At the start of the week, India Hicks expected nothing more dramatic than a routine checkup. What she found instead was something that quietly shook her world. The 58-year-old designer and former model shared on her Substack that her results “were not great.” Not devastating, she said, but troubling enough to make the edges of daily life feel unsteady.
A fast-moving patch of skin cancer had appeared on her lower calf. Hicks described the moment with a disarming honesty. A strange mix of calm, of making tea, answering emails, pretending things were fine, while a quiet internal voice whispered the darker possibilities.
She had been looking forward to a rare stretch at home, a week without airports or queues or lost chargers. Life, she wrote, had other plans. After hours of calls and research, she flew to Miami to undergo Mohs surgery, a meticulous procedure that removes cancerous cells one layer at a time. The part she found hardest was the waiting, sitting with an open incision while the sample travelled to the pathology lab and time slowed to a crawl.
When the doctor finally returned, the news was the one she had hoped for. The cancer was gone. Seventeen neat stitches later, she walked out relieved, bruised, and grateful. It was her second surgery in a short time, she joked, adding that her assistant Claire was becoming unexpectedly skilled at removing stitches and had once said she never wanted a normal job.
She made it home in time for Thanksgiving, surrounded by friends, laughter and noise. It brought her back to herself. For someone who divides her life between the Cotswolds and Harbour Island, the episode became a quiet reminder of how fragile things can be and how fortunate she felt to have been treated in time.
A life still unfolding
Hicks has long woven creativity, philanthropy and entrepreneurship into a life that began in front of the camera. After her modelling years in the 80s and 90s, she built her own lifestyle brand, wrote books on design and island living, and spent twenty years running The Sugar Mill, her boutique on Harbour Island.