Is skin cancer surgery your best option when you’re told “you have skin cancer”?

Let me tell you what happened to me 20 yrs ago. I discovered a small lump on the side of my neck and went to a doctor to find out what it was. He didn’t recognize it as skin cancer and told me to go home and if it didn’t go away to come back.

About a month later I went back because it started growing and swelling up. He referred me to another doctor and I was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma.

The doctors wanted to perform skin cancer surgery right away and I suddenly became overwhelmed with emotion and decisions. I wasn’t ready to just let them start cutting on me unless I knew it was very necessary.

I knew nothing,… nothing about the disease,… nothing about the stages of cancer, I only knew that it is CANCER. I didn’t have a clue what kind of questions I should be asking.

We didn’t have the internet then, and no one really sat down with my wife and me to inform us about this type of cancer and why it would be so necessary to perform surgery.

Some of you may not understand my way of thinking, but I’ve always been very oriented to getting rid of the cause, rather than the symptom, to eliminate the problem.

So I was inclined to believe that I may be able to beat this from within by eating natural whole foods. That was something I knew more about than skin cancer surgery or conventional medicine.

The end result was that I changed to a very healthy lifestyle, but still had to undergo, chemotherapy, surgery and radiation.

The surgery I went through ended up being very extensive. It was a bilateral radical neck dissection.


I can’t go back and change any of that now and I can only speculate on what I should have done and what the result may have been by doing things differently.

I can only say that if I had known then, what I know now about skin cancer, I would have done things differently.

Number one is, I would have recognized the signs of skin cancer as I do now and I would have been suspicious of the small lump.

When I went to the doctor for the very first time, I would have asked to have a biopsy done right then.

If the biopsy showed positive I would have allowed a skin cancer surgeon to remove the cancerous tissue immediately.

To prevent recurrence I still would have changed to a healthy lifestyle to keep a strong immune system against all disease. I continue to do this today.

So the answer for me, I believe is yes, immediate surgery would have been my best option.

Below is some researched information about the actual skin cancer surgery itself.

Be aware and catch it in the earliest stage and you won't have to undergo the extensive surgery that I did.

Skin Cancer Surgery

If it is found to be cancerous then it must be removed by a surgical procedure. If not removed it can continue to grow under the skin and cause much harm. It may even spread to other body parts and organs.

During surgery the doctor will scrape out all of the cancerous tissue. To be sure all of the cancerous tissue is removed the doctor will cut further around the hole with a margin of normal skin to about 1/8 of an inch. The normal skin tissue is sent to a pathologist to be sure that all of the cancer has been removed.

If the pathologist still finds some cancer, the doctor will have to come back about a week later and remove more tissue. Chances of having to do the second removal are about 1 in 20. There’s a chance of about 1 in 100 that it would need to be done a third time to remove all of the cancer.

You will be left with a scar and it takes about 6 months to 1 year to see its final appearance.

In some cases you may need some skin cancer reconstruction performed to improve the appearance.


If your skin cancer surgery has to be performed on your face area, you may want to learn about Mohs microscopic surgery. The surgery is confined to a smaller area without removing any of the healthy tissue. This improves chances of a greater cosmetic appearance. It has up to a 99% success rate.

For melanoma skin cancer, complete surgical removal is the most common treatment. The lymph nodes may also need to be removed in stages 2 and 3.

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