At the start of the week, India Hicks expected nothing more dramatic than a routine checkup. What she found instead was something that quietly shook her world. The 58-year-old designer and former model shared on her Substack that her results “were not great.” Not devastating, she said, but troubling enough to make the edges of daily life feel unsteady.
A fast-moving patch of skin cancer had appeared on her lower calf. Hicks described the moment with a disarming honesty. A strange mix of calm, of making tea, answering emails, pretending things were fine, while a quiet internal voice whispered the darker possibilities.
She had been looking forward to a rare stretch at home, a week without airports or queues or lost chargers. Life, she wrote, had other plans. After hours of calls and research, she flew to Miami to undergo Mohs surgery, a meticulous procedure that removes cancerous cells one layer at a time. The part she found hardest was the waiting, sitting with an open incision while the sample travelled to the pathology lab and time slowed to a crawl.
