When Marisha Dotson, from Knoxville in Tennessee, USA, first noticed a small, red spot on her nose three years ago, she assumed it was just like any other pimple she’d had.
The then-25-year-old, who tragically doesn’t have any parents after losing her mother as a teenager, had recently suffered from pneumonia, shingles and repeated colds – which she assumed had all occurred because she was working so hard trying to pay for her education.
But when the spot wasn’t going down as one normally would – and instead it began to in size and began to ache – Marisha went to the doctor. “I went to my student health service who said they hadn’t seen anything like it,” she told CATERS. The doctors put it down to “either a ‘weird form of acne’ or an infection”.
“To me it looked like a regular pimple, it was slightly red and like a blemish, but after it continued to grow I knew it wasn’t a spot,” she explained. It continued to swell, and Marisha began feeling feverish a lot of the time, so she sought advice from a dermatologist. But she was shocked to discover what was actually going on: she was suffering from an aggressive form of skin cancer.
The exact type of cancer Marisha had was squamous cell carcinoma, and she required 15 hours of surgery to remove all the layers of cancerous tissue in her nose. But devastatingly, the tumour was much deeper than surgeons had first anticipated, meaning two-thirds of the young woman’s nose had to be cut off in the process.
“It was very painful,” recalled Marisha. “Despite having 300 shots of anaesthetic to my face it still hurt as they continued to cut and burn each layer, so close to my nerves and sinuses.”
“I could feel there was a part of my face missing but when I looked in the mirror I was devastated, I had this huge hole where my nose used to be.” In an attempt to reconstruct her face, surgeons took skin from the crown of Marisha’s head and cartilage from her ear to create another nose.
But as if all this wasn’t enough of an ordeal, shortly after her facial reconstruction surgery, another cancerous spot appeared. And it was followed by several more all over Marisha’s face. “Every spot was cancerous,” she said. “I was so angry because I had been through so much already having the reconstruction.”
Marisha’s largest spot was on her cheek, but she also had one under her right eye, two on the bridge of her nose, one above her nose and then eight smaller ones under her nostrils.
“I went back into surgery to have them removed and came out looking like Frankenstein’s monster, they had to take so much out on my nose, nostril and lip that I needed skin grafts,” she described. Marisha required a temporary mouthpiece to allow her to talk and eat, and she’s now fundraising through a Go Fund Me page in order to afford a permanent one which will help prevent infections. But she’s finally got some good news: she’s cancer free.
“Before, I had gotten so used to bad results that I couldn’t believe it when something good happened in September, I started crying and have even framed my pathology report.”
Marisha – who is now training to be a counsellor – had a very low survival rate of less than 20%, but she surprised both doctors and herself with her resilience. And despite all she’s been through, she’s now focussing on all the positives.
“I still feel sad sometimes but I always remind myself of what I’ve overcome, I had the choice from surgeons to keep fighting or give up and die, but I chose to fight,” she said.
[“Source-cosmopolitan.”]