Wear Sunscreen!

Some of you may have heard that Baz luhrmann song "Everybody's Free (to wear sunscreen)". In it he gives a heaping helping of advice for graduates going out into the new world. At the end of the song, he says "Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the
ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth. But trust me on the sunscreen… "
Boy, don't I wish I had listened.

During the summer of 2000, I spent an entire day at a Funtown Splashtown, an amusement park in Southern Maine. I had just lost a ton of weight and was feeling confident enough to wear a tank top for the first time, as well as shorts. The one thing I forgot to wear was sunscreen. I was so used to wearing short sleeved shirts and pants that it didn't even dawn on me to wear any. When we got to the water park side of Funtown Splashtown, the sun was blazing hot, and my skin was starting to redden from waiting in line to go in and out of the chlorine filled pool while sliding down the water slides. A few hours later, we left the park. I was feeling extremely nauseated. I went home and fell asleep.

The next day I could barely get a tank top over my head. I put some aloe on my skin and rubbed it in really well. When I went into work to see my mom, she noticed I had a few blisters on my neck. My boss told me I had second degree burns and that I needed to go home and treat them. I covered myself in aloe but it just wasn't helping. By early afternoon I was covered in blisters the size of oranges. My father took me to the emergency room, and the Dr took a tongue depressor and applied some white COLD goop that was supposed to help heal the blisters. Let me tell you, it did NOT feel good having that scratchy tongue depressing rubbing against my sensitive charred skin. That, and the severe warning he gave me about how just a few sunburns like that can give a person skin cancer should have been enough to remind me to always wear sunscreen. Not to mention how uncomfortable it was trying to find a position to sleep in for two weeks while the blisters healed. Unfortunately, I didn't listen.

When I was seven months pregnant I was out in Hawaii for the first time. My husband and I had forgotten to bring sunscreen to the beach. My legs got pretty red. I figured I was ok, until that night when my feet swelled up so bad that I could barely walk on one of my legs. Can we say stupid? I'm sure it had to do partly with the fact that I was pregnant, but this is a good lesson of how smart it is to wear sunscreen. Again, the OB Dr told me to be extremely careful because one or two bad sunburns can ruin your skin. I believe that having lived in Hawaii for a year and a half my skin toughened up a bit. I can only hope that if I continue to wear sunscreen, especially now that I have been living in Northern California and am pale as a ghost again, just like I was when I lived in Maine, that I will avoid getting skin cancer.

I always make sure to lather my extremely fair skinned son up with baby sunscreen lotion before we leave the house if it is particularly sunny and hot outside. I just read that a person receives 80% of their exposure to the sun within the first 18 years of life. In other words, lather your kids up and put hats on them. Experts say to use a sunscreen of at least 15 SPF, even on cloudy days. Broad Spectrum sunscreens which block out UVA and UVB rays do the best job of protecting your skin as far as sunscreens go. Sunscreen should be applied 20 minutes before leaving your house, and reapplied every two hours. Though some say they are waterproof, you should still reapply when coming out of the water. You can never be to safe. I believe I have learned my lesson, and hope that I learned it before it was too late.