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Lessons from a life at sea

Dan Waterman was 26 and a freshly minted ensign in the Navy when he noticed the first lesion on his forehead. He got it checked and was surprised to learn he had cancer.

Luckily, it was a basal cell growth, what doctors call the “best” kind of skin cancer because it’s relatively easy to treat. Still, it threw Waterman for a loop.

“It freaked me out,” Waterman said. “It looked like someone put a .45-caliber slug in my head.”

Thirty-two years later, he’s a retired captain but an active schoolteacher. Waterman said he sees it as part of his job to scare his students out of the sun and tanning beds.

He has good reason to be worried about them. After getting 30-some cancerous growths removed from his head, neck, back and arms, he knows firsthand the dangers of the sun. “My back looks like it’s been peppered with shrapnel,” he said.

He said he attributes much of the damage to regular childhood trips to the beach, where his fair skin would burn easily. But a life at sea didn’t help either.

“After that first wake-up call, I became very proactive when it came to sun protection, but when you’re in the middle of flight operations for hours at a time and have to have headgear off, you can do a lot of damage,” he said.

That’s why every spring he breaks out a grisly slideshow of his sun wounds and gives his students one of his favorite lessons. “It grosses them out, but that’s the point. I want them to know what the real cost can be,” he said.