When I was 22, I was diagnosed with stage 4 skin cancer, despite having no visible moles or spots and never tanning

When Mariena Browning, from Pocatello, Idaho, was 22, she was in the best shape of her life and busy thinking about other things: ready to buy a house and start a family with her husband.

Weeks later, she discovered she had stage 4 melanoma, despite having no moles or spots on her body.

This led to three years of harrowing treatment, which left her eyes yellow, a nasty intestinal infection and her life changed forever.

Ms Browning, now 28 and a new mother, wants people to know the risks they face if they forego daily sunscreen use, and wants people to know that you can get melanoma without ever having a mole.

Ms Browning was diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma when she was just 22 years old. Only about 22 percent of people diagnosed with cancer survive five years after their diagnosis.

‘Now that I know how crappy and intense melanoma and its treatment can be, I’m a big believer in sun safety, using sunscreen and annual skin checks with a dermatologist, even though mine didn’t show up in the more traditional way , ‘Mrs Browning, told SELF magazine.

Melanoma is a form of skin cancer that affects the cells in your skin that produce the brown pigment that gives the skin a tan or tan color.

About 1.4 million Americans live with the disease.

Most often, people discover that they have skin cancer when they develop a strange-looking spot on their skin or when a mole they previously had begins to change shape, color, or size.

Browning was one of the 3 percent of skin cancer patients who do not have a “primary location” that doctors could use to identify her skin cancer.

If melanoma is caught early, it is easy to treat. But for Ms Browning, it was allowed to grow silently and spread from her skin to her lymph nodes, where doctors first found it in 2018 as a lump in her leg.

She was initially diagnosed with stage 3, which is an indication that her cancer had begun to spread.

She tried to enter a clinical trial hoping it would work faster than other treatments. Just before she was to begin the experimental treatment, her doctors postponed her examination of a new growth on her abdomen.

During the time she was delayed – just a few hours – the process was stopped because people were getting bad side effects from it, which she called “divine intervention.”

This delay also brought bad news: the new growth on her stomach was cancerous, which officially meant she had stage 4 cancer – even more advanced than initially thought.

That drastically reduced her survival rate: About eight in 10 patients diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma die within five years.

Four days after her new diagnosis, Ms Browning underwent invasive surgery to remove all her lymph nodes in her left groin, the lump in her stomach and a lump in her neck.

Over the course of her illness, Ms. Browning was treated with chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, steroids and more. This led to countless doctor visits and sometimes strange side effects.

In November 2018, she started oral chemotherapy, taking 18 pills daily for nine months.

Months later, when she used the toilet, only blood came out – which “looked like a murder scene” and caused her to pass out. It turned out that she had contracted a serious bacterial infection that destroyed her colon.

“I don’t even have words to express what a stressful and scary time that was,” she said.

She recovered from the infection, but discovered in October 2019 that her cancer had spread to her brain. So she had to undergo radiation treatment.

After this, she was given steroid treatment that left her irritable and hungry and suffered temporary but alarming liver problems that left her with bright yellow jaundiced eyes.

Finally, in February 2020, she received the news that her doctors could not detect any tumors in her body.

In October 2021, she stopped treatment completely.

Since this news, she has moved on with her life and is finally returning to some of the things she set her sights on before the diagnosis.

In June 2023, she and her husband had a daughter named Kiya.

Kiya was an “absolute blessing” for Ms Browning, partly because it is difficult for most recent cancer patients to conceive.

Through it all, she has maintained a positive attitude and wants to use what she has learned to spread awareness about melanoma to other young people.

‘I would still like to spread awareness about melanoma more than anything’ she shared in a 2021 Instagram post, “And help women know that even though sometimes your world may be turned upside down, it is still possible to find the happy one and, as my grandpa always says, ‘keep smiling,’ even when it feels like life isn’t fair is like you’re so far behind everyone else.’