Melanoma Blog(s) Updates - a Quick Check-in

Every year around this time I get a bit twitchy about my upcoming cancer-versary, it's soon annual CT scan time, and so I need to stop and smell the roses. Many amazing things have happened in my life in the last year, it's really been non-stop around here - all good stuff! And never a dull moment. Mike and I travelled around BC a bunch, including a raucous Camaro trip to the Kooteneys, and a stunning camping trip to Bella Coola. 

Also news: Claire and Cass moved here to Prince George (haha right - I never thought I'd say those words!) and are settling in beautifully. I of course am thrilled that we are back to living close to eachother!!! They are loving PG and immersing themselves in their new city.  We're slowly but surely getting their Toronto-blood-pressures down, and the imminent spring weather is going to greatly help that when we can get back out there for camping, exploring, and adventuring. 

In the meantime... work. Mike and I both have been burning the candle at both ends the past couple of seasons. Mike worked BC Elections as he loves to do, and then took on a side gig here in town to help him pass the winter (aka non-Camaro) season. I've still been working with Community Futures but also was part of a Scientific Planning Committee (my first one!) to bring a two-day accredited for Physicians hybrid conference to Prince George for Lymphedema Education. It was a large undertaking and I am honoured to have been able to support this event with my conference planning skills. Not long after that, I was part of the team who brought the B2B Expo to the Prince George business community - another large project I am proud to have been part of. These recent refreshers have reminded me how much I love to plan and facilitate corporate events, and how my professional efforts need to swing more in that direction. 

Sprinkled in between all of that was also a little bit of time with Save Your Skin Foundation! In February, SYSF invited me to host their Fireside Chat and speak on the topic of "Connecting to Your New Normal." It did stretch my cancer patient muscles a bit - I dusted off some decade-old feelings about this disease and shared my story and perspectives on life after cancer, hopefully giving even just one person a glimmer of hope in their skin cancer journey. 

SYSF has now posted the recording of my talk, and a short blog re-capping my melanoma and Save Your Skin story. You can check these out here and here: 

SYSF February 2025 Fireside Chat: "Connecting to Your New Normal" 

with host Natalie Allan, Cancer Survivor & Motivational Speaker

Thank you Kathy and Save Your Skin Foundation, for being there for me, and for Mike, our families, and all of the patients and caregivers your life-saving work supports in the cancer community. 🙌

I'm grateful to have some re-connects with my melanoma friends and family, and these opportunities help me to pause and reflect, and celebrate almost 11 years since I was first diagnosed, and I am HERE. 🙏 xoxoxo

🧡

One more quick note before I dash off to the next thing - just this very morning I received an email from Feedspot notifying me that my blog was again on the Top Melanoma Blogs list! Surprising as I haven't posted as much since last receiving this honour in 2017, but a very welcome nod and neat timing as I was just preparing to post about the SYSF event. Thank you @Feedspot - I appreciate #29 and will happily share your new badge. Great to see so many of my old friends and melahomies on this list as well! 🥰

Us - in our neighbourhood magazine!

Well... honestly I'm not even sure where to start with this one. I've frequently reported how I tend to find myself in interesting situations at the most interesting times. Today is no different! And now Mike and I are "in it" together 😁 

We have landed on the cover of a magazine! We did submit ourselves to this - after several months of viewing non-local families being featured in our residential-neighbourhood magazine available in print and delivered to our mailbox monthly, we decided to put our voices to task and contribute to the local publication and share our family story to save the reading masses from random United States etc. family features from flooding our mail. 

Simply enough, we contacted the College Heights (Prince George suburb we live in and love) magazine publisher Best Version Media to submit our story for local interest coverage. Lo and behold, they said "Yes! Fill out this questionnaire and we'll feature you!" And here we are. 

Mike Allan and I wrote every word of this article together:

(I'm pretty sure this supports my BC Citizenship application!!)

Words cannot express how grateful I am for this incredible man with whom I now share my life - he is my dream come true, literally! Mike - amazing human, my partner, I love you. 💖 I am SO grateful we are on this crazy path together. Your openness in sharing your cancer journey - and your life journey - with me is something I cherish deeply, identify with, and will always protect and hold dear. 

***

There is no link to a digital version of this article, so you'll have to bear with us on reading the pdf version scanned from the paper magazine. We are still giggling (and snuffling) over this whole thing, and are grateful for the many people who responded to our call for extra copies so that we can share the print magazine with our kids and family members. Thank you College Heights community - this is what it's all about! 

