Khloe Kardashian has spoken candidly about her skin cancer journey after getting a melanoma spot removed from her cheek.
“For those who do not know I had a skin cancer scare on my face,” she wrote on her Instagram story on Tuesday 19 September, referencing the 2022 event. “Not that we needed the arrow to show the huge indentation on the side of my face but because we had to remove a tumour from my cheek, I was Ieft with an indention,” she added as she showed off a close-up version of the indent.
“I am definitely not complaining because I would rather have an indention than melanoma any day,” she continued. “I am so incredibly grateful to all the doctors who helped and continue to help me with my skin cancer journey.”
Melanoma is a type of skin cancer that can spread to other areas of the body, according to the NHS. The main cause of melanoma is ultraviolet light, which comes from the sun and which is used in sunbeds.
Kardashian also went on to thank her surgeon, Dr Garth Fischer, for removing her tumour in October 2022.
“Not only did he remove the tumour and made sure that I am completely cancer free but he did such a f***ing stellar job on making my scar as small and beautiful as possible,” she wrote on her Instagram Stories.
The Good American co-owner went on to share before and after images of her cheek while also revealing that she would be getting the indentation filled with cosmetic injections. Next to the before image, Kardashian wrote, “This is my indentation before my Armenian tribe helped fill my cheek with the okay from Dr Fischer. I waited over nine months to get this filled by the way. Patience is everything and of course we have to make sure medically everything is all safe.”
She also showed her followers what her cheek looked like “after one round of injections”.
“I look insane in these pics but I’m just happy that my face is slowly coming back together ha! I don’t even know how else to word this,” the reality star wrote.
Kardashian then used her platform to encourage people to get checked for skin cancer every year. “I never imagined that this tiny spec would turn into skin cancer and I can’t fathom what could have possibly happened had I not gone to the doctor to get it looked at,” she wrote.
“Praise the Lord for covering me and thank you to everyone who was a part of my journey. It’s an ongoing one!”
When Kardashian first noticed the mark on her face, she originally thought it was a zit, she explained during an episode of her family’s Hulu series, The Kardashians.
“Khloe has a little bit of a history with melanoma and cancerous lesions, so this on her face is very concerning to me,” Khloe’s mother Kris Jenner, 67, says to her sister Kylie Jenner, 25, during the episode.
Kylie responded at the time that her older sister had “this little bump and she was trying to remove it, and she’s like: ‘it just won’t go away,’ so to find out it’s melanoma is obviously really scary and I just hope that everything’s gonna be okay.”
Kardashian decided to have a biopsy on the bump on her face, despite thinking it was a “zit”.
“I have done one biopsy on this bump that I just assumed was a zit, turns out it’s not a zit,” she said during the episode. “It’s melanoma and for my age, it’s incredibly rare.”
