Growing up, Teddi Mellencamp was just an American kid doin’ the best she can.
“It’d be summer and I’d be like, ‘I need to get my first burn so then I could tan,'” The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alum reflected in an exclusive interview with E! News. “But, at that same time, we ate Pop Tarts every morning for breakfast. We didn’t know any better, right?”
Nor was she all that aware of sun safety when someone mentioned the spots on her back were changing.
“I just assumed that all melanoma looked the same,” she acknowledged. “And I was like, ‘Well, my spots are red,’ or, ‘They’re this. It’s probably this.’ And just did all this self-diagnosis, which is really nothing, just avoidance.”
Even when she received her stage 2 melanoma diagnosis just days before BravoCon in 2022, “I remember thinking, ‘Okay, well, after this surgery, it means I’ll be done,'” admitted the 43-year-old of downplaying the severity of her skin cancer. “And then every time I would go back, there was something more, there was something more severe, there was another.”