'My pimple was skin cancer and now I want a change made'

A mum whose ‘pimple’ turned out to be skin cancer is campaigning to make sun cream cheaper by scrapping 20 per cent VAT.

Jessica Zbinden-Webster, 35, is calling for action after getting diagnosed with skin cancer in her 20s. The mum-of-one from Ferring, West Sussex, believes her condition was caused by several sunburns she received when she was a child, as she was never a sun worshipper later in life.

Now that she has a two-year-old daughter called Arabella, she wants to protect all children from the same fate by making UV protection more accessible.

She said: “Having a child is one of my main motivators for this campaign. I feel strongly that protecting her vulnerable skin is not something that should be taxed. I feel very flattered that I get to carry the torch on this issue and I will see it through one way or another."

In 2018, Jessica found what she thought was a spot under her right eye, but says acne was not uncommon for her, so she didn’t think much of it. However, one morning she scratched the lump lightly and it started to bleed, sending off alarm bells in her mind. She visited her GP the next day and received the devastating news that the spot was skin cancer.

She said: “I was incredibly shocked. The last thing that I ever thought it would be is skin cancer. I thought that skin cancer was all to do with moles, but now I know that it can be any skin lesion that is new, changing, or unusual.

“I also thought that skin cancer was an older person’s disease. I thought it happened to septuagenarians who sunbathed religiously over many decades. I didn’t expect it to happen to someone like me.”

The cancer was an infiltrative basal cell carcinoma, where malignant cells grow as thin, irregular strands that extend deeply into surrounding tissue, making the tumour’s true borders hard to see. Jessica had Mohs surgery to remove the tumour along with most of her lower eyelid, which was done under local anesthetic while she was awake.

They then took a skin graft from her arm to cover up the hole, as it was so large that it couldn’t be closed with stitches. Over the following four years she had a handful of laser surgeries on the area to make the skin look and act more like eye skin, but she said it was a hit to her self-esteem.

She added: “Despite looking fairly innocuous on the surface, underneath my skin the cancer cells were growing outward and downward like the roots of the tree. The cancer had spread pretty far and I had to have most of my lower eyelid removed.

“It was an uncomfortable recovery period both physically and emotionally. Being a woman in your mid-20s is a time when you are hyper-aware of your appearance by default. Leaving the house with a huge scar and a healing skin graft did make me incredibly self-conscious and I did attract quite a few stares of the wrong kind.”

Luckily, the surgery was successful at removing the cancer and Jessica has not had any issues since. Due to the young age she was diagnosed, she claims that dermatologists suggested the damage was caused when she was a child.

She said: “I have never been a sun worshipper and I have never used sunbeds.