A MANICURE SAVED MY LIFE

As the nail polish came off, Michelle Tagliamonte, 58, made a worrying discovery

- RACHEL TOMPKINS, SOPHIE WATSON

Sitting in the chair for my monthly nail appointment, I relaxed as my manicurist began removing the nail colour, ready to file my nails before a new shade was applied.

'What colour are you going for today?' she asked, as she removed the existing powder colour. But as I looked down at my hands, I spotted something on my right thumbnail.

'That's weird,' I thought, looking at the dark brown line that was running from the base of my nail bed to the tip of my nail. It looked like someone had drawn a straight line in brown felt-tip pen.

'That is unusual,' the manicurist agreed, explaining that she'd never seen anything like it before.

It was September 2024 and my job as a certified health coach meant that I was aware of my body and in touch with when things changed. And now my intuition was telling me that something wasn't right.

I had a new nail colour applied, and at my next nail appointment, a month on, the dark brown line in my nail was still there.

'I'm going to google it,' I thought.

As I did so, I discovered that although changes in nail colour could be from damage such as trapping your nail in a door, they could also be melanoma in the skin below-skin cancer.

'I'm a bit worried,' I told my husband Andre, then 57.

'I'm sure it's nothing,' he reassured me.

Still, I'd had a stage o melanoma on my shin 10 years earlier, and although it had been removed, I'd been having annual mole checks ever since. Being half Italian, with olive-tone skin, I have high melanin counts, but I always protected my skin from the sun. Now, though, I couldn't help but wonder if this was something more sinister, so I took a photo and when I visited my dermatologist a week later, I mentioned it.