A Father's Brave Battle With Throat Cancer (page 2 of 8)

In our cottage with the screened porch and outdoor shower that August two years ago, I have just finished brushing my teeth and gargling with lidocaine. I've had a sore throat for several weeks, and it hurts to swallow. But now that I've had the anesthetic, I can drink some coffee and watch the silver-green shade play on the water, the wind like a rope skipping on the surface. It's my new ritual: lidocaine to start the day, maybe some more before lunch. At the end of the day, when it really hurts, I pop a Vicodin. All this and maybe a little gin to help me sleep.

"You know, this throat of mine," I say to my wife one morning, pausing amid gargles, "it's just not getting any better. I probably have cancer or something."

My beloved, who suffers no fools gladly, hands our son a sippy cup and rolls her eyes. "Hypochondria will give you cramps."

Back in New York, weeks after our vacation, I am in the office of an ear, nose, and throat surgeon. The antibiotics and steroids we tried didn't help, and nothing came up in X-rays, but my throat is hurting more and more. So this doctor puts his hand in my mouth and reaches way down my throat. It feels like his elbow is about to hit my teeth. He nods and sends me for a biopsy, and now we have the results: I have a tumor at the base of my tongue, a stage IV squamous cell carcinoma. Throat cancer.

Day one is absurd, surreal. I am fumbling for my poor wife's phone number at her new office, in a job she began only a few days ago. Since our seaside vacation, I have kept the sequence of throat tests, probes, and analyses to myself. Hilary was busy being unhappy at her old job and then looking for another job and then starting the one she found, and I did not want to add to her worries.

Most biopsies of the mouth and throat come back negative. Until yours doesn't. Now I am about to become a safe and fall on top of her life, starting with the conversation we must have, something like "Jeez, honey, I know you're busy over there, but it looks like I need emergency surgery and then a few weeks or months of radiation and chemotherapy. More later -- maybe we could talk about it in the elevator before we relieve the babysitter."

This form of cancer is known to be aggressive, and the tumor is growing. Odds are discussed: chances of survival, of recurrence. The surgeon says he can remove the tumor and that we should, as soon as possible. There are decisions to be made, he adds, and there are risks. Nerve damage, disfigurement, loss of speech, problems swallowing and chewing. But William Portnoy, MD, is affable. He is a facial reconstructive surgeon for the New York Rangers hockey team. He inspires confidence.

All the while, I'm thinking, What did I do? What did I do? Everybody starts with that, I suppose, because the diagnosis seems so unlikely. I never smoked. As one of my oncologists told me, sotto voce, "This used to be a VA hospital kind of thing, you know." Smoke a pack a day for 30 years, wash it down with a pint of vodka -- that's how you get throat cancer, and maybe lung cancer too. But here I am, a 45-year-old male with a graduate degree, a business strategist in the technology industry. Someone with my profile, a nonsmoker under 50, rarely got this disease.

Until recently.

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