‘A spot on my eye turned out to be a tumour’

Seven years ago, Jessica Zbinden-Webster noticed what looked like a blocked pore on her lower eyelid. She'd had a history of skin problems, so assumed it was a blemish and ignored it, expecting it to go away. But it didn't.

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“One morning as I was sitting at my desk, I rubbed my eye and the skin of the lesion came away and started bleeding,” says Jessica, now 33. “I went to the GP the following day and he told me I had skin cancer and that I needed to go to hospital.”

That tiny “spot” on Jessica's eye was a non-melanoma cancer called a basal cell carcinoma (BCC), one of the most common types of skin cancer. The surgery she needed to remove it meant losing the whole of her lower eyelid.

Around 75% of non-melanoma skin cancers are BCCs. They develop from basal cells, which are found in the deepest part of the outer layer of the skin (the epidermis). “Basal cell carcinoma is one of the slowest growing cancers,” she says.

SURGERY

“But mine was quite rare, an infiltrative basal cell carcinoma. The tumour had roots and it was growing under my skin. The hole left by surgery to remove it was so big I needed to have a skin graft. I had two surgeries, back to back on consecutive days - one to take the eyelid off and then one to do a graft.

“My surgeon took the skin from the inside of my arm, shaved it so it was wafer thin, and then put it on my eyelid. Since then I've had five laser surgeries to smooth the skin out as the skin under the eyes is unique. It's the thinnest on your body and needs to operate in a specific way to contract and work like normal eye skin.”

While her surgeries and laser procedures have been painful and distressing, what might have happened if it had been left alone is even worse to imagine. “If I hadn't had it removed, it could have spread to the bone or to the optic nerve, which would have led to my brain. It needed to come out.”