I was diagnosed with stage 4 skin cancer at age 22, even though I had no visible moles or marks and had never tanned.

When Mariena Browning, of Pocatello, Idaho, was 22, she was in the best shape of her life and busy thinking about other things — ready to buy a house and start a family with her husband.

A few weeks later, she discovered she had stage 4 melanoma, even though she had no moles or marks on her body.

This led to three years of painful treatment – ​​which left his eyes yellow, caused him to get a nasty colon infection and changed his life forever.

Browning, now 28 and a new mother, wants people to know the risks they take when they forgo daily sunscreen use, and wants people to know that you can get melanoma without never have a mole.

“Now that I know how crummy and intense melanoma and its treatment can be, I’m a huge advocate for sun safety, using sunscreen, and having annual skin checks with a dermatologist, even though mine doesn’t “Didn’t present himself in a more traditional way,” Ms. Browning told SELF magazine.

Melanoma is a type of skin cancer that affects the cells in your skin that produce the brown pigment that gives skin its tan or brown color.

About 1.4 million Americans live with the disease.

Most often, people discover they have skin cancer when they develop a strange spot on their skin or when a mole they previously had begins to change shape, color, or size.

Browning was among the 3% of skin cancer patients who do not have a “primary site” that doctors could use to identify their skin cancer.

When detected early, melanoma is easily treatable. But for Ms Browning, it was allowed to grow silently, spreading from her skin to her lymph nodes, where doctors first discovered it as a lump in her leg in 2018.

They initially diagnosed him with stage 3, indicating that his cancer had started to spread.

She attempted to participate in a clinical trial in the hope that it would work faster than other treatments. Just before she began the experimental treatment, her doctors delayed her to check a new tumor on her stomach.

During the time she was delayed — just a few hours — the trial was halted because it was causing harmful side effects, which she called “divine intervention.”

The delay also brought bad news: The new tumor on her stomach was cancerous, which officially meant she had stage 4 cancer – even more advanced than initially thought.

This has significantly reduced its survival rate: around eight out of ten patients diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma die within five years.

Four days after her new diagnosis, Ms Browning underwent invasive surgery to remove all of her lymph nodes from her left groin, the lump in her stomach and a lump in her neck.

In November 2018, she started oral chemotherapy, which involved taking 18 tablets a day for nine months.

Months later, when she went to the bathroom, all that came out was blood – which “looked like a murder scene” and made her pass out. It turns out she contracted a serious bacterial infection that ravaged her colon.

“I don’t even have words to express what a stressful and scary time this has been,” she said.

She recovered from the infection, but discovered in October 2019 that her cancer had spread to her brain. She therefore had to undergo radiotherapy.

After that, she received steroid treatment that made her irritable and hungry and treated temporary but alarming liver problems that caused her to develop bright yellow eyes with jaundice.

Finally, in February 2020, she learned that her doctors had not detected any tumors in her body.

She stopped treatment completely in October 2021.

Since this news, she has moved on with her life, finally returning to some of the things she had set her sights on before the diagnosis.

In June 2023, she and her husband had a baby girl named Kiya.

Kiya has been an “absolute blessing” to Ms Browning, partly because it is difficult for newer cancer patients to conceive.

Through it all, she has maintained a positive attitude and wants to use what she has learned to raise awareness about melanoma among other young people.

“I would still like more than anything to raise awareness about melanoma,” she shared in a 2021 Instagram post, “and help women know that even though sometimes your world is turned upside down, it is still possible to find happiness and like my grandfather always said “keep smiling” even if you feel like life isn’t fair or you’re so far behind everyone.”