"That's when I knew it wasn't normal..." 
Brittany Lietz

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Brittany Lietz of Edgewater, Md., just wanted to look tan for her senior prom. She didn’t count on a life-altering brush with skin cancer.  Now Lietz, winner of the 2006 Miss Maryland competition on July 1, is doing everything she can to raise awareness of skin cancer.

When Lietz, 21, was in high school, she bought a white prom dress. To make her fair skin look healthier, she started going to tanning salons “pretty rigorously,” gradually increasing the length of her sessions from eight minutes to 25 minutes. Soon she was “addicted” to tanning, going to the salon four times a week, in addition to lying outside in the sun without using sunscreen.

Within a year, a small mole on her back, located by her bra strap, had started growing.

“My mom really started bugging me about it, saying it didn’t look normal,” says Lietz, who continued to tan. Then “one day I removed the bra and it started to bleed. That’s when I knew it wasn’t normal.”

On April 24, 2005, Lietz visited a local doctor’s office. She was first evaluated by a nurse practitioner and “within five minutes I was scheduled for a biopsy.” The results showed that the brownish-red mole, about three-quarters of an inch in diameter, was borderline stage II melanoma – a form of deadly skin cancer that had spread to the inner layers of the skin.

On May 13, she underwent surgery at Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center to remove the mole and six lymph nodes in her right arm, leaving a 14-inch scar across her back. Since then, she has had about 20 additional surgeries to remove other precancerous or atypical lesions all over her body, and now sports small scars on the front of her chest, stomach, hips, one knee and her inner thigh near the groin.

“I attribute almost all of it to the tanning beds,” Lietz says, noting that the lesions found on her inner thigh were located “in an area that the sun doesn’t reach unless you’re in a tanning bed with no clothes on.”

The experience changed Lietz’s outlook on life. She is now a nursing student at the University of Maryland who is pursuing a career in pediatric oncology. She goes for regular skin checks at her dermatologist’s office and Johns Hopkins, and participates in a melanoma patient advocacy group at Hopkins. And, as a contestant in the upcoming Miss Maryland competition, she is using skin cancer awareness as her platform.

“I realized there is not a single person out there telling kids about (melanoma),” says Lietz, who is currently Miss Tidewater. When she was younger, she heard warnings from doctors and nurses, but “unfortunately, teenagers don’t listen unless they hear from someone their own age.”

To that end, she has been traveling to high schools around Maryland, speaking to health classes about skin cancer prevention, and the dangers of tanning beds. She tells them about statistics, that one person dies every hour from melanoma, and how it’s the leading cause of death by cancer in people ages 20 to 29. She also goes over common myths.

“Teenagers think (tanning salons) are healthy because if they tan at a tanning bed, they won’t get burned when they go outside, but 30 minutes in a tanning bed is equivalent to 12 and a half hours of sun exposure,” Lietz says.

Some people think it’s genetic, though Lietz says in her family, only her grandmother was affected, with only one mole. And though her fair skin, blond hair and blue eyes put her at “pretty much the highest risk you can be” for melanoma, she makes sure to tell students that people of all skin colors can get cancer.

“I’ve had a very positive response,” she says of her talks. “Some students say they had no idea how horrible the disease is. Some tell me they’re never setting foot in a tanning salon again.”

In late July, Lietz also plans to join the Skin Cancer Foundation at the Pentagon, where organization representatives will screen soldiers returning from Iraq.

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