Woman Battles Melanoma In Real-Life 'Grey's Anatomy' Story

May 14, 2009— -- Naomi Williams, 29, was watching a recent episode of the ABC hospital drama Grey's Anatomy, on which Katherine Heigl's character, Izzy Stevens, is battling advanced skin cancer but had to stop because her own experience with skin cancer was still too fresh to endure seeing it unfold on screen.

"The timing is very surreal," said Williams, who lives in Jacksonville, Fla. "It was really intense... too difficult to watch for me."

Like Heigl's character, Williams was diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma -- the most serious type of skin cancer -- about one month ago. The cancer was discovered after she broke a bone in her back bending down to put a plug in a socket. Subsequent tests revealed that she had cancer in her bones and her lungs.

"That was the red flag that started it all," Williams said of her bone fracture. "The question was, why are you 29 and healthy and having a bone fracture? The diagnosis was malignant melanoma but they can't find anything on my skin to show that it's melanoma."

Undetectable sources of melanoma are not unusual. While the cancer does begin most commonly in moles or other skin discolorations -- since melanoma occurs in the skin's pigment cells or melanocytes -- it can develop in other tissues as well and cause secondary problems that hint at cancer.

The first sign that Heigl's character had a health problem occurred when she began having hallucinations of a romantic interest who had died. Prompted by these hallucinations, the character underwent a series of tests, finally discovering that she had stage 4 metastatic melanoma. The cancer had spread to her liver, as well as to her brain, which explained the hallucinations. In the show, the character's chances of survival are estimated at only 5 percent, which is a typical prognosis for someone with stage 4 metastatic melanoma.

"The sun isn't the only thing that causes melanomas," said Dr. Murad Alam, an associate professor of dermatology at Northwestern University in Chicago. "Sometimes melanoma just happens."