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Karen Wells wants the death of her son to be a warning to others. She believes people need to take skin cancer more seriously. Her grief is still raw after two years, but she has decided to channel that grief and try to make a difference.
"Don't take a chance." That's the advice from Karen Wells who will carry the grief of losing her son to melanoma for the rest of her life.
Wells often relives the events that led up to the death of her son, Morgan Forshner. She can only look back and wish she had known back then, what she knows now. "If only I had known," she said, choking back the tears.
She can only lament that she didn't get him to go to the Doctor sooner in the first place with a mole that looked bad.
"The bottom of it was purple and the top of it was black and it was really ugly," she recalled.
She also learned that even a doctor can get it wrong. She recalled what he said after he finally visited the doctor's office.
"'She said it looks benign to me', she remembered him saying. "She froze it off in the office and he came home and high-fived me that 'it's all good Mom.'"
Her son was 33. He wouldn't make it to his 34th birthday. He left behind a wife and two children including a new baby.
When the mole appeared even worse a few months later, again, she had to get him to go back in.
"We just couldn't get him to go to the doctor, he kept saying, 'She said it was okay Mom.'"
Finally, he had a biopsy. Initially, the results came back that it was benign, but that was a mistake. The reality was that it was cancer. It was stage 4 cancer, and it had migrated to his adrenal glands, his lungs, his spine and eventually his brain. Surgery solved nothing.
"I'll never forget the day that he came home. They said just take him home and enjoy him. And I really didn't know what that meant you know?"
Wells wants her story to help get the message out that skin cancer needs to be taken more seriously.
"Get your partner to check your back, the top of your head," she urged. They started their own Facebook page about the issue, Morgans Mole Patrol "We started that before he passed away actually."
And while she works on that, her advice to everyone is to take a moment, consider if there is a mole that's new or changing, and don't hesitate to get it checked out.
"Like really. Don't take a chance."
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