I’m a 43-year-old mom with terminal cancer – this is the fatal mistake I made in my 20s

A mother of three diagnosed with stage four skin cancer is urging young people not to make the same mistake she did in her twenties.

Claire Turner, 43, was diagnosed with malignant melanoma of the skin in January, learning the disease had spread to her liver, thighs, lymph nodes and shoulders.

“I used sunbeds and got sunburned trying to get a tan,” Turner, who hails from Oxfordshire, England, told Kennedy News.

The Briton says she is now making it her mission to make people aware of the dangers of sunbeds and other forms of UV exposure.

“Sun damage caused my cancer, it could have been avoided,” she said. “It’s about protecting and taking care of your skin before anything shows up. Fake tans don’t last and real tans don’t, but which is safer?

Turner says she first sought medical treatment after experiencing pain in her right shoulder last December.

Doctors initially believed it was a torn ligament, but the accountant became concerned a few weeks later when she noticed a slight swelling in her shoulder.

After having an MRI scan, Turner was referred to a sarcoma unit and faced an agonizing wait over Christmas waiting for a diagnosis.

“It was terrible, it was just terrible, I expected the worst,” she recalls. “I went down the Google rabbit hole. It’s the worst thing you can do when you have a potential diagnosis hanging over you. I was in the depths of despair.”

Alas, Turner’s worst fears were confirmed. She had cancer – and it was advanced.

“I was just blacked out. It threw me aside, I was just shocked,” she declared emotionally. “I left knowing it was stage four.”

The mum was given three rounds of immunotherapy to shrink her tumours, but had to stop in August after it caused inflammation in her pituitary gland and optic nerve.

A scan that same month revealed that some of the spread had spread to the lungs.

“They rented me out, I didn’t find out earlier,” she said. “I think if I had known, I wouldn’t have gasped right away, but it would have been panic and anxiety and not cancer.”

While treatments have slowed the spread and even made some of her tumors disappear, Turner is taking each day as it comes.

And despite the uncertainty, she’s still getting to enjoy some sunshine — with care.

“I still sit in the sun, but I will sit in the shade,” she said, urging others to take cover. “I’ll wear a hat or I won’t have bare shoulders. It’s just knowing.”