Teddi Mellencamp Arroyave is detailing her ongoing melanoma struggle, sharing that she’s had her sixteenth melanoma removed.
The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alum, 43, posted an update to her Instagram stories as she was headed to have the cancerous mole removed.
Mellencamp Arroyave, who had her head on a pillow in a car, explained that “because I can’t stand going under anesthesia, the method we’re doing for this one is a little pain medication prior.” She added that it explained her “current state.”
“Then they do local anesthesia and then they do the removal,” she explained, sharing that she would go home to recover, “which I thoroughly enjoy.”
However, she said the hardest part of having a melanoma removed without general anesthesia is “that first shot.”
“I don’’t know why, it always makes me so emotional. It hurts,” she shared. “I’m trying to keep you guys all in the mix and in the know.”
Keeping everyone in the know has been a mission of hers, as Mellencamp Arroyave has been vocal about her ongoing melanoma journey, encouraging her followers to get skin checks, posting Zoom calls with her dermatologist — and on Sept. 4, she shared photos of what her shoulder looked like before being diagnosed with melanoma so people could see how her skin looked before.
“These pink spots turned light brown,” she wrote, then shared another photo of “the initial mole I got removed.”
She circled the spot — a small, irregular brown splotch — which she said was “the first of my 16 melanomas. This one was stage 2.”
“And when I went for my three-month check, they found another one,” she said over a video of herself at the Angeles Clinic. “This is number 16. So grateful to these incredible doctors.”
In December, the podcaster — she co-hosts Two Ts In a Pod with Tamra Judge — showed a large scar on her back, the result of having her thirteenth melanoma removed.
As VeryWell Health says, melanoma is “not as common as other forms of skin cancer, [but] it is the most dangerous. It can spread quickly to other organs if not detected early enough.”
“Early treatment is essential,” the outlet says. “If melanoma is found and treatment begins when it is confined to the primary tumor on the skin, the five-year survival rate is excellent, at 99.6%. But if it has spread to distant parts of the body (metastasized), the survival rates drop to around 35.1%”
She shared a video after the surgery, saying “they took quite a big chunk out of my arm.”
They also found “a little place on my ear,” Mellencamp Arroyave said, showing off a bandage at the top of her ear.
“Be an advocate for your health,” she had said before the procedure. “Get your skin checked.”