Teddi Mellencamp's Shocking Cancer Journey: A Fight for Life and Hope

For Teddi Mellencamp, it all began with becoming more aware of the skin she’s in.

“I had this ginormous patch on the back of my shoulder that I always kind of had that used to be just a big white circle,” The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alum said on the Feb. 3 episode of The Skinny Confidential Him & Her Podcast. “Then it turned into no longer a big white circle.”

While Teddi said she’d had the white patch since she was a kid, she noticed “it started to get freckled” as she got older and that sometimes the spots would “raise and sometimes they would be small.” After someone expressed concern to her in 2019, she decided to get them checked.

“I went to a dermatologist, and they were like, ‘Oh, we think it’s dermatitis. Put this cream on it.’ And they went down,'” the eldest daughter of Rock & Roll Hall of Famer John Mellencamp and actress Victoria Granucci continued. “I was like, ‘Oh great, OK.’ So whenever they would flare up, I’d just put the stuff on and move on.”

But while on a run three years later, her castmate Kyle Richards insisted she make an appointment to get the spots reexamined. And again, Teddi—who acknowledged she gets anxious about going to the doctor—just wanted to move on.

The 43-year-old reminisced about her past, admitting she didn’t give much thought to sun protection during her youth in the ’90s. She would often apply baby oil and iodine to tan, and even had a tanning bed in her room at one point. At that time, she didn’t realize how serious skin cancer was, thinking it was just moles and telling herself, “It’s not skin cancer, it’s just moles. Get over it.

But after getting checked, she learned that it was skin cancer.

“At that point, I still hadn’t understood the magnitude of it,” Teddi said on a November 2022 episode of the Tamron Hall Show, noting her first diagnosis was for melanoma in situ (stage zero). “Because the dermatologist looked at me and she’s like, ‘Listen, I’m 99 percent sure this one is melanoma. All the others look good right now. You’ve gotta come back in three months.’ I was like, ‘OK, great.’ We cut it out, and then I got the call. The margins are good. And then I went back after three months, and now I have nine more.”

The reality star announced in October 2022 that she was diagnosed with stage 2 skin cancer. And she continued to keep fans updated on her journey, including the discovery of additional melanomas and the subsequent surgeries to cut them out.

“I say peace out to 11 melanomas and 3 lymph nodes—I gladly hardly knew ya— and hello to a new sense of peace,” Teddi wrote in a December 2022 Instagram post, noting her pathology at the time showed clear margins. “It’s been eye-opening how quickly things can change and it’s a lesson I will never forget, nor quit speaking up about. I want nothing more than for all of you to be proactive so you do not have to experience this. Let my scars be your inspiration to get preventative care.”

Just nine months later, the Bravo star revealed she was going back under the knife.

“I found out late yesterday afternoon that the most recent spot biopsied is another melanoma,” she wrote on Instagram in September 2023. “I can’t even remember if this is the 12th or 13th one. At this point, I am starting to black out these memories like a portion of my childhood.”

Over the next few months, Teddi shared more about her treatment options—documenting her experience with an immunotherapy cream.

“Long story short: The immunotherapy treatment did not work on my melanomas,” she wrote in a December 2023 Instagram post. “I had a wide excision removal on my most recent melanoma last week to see if it did and sadly it did not. I have been presented with a couple new options and I have decided with my doctors that the best next course of action is have surgery on December 26th to remove a larger portion of problematic area.”

The surgery was one of Teddi’s “biggest,” she revealed in an October chat with TopMob News, sharing, “I had over 800 stitches in my back.” The procedure involved removing “a very large patch of skin where the majority of my melanomas were,” she continued, “and then they were able to pull my skin that was in my back over that area.”

Doctors did “an incredible job,” Teddi recounted, but “unfortunately something outside of that area popped up.”

And so she went back under anesthesia. “Which means more hard conversations with my kids,” the podcaster detailed last summer before her 16th surgery. “Which means more of me trying to be positive but also feeling really sad.”

When it comes to talking about her cancer battle with her kids Slate, 12, Cruz, 10, Dove, 5, and stepdaughter Isabella, 16—whom she shares with her now-estranged husband Edwin Arroyave—Teddi is honest about the painful process she’s enduring.

“I just had to tell them, ‘Mommy might be emotional. Mommy might be not able to do all the things that she wants to be doing, but you have to know that Mommy’s taking care of herself so that I can be around forever to take care of you guys. And if I don’t take action and do these things, then I can’t be there,'” she explained to TopMob. “You know when you’re in pain, you never know what emotion you’re [going] through, and also when you’re scared, just letting them know it’s not anything to do with them.”

She’s been riding a wave of emotions ever since.

In November, Teddi announced she filed for divorce from her husband Edwin after 13 years of marriage—though the two remain such a strong team amid her battle she’s had to shoot down reconciliation rumors.

And while the wellness coach shared in December that her check-up went well and that doctors hadn’t detected any new cancerous spots on her skin, by February, she was back in hospital scrubs. That’s when Teddi shared “doctors found multiple tumors” on her brain, which they believed had been developing for six months. Four of the tumors were removed via emergency surgery Feb. 12, but later scans revealed more bad news.

“I have multiple tumors in my brain that weren’t able to be removed via surgery,” Teddi noted on Instagram March 6. “I also have 2 tumors in my lungs. These are all metastases of my melanoma. The doctors are hopeful that immunotherapy will effectively treat them.”

Five days after the announcement, she posted a video of Edwin driving her to her immunotherapy appointment.

“I’m feeling really positive,” Teddi said on the March 13 episode of her podcast Two Ts in a Pod, which she hosts with The Real Housewives of Orange County‘s Tamra Judge. “I have radiation starting Monday for a week, and then immunotherapy is every three weeks. That’s just one day.”

And as Teddi tends to her physical health, she makes sure to take care of her mental health too.

“I have very big highs and lows depending on what’s going on with my surgeries and whatnot or my diagnosis,” she told TopMob in October, “but going out on walks, getting fresh air, doing meditation, journaling, just being very open with what I’m going through. And then also having those days where I say ‘I’m just going to let myself crash today’—like ‘I have these three hours to myself. I’m just going to let myself have a little cry to let myself feel these emotions.’ And then it’s kind of easier to process it than when you hold on to something and pretend that everything’s great and everything’s perfect all the time.”

Because she’s sharing her messy truth, literal scars and all, in the hopes that she can serve as a cautionary tale to those who don’t take sun safety all that seriously. She’s had several doctors reach out and say, they’ve had numerous patients come in for skin checks after seeing her story and realizing “this isn’t something that you take lightly,” Teddi revealed. She’s not trying to scare people, she continued, “But I think part of sharing my scars and sharing my journey is the wake-up call that a lot of people need.”

2025-03-15 17:21

Teddi Mellencamp’s Shocking Cancer Journey: A Fight for Life and Hope

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