Chloe Goodman opens up about her skin cancer scare and agonising seven month wait to discover whether she had the disease
The Ex On The Beach star has a tragic family history of skin cancer
CHLOE Goodman has opened up about the terrifying seven month wait she had to find out whether or not she had skin cancer, the same disease which tragically took her aunt’s life.
The 23-year-old’s health scare began back in June 2015 after two moles on her back had grown bigger and become itchy.
Knowing that she had a family history of the deadly illness, Chloe had kept an eye on her moles for years and so immediately noticed the change.
Speaking exclusively to The Sun Online, the Ex On The Beach beauty said: “I’ve been told that the moles were benign, but I do have skin cancer cells.
“My nan and my aunty both had skin cancer, and my aunty died of it, so I think it’s hereditary and that’s why I was panicking about it.
“I used to have a really clear back, but when I was younger these moles appeared so I got them checked out every six months and was always told there was nothing to worry about, but over the last year they got really itchy, they changed formation and colour.
“I’d make them bleed I was scratching them so much, so I thought, ‘Right that’s enough I need to get them checked out.’”
However, despite having the moles removed in November 2015, this was only the start of several harrowing months for Chloe in which not only did she have to wait to find out whether she had cancer, but also had to deal with a painful infection in one of her scars.
“I personally think it became infected because they didn’t give me enough stitches. The wound was gaping when I left, but I didn’t know as it was on my back,” she tells us.
“The pain I had was horrendous, I couldn’t sleep at night, even when I was driving it hurt because moving meant the skin was being stretched.
“It wasn’t healing properly, so I had to go on antibiotics for the infection and it was just one thing after the other and now I’m left with a scar that looks like a bullet wound, where really it should just be a neat line.”
With the knowledge that her aunt had died of the disease, Chloe admits that she did have dark moments during the lengthy wait for results, in which she worried that she might suffer the same fate.
“Certainly knowing that my aunty died and that my nan had it, I did have times when I thought, ‘Oh my god, well if I do have it I’m gonna have to really fight it.’
“I’m a really feisty person anyway, I just thought, ‘Life is what it is’ and I would fight it best I could.
“But there were times when I couldn't stop thinking, ‘I’m so young, why is this happening to me, why me?’”
And while waiting for the results, the opportunity for Chloe to appear on Ex On The Beach came up, but Chloe admits that the worry stopped her from having fun on the show and being herself.
“It definitely hung over me, it was the first thing I thought about when I woke up and the last thing when I went to sleep.
“I didn’t know whether I was going to get back and they’d say, ‘You’ve got cancer, you need to start chemo’, so I constantly thought about it and it made me really angry on the show, I didn’t find anything fun.
“Because something so important was going on that I didn’t have any control over, it made everything else irrelevant, so what should have been a really fun time, was a time when I was most angry, most on edge, and everything else on the show felt really little in comparison. I didn’t really sunbathe much and if I did it was obviously for filming the rest of the time I was in the room or in the shade.”
Despite her anguish, Chloe kept her fears a secret from her cast mates and producers.
“I didn’t want anyone to know as I didn’t know what they were going do with it, whether they’d put it on TV.
“If I’d had skin cancer I wouldn’t have wanted anyone to know unless I could have told them I was on the road to recovery, so I just kept it quiet.
“I’ll probably get, ‘Oh she’d so negative the whole way through the show’ but I was worried I had a long road to recovery ahead of me.”
After finally getting the all-clear last month, Chloe who admits that she didn’t take care of her skin in the sun when she was younger, has a warning for other young people.
“I now avoid sunbeds like the plague and wear factor 50 sunblock, but my dad was a pilot which meant we had a lot of holidays when we were younger. I used to tell my parents I put sun cream on just to shut them up, as they’d be really on at me to use it as they’d see how dark my olive would go in the sun.
"When you’re young you just don’t think about the effect that the sun can have on your skin. You’ll be on Vegas holidays, having the pool parties, and you just don’t think of the damage.
“You’re out there for ten hours and drinking, and when you’re drunk you don’t feel the sun. All these parties that people go to when they’re hammered, they last thing they think about is topping up the sun cream.
“It’s something that should be first on your mind. I thought I was invincible when I was younger, but now I really take care of my skin. It’s just a shame it took this for me to do that.”