Please also note - our sweet sphynx cat Archer has the centrefold of the magazine, Save Your Skin Foundation is our chosen feature charity, and there is an honourable mention for my long-time pal Reese, the eternal blog dog 🤎

SO much love xoxoxoxo

Recent Media - it's still a family affair

For years Claire and Cass were by my side for awareness events and opportunities when we would share our story about how I was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma, and how it went from there for our family. Especially with Save Your Skin, we did many video and print advocacy pieces, often making the trip from Meaford to Toronto to meet with journalists and crews, SYSF staff, the La Roche-Posay team - anyone who would listen, really! - to raise the profile of skin cancer and the importance of early detection. The three of us were a melanoma-awareness-posse! And we had some great media hits in addition to my guest blogging for HuffPost, Her Magazine, Yahoo Canada, and others.

Claire and I on CTV News - Melanoma Monday, May 2016

In recent years the girls have taken a well-deserved break from that scene, and I placed all of my own advocacy and media attention under the Save Your Skin banner. 

Well... fast forward to the last two days - and Cass is now on CTV News as well! I've woken up at balls a.m. (stay tuned for more on my move from the centre of the universe Eastern Standard Time to Beautiful British Columbia Pacific Time LOL) to hold interviews with a couple of lovely media providers in Ontario to speak about the Sty-Lives (Styling Hair & Saving Lives) program.  And Cass, recently graduated from Marca College of Hair and Esthetics and now working at a swanky salon in downtown Toronto, jumped on board to help share the message. 

Early Monday morning we bravely prepared for a zoom interview together with two Physicians on CTV News Sudbury, and I'm proud to say Cass nailed it! She has a very firm grip on how to be successful in her chosen vocation and she works toward that goal every day, while maintaining her beliefs and bringing her personal experience to the job as well. Cass is an advisor on the Sty-Lives initiative, helping us shape it to be relevant to the Hair Professionals perspective. Of course she is also passionate about the program as it brings full circle our family's desire to increase melanoma skin cancer awareness. 

Enough of my talking about it - how about I just show you the interview recording!  :-)  Click here to watch:

The written article is also located at this link, though the video at the top hasn't yet been updated to our interview (at the time of this blog posting). An excerpt:

Toronto hairstylist Cassandra Richardson joined the initiative for a very personal reason, her mom is a skin cancer survivor. Richardson said she’s ready to help anyone who sits in her chair.

"I’m very passionate about prevention and early detection so this really means a lot to me in the fact that you can absolutely change someone’s life by simply doing your job," she said.

"It’s so easy with the instructional video that Miranda sent. Like it’s so easy to tell someone that 'you have a spot on your head, you should get checked out.' It doesn’t have to involve anything  more than that. Just that simple step of telling that person that it exists is just one step closer to saving their life."

Adding, "It’s just so easy. There’s just no excuse not to do it as a hairstylist."

Atta girl Cass!  #ProudMomma

In addition to the above coverage, Global News Radio 640 Toronto picked up the story on Tuesday, and I had the privilege of speaking with Kelly Cutrara about Sty-Lives and skin cancer detection. Check it out here:

The recent story of hockey fan and medical student Nadia Popovichi who alerted a Vancouver Canucks equipment manager about a cancerous mole she spotted on his neck while at a game has gone viral and is helping to highlight the importance of early detection.

I'd like to say thanks to these media networks for sharing news of the Sty-Lives program, and I am happy to report that registration from hair salons across the country is growing very rapidly!  I'll keep you updated on the progress, and in the meantime please feel free to share this link and video with your Hairstylist or Barber:   

https://saveyourskin.ca/sty-lives/

Thank You!

My work at SYSF, explained

A few years ago I posted about finding this group called Save Your Skin Foundation (SYSF), founded by BC-based melanoma survivor Kathy Barnard, and all about how Kathy and the SYSF team helped me through my cancer experience.  (Click here for a quick re-cap: "Queen's Park Yesterday")

Since that time I volunteer-blogged for SYSF, and was a Spokeperson for them at Ontario events and then nationally, until I felt well enough to go back to work, knowing I needed to do something meaningful with my career and help others the way SYSF had helped me. I badgered Kathy into hiring me part-time as a Project Coordinator, and off we went! 

I tested the employment waters for about eight months, got my legs back under me, and then moved into a full-on Director role in which I have been working for the past five years. As you know, that didn't leave me much time to write on my blog - but it's okay - I was able to pour all of my creativity and combined professional skills into my work at Save Your Skin, and I love it. Love working in this field, though stressful at times, I am proud of what we do, and I endlessly appreciate my mentor and friend, Kathy.  

