Growing up, my dad was always the one who burned to a crisp if he spent any time outdoors.

It seems odd, then, that he never got any kind of skin cancer.

My mother’s family, on the other hand … every six months my grandfather would joke about getting a group discount for all the leopards getting their spots removed at once. I got my first cancer scraped off my cheek at age 28 (right after I started a new job where everyone knew me as ‘that girl with the bandage,’ so that was fun). But these were minor issues. Basal cell, precancer, la la.

And then, some time back in the aughts, my mom got melanoma. I didn’t find out until after the fact; my family has an extremely bad habit of waiting to see if surgery kills them before they tell you anything is going on. So by the time I was informed that she had a problem, she’d already gone the van Gogh route and had a chunk of her ear lopped off.

Previously, I had not spent much time looking at my mother’s ears, but I did on the next visit. And you have to look really closely to tell anything was done—much closer than anyone should really be looking at anyone else’s ears. The surgeon was excellent.

But that certainly put the fear of god in her. My mother—who smokes two packs a day and drinks two booze drinks every night, who refuses to see a doctor unless she can’t stand up, who taught me that potato chips and onion dip were a viable option for dinner—this woman sees a dermatologist like clockwork.

It’s one of maybe three practices of hers that I would heartily recommend to all of you. (The other two? Get lots of exercise chasing your dogs around and drink at least a half-gallon of water a day.)

Mortality rates tied to melanoma have gone way down. But it’s still a possibility. Get your scalp checked!