Woman’s Toe Amputated To Stop Melanoma

Pedicurists kept asking Yvonne Basil about a dark spot on her pinky toe, but she would tell them what she believed herself: It was just a mole.

The charcoal-colored mark — about the size of a pencil eraser and located on the skin under that toe nail — didn’t bother her and it was out of sight, out of mind, Basil said.

The spot had appeared a few months earlier and even when it grew a little bigger and spread, she still didn’t think it was concerning — certainly not that it could be skin cancer.

“My mindset was basically that it couldn’t happen to me. I just thought my skin is dark enough and the sun can’t harm it,” Basil, 57, who lives in Dallas, Texas, told TODAY.

So when she decided to get checked out by a dermatologist as a way to use the money left in her flexible spending account, she was shocked when he immediately flagged the spot as a suspected melanoma — the deadliest type of skin cancer.

One week after a biopsy confirmed the diagnosis, doctors amputated Basil’s pinky toe on her right foot to stop the cancer from spreading.

“It just totally took me just by surprise,” she said. “It just didn’t register — I can’t say that enough.”

Melanoma on the extremities — nails, hands and feet — is the rarest subtype of the skin cancer, accounting for less than 5% of all melanomas, said Dr. Vishal Patel, assistant professor of dermatology at the George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences, when TODAY profiled another Black patient with a melanoma on the foot.

But it makes up about a third of all the melanomas that African Americans, Indians, Asians and other people with darker skin develop, which is a ten-fold increase compared to the general population, he noted.

“Patients say, ‘I have dark skin, I don’t have to worry about melanoma.’ This answer is no, this is exactly the type of melanoma we worry about,” Patel said.

This type of cancer — called acral lentiginous melanoma — tends to be more aggressive than other melanomas.

Singer Bob Marley died at the age of 36 after being diagnosed with the disease. He believed a dark spot that appeared under his toenail was due to a soccer injury, when it was actually acral lentiginous melanoma, according to the Skin Cancer Foundation.

Anyone can get skin cancer, the American Academy of Dermatology warned. It has photos of what the disease can look like in patients with black and brown skin.

When checking suspicious spots, it’s important to remember the ABCDEs of melanoma. A vertical dark streak on a nail can be among the warning signs.

Basil’s cancer had not spread to other parts of her body when it was caught in 2015, so she didn’t need further treatment.

She had to wear a special boot for a couple of weeks after the toe amputation to keep her balanced. It took a couple of months for the executive assistant to be able to scrunch her toes in a regular shoe. She’s now completely used to not having a pinky toe on her right foot.

Sun exposure is not thought to play a significant part in the development of acral lentiginous melanoma — rather, genetic factors or other unknown reasons may be at play, according to the National Library of Medicine.

Still, Basil is vigilant about using sunscreen and seeking shade.

“I can’t stress it enough, especially people of color, to take this seriously. It’s no joke,” she said. “You think it won’t happen to you, which is what I thought, too. But it can definitely happen.”