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Your Healthy Family: Ken Landau's melanoma recovery, 5 years later

Posted at 4:25 PM, May 28, 2021
and last updated 2023-02-23 13:51:44-05

Disclaimer: This is sponsored content. All opinions and views are of UCHealth and does not reflect the same of KOAA.

In this Your Healthy Family, as part of Melanoma Awareness Month, I want to update you on Ken Landau’s cancer journey. Ken is the radio voice of Colorado College Hockey, and when I first met him five years ago, he was in the initial stages of recovering from surgery to remove deadly melanoma cancer from near his eye.

These days, Ken is doing great and looking forward to the debut of Ed Robson Arena, the new on-campus home of CC Hockey in Colorado Springs, and a new play-by-play booth where he will be calling games.

Ken says, “This place is just awesome! It's as great a building as there will be anywhere in college hockey.”

While his radio job involves working indoors, that didn't keep Ken from having a brush with melanoma. Ken says, “We can't live indoors all the time. Plus when you live in Colorado, you want to be outdoors as much as you possibly can.”

In May 2016, Ken was recovering from surgery at UCHealth in Aurora, where they were able to remove the melanoma, and he looked like a grizzled veteran hockey player who had been through many knock-down-drag-out battles on the ice. He told me then that how he looked was the least of his concerns. "My mom had melanoma, and she died of a recurrent melanoma, so this really strikes home with me, I mean it (the diagnosis) was a punch to the stomach."

Meeting up with Ken recently reminded me that he's a great example of the importance of catching melanoma early. Ken says, “It's healed up really well. There have been a couple of little cosmetic things they did to fix my eyelid that had nothing to do with cancer directly. If I didn’t know better, I wouldn’t know that there was a problem.”

And the message Ken continues to share with as many people as will listen remains the same. “To me, the message is simple: We can prevent this. Sunscreen is easy to put on, I keep a bottle with me almost everywhere I go, and I have two bottles in my car. That minute of prevention at the start of your day can help avoid a lot of heartaches and a lot of trouble later on down the road.”

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