Teddi Mellencamp has been open about her cancer journey since she was first diagnosed with melanoma in 2022. Now, five months after she had surgery to remove tumors that had metastasized to her lungs and brain, she believes doctors missed their spread by not doing further scans.
“When you go to a doctor, you just assume that’s it. I’m doing what I’m supposed to do,” she said in a conversation with close friend Kyle Richards, published by Glamour on Thursday, July 17. ”I never really thought about it because I was like, I go to a doctor every three months. Why wouldn’t they get me checked?”
Mellencamp, 44, added that her highest level of melanoma at the time was stage 1, located on her shoulder.
“When I finally followed up on it, they were like, ‘We didn’t do the scans, because you didn’t have anything above a stage 1 on your body,’” she said. “But look what happened.”
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Without those scans, Mellencamp says she was left to self-diagnose the headaches she started to experience.
“There was a long time that I wasn’t feeling well and didn’t go to the doctor,” she admitted. “I thought I had migraines, I thought I was going through menopause. I had self-diagnosed myself with 500 things. And then one day, I couldn’t stand up. It’s really being an advocate for yourself and your health if you’re not feeling good.”
Mellencamp also shared the importance of having a trusted friend or relative to help keep track of medical information.
“For people reading this, if they have a family member or a friend and something like this comes up: A great way to help is to just keep track of things. I’m so lucky that I have a great team right now, but I still to this day need to double-check things,” she said. “I’m being treated for cancer at the moment, and the other day I was like, ‘When was the last time somebody checked my skin?’ And it had been over the time.”
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While Mellencamp has said her doctors don’t want her to view her cancer as terminal, she also stressed the importance of getting life insurance before getting sick.
“I can’t get it now,” she said. “I always thought, I’ll do it when I’m older and then never did. I couldn’t get it back in the days when I only had melanoma on my shoulder. If you get anything from this interview, it’s to get yourself some life insurance and some friends you can laugh with.”
