May is Melanoma Awareness Month, and a clever and highly effective video PSA supporting melanoma awareness has been making the rounds on Facebook and elsewhere. It’s called Dear 16-Year-Old Me, and it features people affected by melanoma “talking” to their younger selves about what’s to come, and how they could have avoided or lessened the impact of this potentially devastating form of cancer.
One of the participants is Adam Perzow, a partner at Minden Gross. Like the other people who appear in the video, Adam’s first message to his younger self is a hilarious, random piece of advice:
Dear 16-year-old me: There’s going to be a new set of Star Wars movies. Don’t watch them. They ruin everything.
But we soon learn about Adam and the other participants’ experiences with melanoma — when they were diagnosed, where the cancer appeared, the treatment they had to undergo and what their lives are like today.
The video ends by encouraging viewers to share this message with a 16-year-old they know, in the hope of raising awareness about what young people can do to decrease their risk of developing melanoma later in life.
Precedent salutes Adam and the other brave participants who faced this disease and shared their stories with us.