Vanderpump Rules Star Ariana Madix Shares Her Melanoma Journey
If you watch Vanderpump Rules, you’ll find Ariana Madix behind the bar at Lisa Vanderpump’s famed West Hollywood eatery, Sur. You’ll see her jetting off to Mexico and Vegas alongside castmates like Jax Taylor, Stassi Schroeder, and boyfriend Tom Sandoval and constantly engaging in all the dramatic antics that viewers love the show for. But if you look closer at the footage, you might notice a pink scar across her chest. This is from a life-saving surgery that the reality star had where a doctor removed Stage 1 melanoma from her body. The incident was an eye-opener for Madix, who spent her youth in the Florida sun and admits to hopping into tanning beds in order to keep a constant glow.
But eventually her sun habits caught up with her and in 2018, Madix found herself facing a scary health situation. Fortunately, she caught it early, had everything successfully removed, and has been granted a bill of clean health. The experience changed her outlook on sun safety and she’s now glad to be able to raise awareness about melanoma, something that she herself knew very little about until she found herself unexpectedly diagnosed with it.
Ariana Madix' Melanoma Journey
A sun-filled past
I'm from Florida, so I was at the beach in the sun all the time. The sun is very strong there. It's completely different than it is in California or anywhere else I've ever been. And when I was in high school, because I just really needed to be extra tan, I would go to the tanning bed like three or four times a week. I would go all the time because that's kind of how it was there. Everybody had to be tan. That was the trend. That was the cute thing to be. I tan very well. I do not burn. I guess when you don't know anything about skin cancer, you think, “Well, I don't ever get a sunburn. So of course I should be fine.” Because you think a sunburn is where you get it from. So I went on and on my whole life. I would wear sunscreen but of course not in a tanning bed.
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A suspicious mole
I have moles and freckles on my body. They are fine, but there was one on my chest that was darker. I didn't have health insurance so if I absolutely needed to see a doctor about something, I would be like, “Oh, and by the way. Is this OK?” And they'd be like, “Well if it's not growing or changing, you're fine. Monitor it and see if it grows or if it starts changing shape or color.” And I was like, “OK.” And so it grew, but it grew so slowly that I was like, “Well, is that what they mean? I don't know.” And again, I didn't have health insurance. I couldn't just be going into doctors all the time and asking them questions.
After being on the show for a few seasons and starting to kind of become a little bit more financially secure, I got health insurance and I was like, “You know what? I have a couple of questions. I'm just gonna make an appointment with a dermatologist and see what he says about all of these things.” So I go in there and he was like, “I want you to get this taken off today.” And I was like, “Are you kidding?” He was like, “Yeah, I have a doctor in Beverly Hills. He's great. He’ll see you right now. I just went and called him and if you drive over to his office, he will see you right now and you can get this taken off and I think you should do that.” I was like, “Oh shit. OK.” So I had it taken off that day. They biopsied it. I had to come back in and they were like, “You have Stage 1 melanoma. It is the most dangerous form of skin cancer and one of the most dangerous forms of cancer period.” They were like, “We caught it early.” They go by thickness and I guess the thickness was not that bad, and was like, “This is crazy. This has been on my body for so long.”
So they caught it and I had to have a surgery where they inject this stuff into where the cancer was and then they see where goes, which lymph nodes. I had lymph nodes removed from under my left arm, and then I also had a pretty large area of skin taken out of my chest. But they did a pretty good job of keeping the scar kind of linear.
Life post-melanoma surgery
I see an oncologist every six months and he does a full body check now. He told me I don't have any other spots as of right now, so that's good. And he told me one of the most eye-opening things that I learned in the process. He told me that whatever is on your skin is from 20 years ago. And I was like, “Well, 20 years ago I was in high school and that was when I was going to a tanning bed all the time.” And he said, “ Being in a tanning bed accelerates these types of things like crazy.” So he's like, “You might not have to deal with this ever again for the rest of your life if you're not being in a tanning bed.” He said, “Be responsible in the sun, but at the same time, just know that if you do something now, well 20 years from now when you are in your fifties, that's when you'll see it.” I had always thought if you did something, it would show up way sooner. So I guess I just was living in this world of just blissful ignorance.
Something else that really I learned in the process was that when you go to a doctor, I feel like you really kind of have to push for what you think. If you have a gut feeling that there's something that's not right, you have to speak up about it. When we're kids, we just think, “Oh, you go to the doctor and the doctor's in charge and they know everything.” But they are people too. And I think that we are paying them and it’s our body and we have to be really kind of in their face a little bit sometimes when it comes to making sure that they're taking our issues seriously. Because I think there were like three or four occasions where I had gone in to see doctors and showed them this mole and they were like, “Oh, that's probably fine.” And I'm like, “OK.”And of course, if someone says you're probably fine, you want to be fine, so you're gonna be like, “Well, they said it’s fine. So I’m good.”
Related: Hollywood Publicist Wendy Zocks Shares Her Incredible Story of Surviving Metastatic Melanoma
Staying safe in the sun
Nowadays, I just try to be responsible. I was also told by my oncologist that anything above SPF 30 is a waste of your money and it’s a scam. So I just use a SPF 30 on my face. It's actually cute. It's a tinted moisturizer/sunscreen of SPF 30. I wear a hat. I just think “am I going to just go sit out there and bake?” My oncologist told me that you don't have to stay out of the sun. You just have to be kind of smart about it. And I think I'm just more conscious now of what I'm doing. I certainly will never go to a tanning bed ever again in my life! And when I have friends that I see who still go in tanning beds, I'm like, “You have got to stop. It’s so bad!”
What the mole looked like
Well, it was dark. I have to say it was very dark. It’s so funny because these things are small, so it wasn't like a crazy irregular shape. It was pretty round. But when a doctor really looked at it, they would see things that I didn't see that are like millimeters difference, like “it's a little longer here by one or two millimeters,” which to my eye looking in the mirror, I was like,” Oh, it's just round.” But it was definitely very dark. And my other moles and freckles on my body are not. So I feel like maybe if it was like more normal for me to have that, then fine. But it was very unique in that way. It was about the size of the bottom of a pencil, like an eraser. It was kind of like that, maybe a little bit bigger.
Dodging a bullet
The doctors told me that it spreads so fast usually. They were like, “We want to be really aggressive with this.” If I didn't take care of it when I took care of it, it would have just gotten thicker, gotten worse. And then who knows what happens? It could have spread to other parts of the body, getting in your bloodstream, all of those things that that are everybody's worst nightmare. So, maybe it wouldn't have happened overnight, but it definitely would have happened.
Viewers even noticed
What’s crazy is people would sometimes hit me up on social media after watching the show and say, “I'm a dermatologist in Minnesota and I really think that you should get that checked.” People would watch the show and point it out! It was already kind of on the back of my mind, but I was like, “But these doctors said that I was fine, so everybody leave me alone.” But then you have that nagging voice in your head that just tells you it's not fine. You can totally see it when you watch older episodes of the show. And it’s funny; if I'm going to post a #TBT and I'm going through old photos. I'm like, “Oh there it is. Just chilling.” It’s like that show The Devil Inside Me. Fans do a lot of weird things (laughs), but that one at least was helpful! I'm glad it's OK and I feel like there's a learning experience that came out in a positive way. Sometimes people aren't that lucky. So I really did learn a lot about what it means to be an adult woman in this world of “it's not my mom taking me to the doctor.” And I learned to listen to my intuition and advocate for myself.
Going forward
I’m thankful that I’m healthy and able to focus on new endeavors, like my upcoming book.
Check out these surprising facts about melanoma.
