Loose Women’s Coleen Nolan urges fans to check skin as she ‘clears the air’ on cancer diagnosis

The 58-year-old ITV panellist addressed her 339k Instagram fans to “clear the air” about her experience, saying she wanted to raise awareness of skin cancer.

It came after Coleen announced her cancer diagnosis on Loose Women last week.

She said: “Firstly, can I put all your minds at ease? I don’t have dangerous skin cancer, because I found it in time.

“One of them on my shoulder was a carcinoma. That’s been cleared up, and I’ve got two little spots on my face which are pre-melanomas.

“So they would affect me much later on in life. If I don’t treat them now, they could turn into skin cancer much, much later on. So I am going to treat them.”

She added: “My whole point of talking about it really was to raise awareness, because the problem with your skin – as with mine – is I’d kept thinking ‘It’s a bit of eczema. It’s a bit of dry skin.’

“Also being menopausal, they are side effects of the menopause as well. Your skin goes all over the place - as does everything else.

“So it is really important – just because it doesn’t hurt or because it’s not causing you any pain or making you ill – it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t check anything out that is slightly out of the ordinary.

“I really, really appreciate all of your gorgeous messages. I love you all.”

Coleen, part of Anglo-Irish family pop group The Nolans, has already seen several of her sisters diagnosed with cancer.

Bernie died of breast cancer in 2013 at the age of 52 and Linda announced this year that her cancer had spread to her brain.

Speaking on Loose Women on July 17, Coleen said another sister, Maureen, would often point at a “tiny bit of skin” on her shoulder that was a “bit red”, before she decided to see a doctor.

The TV personality, who has appeared on Dancing On Ice and Celebrity Big Brother, said she was seeing a dermatologist about “another problem” when the medic said the patch was common skin cancer basal cell carcinoma.

She added: “I went back in and he was very good and he said, ‘Look, it’s nothing to worry about. It is actually a cancer that doesn’t necessarily spread, but you do need to treat it and we’ll try it with cream and then the chemo cream and then if that doesn’t work, we’ll cut it out and give you a skin graft’.

“My first instinct, typical me, was to laugh hysterically because I just thought that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard anybody say.

“I’m sick of cancer and also, my first instinct was, I’m not telling anybody in my family because this that I’ve got at the moment seems nothing compared to what my sisters have been through.

“And… what Linda is going through, where it has gone to her brain and she’s having chemo.

“It just seemed so pathetic for some reason to go back and go, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve got a carcinoma’.”

She added she has to try the cream again and is hoping to raise awareness for other people to get checked.

After her announcement, Linda wrote on Twitter how “very proud” she was of her younger sister Coleen.

The 64-year-old wrote: “She acted on her instincts, found something amiss and got it checked.

“If you spot something out of the ordinary for you, PLEASE get it checked. Don’t be frightened.”

Linda revealed in 2020 a third recurrence of the disease in her liver after treatment in 2006 for breast cancer.

Another sibling Anne, who took part in The Nolans Go Cruising TV series alongside her sisters, was diagnosed with breast cancer for the second time three years ago but is now cancer-free.