Worcester firefighter Ryan Kelley had a scab on his temple for two years that never really healed.
He hadn’t done anything about it, when his whole truck decided to attend a free cancer screening held by DetecTogether and UMass Memorial Health at Polar Park last year.
When doctors from UMass saw the scab, they told Kelley it looked like basal cell skin cancer. He worked with them to schedule a biopsy for the next morning. The biopsy revealed it was a tumor and it was skin cancer.
They scheduled the surgery to remove the tumor a month later and now Kelly is cancer-free and goes for cancer screenings every six months. Had they not had the free screening, Kelley said, he would probably still have a tumor.