DEBORAH HUTTON The scars that heal

When Deborah Hutton was rushed in for surgery on a facial skin cancer, she was shocked to hear it had been caught “just in time”. She tells Juliet Rieden about the wake-up call we all need to heed.

- Juliet Rieden

It feels strange to meet up with Deborah Hutton and not be greeted by her usual smile. But smiles are not possible at the moment. Deborah’s face is a swollen, dull yellow on one side, strained and painful with a Band-Aid stretching from her nose down her cheek. The dressing covers a gaudy wound and as we settle down to talk about her unexpected cancer surgery she can’t help but shield her lip with her hand, an involuntary protection instinct.

When I ask what her face looks like underneath the dressing, Deb pulls out her phone and shows me a photo taken a couple of days ago by the nurse before she removed the stitches too numerous to count. It’s a raw, arresting shot revealing a meandering oval-shaped angry scar crisscrossed with stitches mapping out the edges of the skin flap that was lifted in surgery and then sewn back in place. The affected area is surprisingly large, tracing right down along the top and corner of Deborah’s lip.

When she shared the photo on Instagram expressing her relief and gratitude that “they’ve got it all”, it sparked an unprecedented outpouring of support from more than 7000 people from all over Australia.

“I um-ed and ah-ed about doing that. Instagram is the only social media I use and then only if I want to say something. But it shocked me to see my face after the surgery and I thought, I want people to see this because there’s an ugliness to skin cancer that frightens the s*** out of you. It has certainly frightened me. But what’s more frightening is if you just sweep it under the carpet and put your head in the sand. I got a real wake-up call.”