A teenager has opened up about being diagnosed with Stage three melanoma at 15 after "doctors dismissed symptoms as a sign of puberty."
Samuel Gee is reflecting on the life-altering moment that led to a shocking diagnosis: stage 3 melanoma. And it all started with a mole he’d had since childhood.
Gee told Today.com that the mole had always been there, sitting on his back.
But it wasn’t until he was 15 when a referee at one of his matches in 2020 spotted it and said he should “get it checked out” that he finally saw a dermatologist.
What followed was a biopsy - and the devastating discovery that the mole was cancerous.
“I was definitely surprised,” Gee, now 19, told the outlet. “I was in shock.”
The cancer diagnosis came with even more alarming context. Over the years, the mole had changed, something Gee hadn’t paid much attention to. He said the spot “looked like it was drying out” and “gradually [became] raised” - a red flag symptom of melanoma.
But it wasn’t the mole itself that initially had him concerned. It was swelling in his right leg that he believed was something else entirely.
“I thought it was an inguinal hernia,” he explained, referring to a condition where tissue protrudes through weak spots in the abdominal muscles.
A pediatric surgeon checked it out - but the conclusion, at the time, was far less serious.
“He was like, ‘It’s not a inguinal hernia, but likely [an] swollen lymph node,’” Gee said. “He’s like, ‘It’s just from puberty… Come back in a few weeks if it hasn’t gone away.’”
As it turns out, the swollen node was no puberty side effect. Doctors later discovered it was linked to the melanoma, which had already started spreading.
That diagnosis marked the beginning of a difficult treatment journey. Gee underwent immunotherapy, a powerful cancer treatment that he described as manageable.
“I would get fatigued a little bit. It would make me nauseous,” he said. “It was a very day-to-day thing. Some days I would feel fantastic. Some days I would feel like I needed to throw up or I was really tired.”
After initial rounds of immunotherapy, Gee went into surgery to remove both the melanoma and the affected lymph nodes.
He continued treatment post-op, and eventually got the words every cancer patient hopes to hear: he was officially declared “disease free.”
Now a college student studying engineering at Texas A&M, Gee is all about prevention.
“I’m all about the sunscreen now,” he told Today. “I hope people will start wearing their sunscreen. That’s really what I want to get across is wear sunscreen, don’t tan on purpose.”
The experience has also changed how he sees the world - and his health.
“It’s very important that we take care of ourselves, and I think a lot of young people neglect that,” he said. “I have a new perspective on life.”