I Had a Toothache—I Was Told I Had 6 Years to Live

One morning, in early 2006, I woke up to a toothache. It was irritating because I couldn't do anything about it—I had a busy day ahead. I was the manager of a large, international airport, and had meetings back-to-back for most of the week.

I took a couple of aspirins for the weeks that followed. I became adept at putting that toothache on "ignore" quickly—it was preferable to keep my schedule instead of spending half a day or more going to the dentist.

After a few weeks, the toothache stopped. Even better, I thought. No dentist needed.

The relief lasted for a few months. Even though I no longer had a toothache, I had a sense of foreboding—something was going on, but I was too busy to act on it.

During a trip to San Fransisco several months later, the toothache returned, with a vengeance. As soon as we got home, I booked an appointment with the dentist.

Although a root canal had been done on the problem tooth, the pain was bad enough that the dentist felt it should be extracted, and I agreed. Straight after the tooth was removed, my dentist's demeanor changed instantly.

He said he was referring me to an oral surgeon immediately, and gave me a prescription for pain medication. I went home, that sense of foreboding at the forefront of my mind.

Forty-eight hours later, I had a biopsy. The oral surgeon was pretty casual: "I'm almost certain you have a granuloma. It's not malignant, and easy to deal with." I left, wondering why I wasn't relieved.

Two days later, my phone rang during a meeting. The oral surgeon had called me. He said: "There is no easy way to say this—you have cancer. It's aggressive, and we need to get you scheduled for surgery, as quickly as possible".

The next month was spent being a professional patient. Doctors, surgeons, anesthesiologists, oncologists, ENT's. I saw them all and underwent more tests than I could count.

That was dizzying enough, and only added to my biggest worry—how this was affecting my family.

I was fairly high-profile in my job, regularly in the media, and it was well-known in the aviation community that all three of my children worked in the airport as well.

I had immediately taken time off to deal with this, with no advance warning, and speculation went wild amongst the 20,000 airport community. Some thought I'd died, had a stroke, a mental breakdown, or been arrested for one heinous crime or another.

My employer would not, and could not, disclose anything for privacy concerns. The speculation fell on my kids—they were approached dozens of times a day by strangers, asking about what the "real story" was. Ultimately, I had my office put out a release, to ease some of that pressure.

After a month of preparatory work-ups, in June 2006, my surgery day came. My wife and I had been inundated with information, potential outcomes, and possible complications. Best case, I might live for a couple of years, but in 2006, the odds were very much against me.

Oral cancer was not as well understood, and like many, I'd been diagnosed late. One of the ways cancer had kept itself hidden, was by numbing other nerves in my mouth and face. The pain had gone away for quite a while, but the tumor kept growing.

Walking into that operating theatre, I had no idea how much my life would change.

We had been told to expect a five or six-hour surgery. It ended 17 hours after it began. In recovery, I experienced respiratory arrest, and then a heart attack due to the extreme swelling in my face and neck.

I was given a tracheotomy, a feeding tube, and put on a ventilator in a medically induced coma, where I stayed for nearly 2 weeks. When I slowly returned to consciousness, my wife and the doctors began to explain the extent of my surgery.

Due to the location of the tumor, I'd lost half my jaw. It had been rebuilt, using the fibula of my left leg. My teeth had been removed, along with most of the tissue inside my mouth. That was reconstructed, using tissue harvested from my left forearm. I'd also had a bilateral, radical neck dissection, and the inferior jugular vein was removed on one side.

Skin grafts were needed to fill in the voids left in my arm and leg. An error during surgery had resulted in a severe burn on my left foot; bad enough that it would become a lingering mobility issue.

Despite being swaddled in bandages from the tips of my toes to the top of my head, I was upbeat. We were doing something—moving ahead.

After I was awake for a couple of days, my surgeon came in. His first words were: "Now the easy part is over."

I thought to myself: The easy part? What on Earth had been "easy" about it? What was coming that could possibly be more challenging?

Radiation. Thirty-five days of it.

Radiotherapy for oral cancer is a double-edged sword. Because the location of the disease is close to the surface, radiation is highly effective. It's also very hard on the tissues of the face and neck.

I began radiation a couple of months later. It was an awful time. I had intractable nausea, and terrible burns on my face, inside my mouth, nose, and ear. I hadn't been able to shave because of the hundreds of sutures in my face—there was no need, now. My newly grown beard wiped off half my face with a paper towel one day.

For weeks, my wife and a neighbor would half carry me to the car in the morning, for the trip to the hospital. A wheelchair ride in, where my head would be confined in a mask and bolted to the table, while the equipment buzzed and hummed over me. Then, I was off to the day room for several hours of I.V. fluids and off home for the night.

Eating orally was impossible, because of the burns and swelling. A feeding tube helped, but I still lost 25 percent of my body weight. A full six months after starting radiotherapy, I once again felt, physically, where I'd been when I was released following surgery.

The years that followed have been full of challenges—learning to walk again, to eat and drink. Many, many more surgeries and procedures followed—51 to date.

Cancer took a great deal from me and from my family. We gained much more. I learned how strong and resilient my wife and children truly were. Being beaten by cancer was never in consideration.

On my first "cancer free" anniversary, my family asked what I wanted to do to celebrate. I told them I wanted to have a family photo taken.

"That's it? A family photo?" they asked.

But what I had in mind was a little more complicated.

I beat the odds. I was able to see retirement. I've seen all three children meet and marry their spouses. I've experienced the incredible joy of seeing four grandchildren born, and delight in being called "Papa" by them.

Great strides have been made in diagnosing and treating head and neck cancers in the last 20 years. High-profile individuals suffering from this disease have focused a spotlight on what was once an obscure type of cancer. It no longer has the dubious reputation of being the killer it once was. But work still needs to be done.

More doctors and dentists are now screening for oral cancer than ever before. It is being diagnosed much earlier, and one of the major risk factors beyond lifestyle issues of smoking and drinking, the Human Papilloma Virus, has been identified, and preventive measures can now be taken to eliminate the risk of HPV-related oral cancer.

Survivability is vastly improved, with early detection. We should all be visiting our dentist every six months—if your dentist is not screening for oral cancer automatically, ask them to. It's a simple test, noninvasive, involving a special type of light.

I hope every single person reading this asks their dentist about oral cancer screening during their next visit. It will save lives, and unmeasurable, needless suffering.

Wayne Reimer was diagnosed with oral cancer in May 2006. He is a former airport manager, and has been cancer free for over 17 years.

All views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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