Baseball Great Johnny Bench Had Skin Cancer Surgery

Hall of Fame baseball legend Johnny Bench,64,who was the Cincinnati Reds' star catcher in the 1970s,is promoting skin cancer awareness in Major League Baseball's Play Sun Smart campaign.Bench has quite a bit of personal experience with the topic,as he himself was recently diagnosed? with,and successfully treated for,basal cell carcinoma,the most common form of skin cancer.It was found on his lower eyelids.
The problem with skin cancer is,you can easily overlook it,just dismissing those small lesions on your face or elsewhere on your body.It often takes a dermatologist to determine just what those bumps,moles or rough patches really are.They could be malignant or precancerous,even though they may not look particularly menacing to the naked eye.At his doctor's suggestion,Johnny Bench had those little bumps on his lower eyelids biopsied by a specialist.When they turned out?to be basal cell carcinomas,he underwent highly sophisticated surgery called Mohs surgery,in which the surgeon basically?slices off minute layers of skin cells,checking each layer under a microscope until there are no more cancerous cells left.This preserves more of the surrounding healthy tissue.
Bench fully recovered from his January operation,but he wants to make sure others don't have to go through the ordeal of skin cancer.He committed himself to the MLB skin cancer awareness program,appearing in a Play Sun Smart?video with Harlem youths.Play Sun Smart is a joint project of Major League Baseball;the Major League Baseball Players' Association;and the American Academy of Dermatology.

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