LET’S TALK ABOUT… SUN PROTECTION

“I’ve had dozens of surgeries in the last 10 years – and they’ve all come because of the amount of time I’ve spent outdoors.” Kimberley Conte had never thought much about the risk of skin cancer. “No one in my family had a history of it and I don’t burn easily, so I thought I would be immune from it. I didn’t take it seriously at all.” But then, in 2010, she was diagnosed with a very small basal cell carcinoma between her lip and her nose. At first, she had the affected area of skin frozen using a technique called cryotherapy, a proven means of destroying cancerous cells.

“‘No big deal’ was my attitude,” reflects the Australian, who is a race director of the Women’s Tour Down Under, “but what I couldn’t see was the cancer still growing under the scar tissue where it had been frozen, and it kept returning. Since then, I have had multiple surgeries, including graft surgery and a full reconstruction of the tissue between my nose and my upper lip, including a