Recently we were both interviewed for a joint article for AIM at Melanoma in the States, and this write-up took me right back to how I felt about Kathy and SYSF six years ago, and it is still how I feel today:

From Survivors to Advocates: Two Leaders are Pushing for Progress in Canada and Around the World

It is true that the Oncologists on our team joke with Kathy and I about how they help save melanoma patients and then Kathy hires them.  Kathy saved me - then she saved my career, and then she saved my love life LOL!  (More on that later - as I mentioned, Mike is a melanoma survivor and he has long been a Spokesperson for SYSF, and that is how we first met and became friends years ago. 😊 )

Many of my family and friends have asked me over the years "what IS your job?" 

I can explain. It is oncology patient support and advocacy across Canada. Helping patients like myself navigate the health care system, figure out - and access! - treatments, support them through the emotional and sometimes financial hardships of a skin cancer diagnosis, inform them about their disease and options, and simply in general BE there for them.

In the last five years, along with the Team and Board and Medical Advisory Board at Save Your Skin, I have supported the Foundation's work by:

• facilitating 14 educational webinars on melanoma, non-melanoma skin cancers, and ocular melanoma 
• hosting two fund raising Galas in Toronto, and one virtual one (since covid)
• attending the Canadian Melanoma Conference in Banff three times
• traveling around the world to attend conferences such as the Society for Melanoma Research Congress, European Post-ASCO Melanoma/Skin Cancer Meeting, CureOM Science Meetings and Patient Symposiums, Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer, European Society of Medical Oncology, and many more - next post is all about these! (Travel to all the conferences helps us learn all the latest news in skin cancer and advocate for the best treatments to come to Canada)
• representing SYSF and working with many Canadian and international groups to endorse and support work in the field of melanoma skin cancer research and support, including being on the cover of the newest National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN®) Patient Guide for Melanoma. True story:

• writing content and guiding awareness and support initiatives in all aspects for the SYSF community across Canada - annual Melanoma Awareness Month, Cancer Survivor Day, press releases, city proclamations, media opportunities, development and publishing of video productions, educational materials, blogs, newsletters, countless patient/caregiver meetings and roundtables, the list goes on...

Below are a bunch of photos of my work in the last five years.  

To kick those off I want to show you our newest video - among other items, most recently we launched a project about which I am very proud and excited: Sty-Lives - Styling Hair and Saving Lives.  (You may or may not know my Cass is a Hairstyling Apprentice, graduated from Marca College in Toronto, so she was a contributor on this project.)

Sty-Lives is being rolled out across the country by a team of Medical Student volunteers, plus our SYSF staff and supporters, to hair salons and barbershops for the education of hair professionals to help detect suspicious spots on clients' heads/ears/necks, encouraging them to seek an appointment with a Dermatologist for professional examination. All salons are eligible to register for this free program, so if you'd like more information or for me to mail you some materials for your salon, email me or let us know, here:

https://saveyourskin.ca/sty-lives/

And here is the video:

***

Collection of photos  - just some of the many friends I have made and experiences I've had along the way.  Enjoy!  

Giving Hope Gala

<--- oh and there's Mike! :-)

Move for Melanoma Annual Event

Global Coalition - Melanoma Research Foundation, U.S.

           ( and you might recognize this guy... --->  )

Conferences and Roundtables

MI-PAC - AIM at Melanoma, U.S.

And some random shots from over the years at the Cdn. Melanoma Conference at the Banff Springs Hotel:

And a random selection of our materials:

Thank you Save Your Skin Foundation, I love you! 

Save Your Skin Foundation (SYSF) is a patient-led organization dedicated to the fight against non-melanoma skin cancers, melanoma, and ocular melanoma through education, advocacy, and awareness initiatives across Canada. SYSF provides a community of oncology patient and caregiver support throughout the entire continuum of care, from prevention and diagnosis to survivorship.

How it went at OneWalk Toronto 2018

So I'm a bit delayed in posting about my experience at OneWalk Toronto with the team at La Roche-Posay Canada, but that's because I decided to write about it in a blog for Save Your Skin Foundation. It's worth the wait honestly - I'm still smiling about the whole thing.  :-) 

Below are some extra pics, but to the read the blog about it, please click here: 

SYSF Teams up with La Roche-Posay at OneWalk Toronto 2018

 

 Oh yes, here we are with Toronto Mayor John Tory

 Team LRP at the Finish!!

 

When things come full circle: OneWalk, Toronto

I'm having one of those days where everything seems ironic. In a good way.  This afternoon I am being interviewed for an article in the National Post, for a project that I have been working on behalf of Save Your Skin Foundation since last year.  We are working with the folks at Post Media to do a Spotlight on Immuno-oncology in the Patient Diaries series. 

