| Brittany Lietz, 21, Miss Maryland was an avid tanner as a teen. SupportiveArgument1 #119501
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The nursing student was crowned Miss Maryland last month and will compete in the Miss America pageant in January, with skin-cancer awareness as her platform issue. She has already spoken dozens of times to kids about how she was a hard-core tanning-bed user--baking three or four times a week for 25 minutes a session--until she learned that the nickel-size mole on her back was a potentially life-threatening melanoma. Lietz says she gets the rapt attention of young audiences when she shows them some of her 27 surgical scars, including an 8-in. track on her back. "They really do have a look of shock on their faces," she says. "I want to scare them," she adds, "because nobody else is."
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