When Healing Becomes Harm |
For most of my life, sunlight was framed as medicine.
As someone who lived with psoriasis from childhood, I was repeatedly told by dermatologists that the sun could help heal my skin. My mother drove me to Pittsburgh for PUVA treatments (ultraviolet phototherapy), which at the time were considered cutting-edge therapy for severe psoriasis. We pursued those treatments in good faith, trusting the best medical guidance available. For decades, I viewed ultraviolet light not as something to fear, but as something therapeutic. The sun was associated with healing, health, and relief.
Then, last year, at age 48, I was diagnosed with melanoma.
In an instant, my psychological relationship with the sun changed. What had long symbolized warmth, vitality, and healing suddenly felt dangerous. The very thing I had been taught to embrace began to feel more like the death star. That may sound dramatic, but melanoma fundamentally reshaped how I experience the world.
The Trauma of Confronting Mortality
What made the diagnosis even more destabilizing was learning that my tumor demonstrated aggressive features on molecular genetic testing. I underwent surgery to remove seven lymph nodes to determine whether the cancer had metastasized. Thankfully, the nodes were clear. But confronting the possibility that cancer may already have moved through one’s body changes a person in ways that are difficult to explain to those who have never lived through that uncertainty.
Cancer often introduces fear. Aggressive cancer introduces existential fear. It forces confrontation not merely with illness, but with mortality.
Psychologists use the term shattered assumptions to describe what happens when trauma disrupts our deeply held beliefs that life is predictable, our bodies are trustworthy, and the future is largely within our control (Janoff-Bulman, 1992). A cancer diagnosis can fracture those assumptions.
The Pain of Medical Progress
The psychological complexity deepened further when I later learned that PUVA, once viewed as a breakthrough psoriasis treatment, is now recognized as a long-term risk........