Save Your Skin advocates for cancer patient access to life-saving immunotherapy treatments, and is helping to bring patients and the media together to shed light on this subject.  Patient Diaries is spotlighting some patient stories for the feature to run this Fall, so I shouldn't have been surprised when I got the call the other day asking if I would be willing to share my story for it.  Guess I kinda forgot I still am a melanoma patient (who received immunotherapy) - have been so busy living and working it didn't occur to me that they would want my story in there. LOL It will be neat to see this Spotlight come together from both sides, as a project manager from the inside, and as a patient interview on the outside.  Stay tuned for more info!

Another full-circle event is upcoming for me too - the OneWalk in downtown Toronto September 8, 2018.  Two years ago my dear friend Rhonda walked in my honour the fund raiser for melanoma research at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, when there was no way I could have walked that distance.  Just finishing my treatments at the time, I was struggling with side effects and a difficult emotional cancer battle, and I was incredibly moved that she did that for me.  

That's Rhonda :-) -->

Now I am feeling much better, and I have been invited to walk 15km downtown Toronto with a team that has been part of my life for several years. You may remember me talking about La Roche-Posay, the sunscreen and skin care brand who created the "Become A Skin Checker" campaign and invited me to share my story at their Toronto awareness events. 

This year La Roche-Posay graciously accepted my request to become an official sponsor of Save Your Skin Foundation, and they donated a whole bunch of their excellent sunscreen to us for distribution at our events.  We are building further on the relationship by my joining their OneWalk team this year, to raise money for melanoma research at Princess Margaret (at which Save Your Skin closely works with melanoma oncologists on a regular basis).  

In September La Roche-Posay Canada and I will join forces again, this time to raise $15,000 for melanoma research.  A very exciting prospect!!  Being as I have the honour of working directly with lead melanoma researchers at Princess Margaret, I can assure you personally that the funds go directly where they are supposed to go.  I fully support this endeavour, and I hope you will too.  

To donate to our team, please click here: 

OneWalk.ca/goto/Natalie_Richardson

Thank you! 

More about La Roche-Posay at OneWalk Toronto 2018:

La Roche-Posay is a skincare brand committed to preventing and fighting skin cancer. Recent studies indicate that of cancers diagnosed worldwide are a form of skin cancer, which is why our mission to provide a better life for sensitive skin is more than ever. Developed in collaborating with dermatologists and toxicologists, our products contain only the necessary ingredients, at the right active dose.

To further contribute to the cause, we introduced an annual public service campaign in 2017 with the mission to inform the public about the dangers of sun exposure and the importance of protecting your skin from UV rays. This year, we are taking our commitment one-step further. La Roche-Posay is proud to be an official partner for this year’s OneWalk to Conquer Cancer™, one of Canada’s life-changing cancer fundraising experiences. Every year, thousands of walkers unite to take the streets of Toronto and challenge themselves to walk and raise vital funds for cancer research and care at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. 

This year, La Roche-Posay will be walking 15 kilometers and raising $15,000, which will go directly towards melanoma research. These funds will go directly toward supporting the Princess Margaret Hospital’s world-leading clinicians and researchers to detect cancers earlier, diagnose with more precision, target treatment for each patient and support patients and their families throughout the cancer journey.

My involvement in Melanoma Month this year

On my fourth anniversary of diagnosis of advanced melanoma skin cancer (which is this week), I am reflecting on my experience, and that of those around me.  Above all, I am grateful for all of the support I have received, and I am motivated to carry forward that feeling.  That is why I do what I do, in working for Save Your Skin Foundation.  

I have told you lots about Save Your Skin and how they have helped me - just check the label to the right of this blog. I have also told Save Your Skin lots about how you have helped me... my family and friends in Ontario, who really floated this boat in those couple years where the water was extremely rough.  

I love you both, and my girls love you both. And now, by some bizarre miracle, I have the chance to connect you - my family and friends, with my Save Your Skin family and friends.  May 10, in melanoma awareness month, in Toronto, we are having a party. :-)   A big, kickass party.

If there is any way you may be interested in helping to support this event (that I am seriously devoted to) (for many reasons that I have already explained on this blog) (many times), I would love it.  Claire and Cass would love it, my co-workers would love it, and all of the patients we represent would love it.  

Tickets include delicious catering, yummy cocktails, a super fun night with a silent auction and entertainment, lots of hugs, and a sprinkling of updates on how awesome it is to be sun safe and melanoma patient supportive.  We're even launching a big project we've been working on, a lovely video of some patient friends who represent the work we do at Save Your Skin Foundation.  

Here is the link to the Eventbrite information page, for more details or to buy tickets: 

Save Your Skin Foundation Giving Hope Gala & Auction 2018

If you can't make it, I understand, but if there is anything you can or want to do to support the event, and you know I never ask for donations.. but if you wish to, you could do so here: 

SaveYourSkin.ca/donatenow/

Thank you