
