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When Trish Burton, 50, noticed the inside of her cheek was irritated in early 2022, she didn’t make much of it. She thought she had bitten her cheek after she had Novocain during a dental appointment.
But the spot didn’t go away — after a few months, it became a painful, open sore. She tried treating it on her own with salt water, and when home treatments didn’t help, she made an appointment with her dentist.
“As soon as he saw it, he knew I needed to be treated. I was in the oral surgeon’s office 45 minutes later, getting a biopsy. Two weeks later, I got the results. It was squamous cell carcinoma,” she tells TODAY.com.
A PET scan showed she needed more surgery. A head, neck and throat cancer expert removed the tumor from her cheek, grafted skin from her thigh and removed 15 lymph nodes that showed signs of cancer.
“The surgery was supposed to take an hour and a half, and it took about six hours. It was the worst-case scenario,” Burton says.
Cancer treatments take a heavy toll
Removing the tumor and lymph nodes was just the beginning of Burton’s battle with cancer. The tumor review board recommended six chemotherapy treatments, plus radiation every day for seven weeks.
“The chemo was manageable,” Burton says. “But the radiation was super aggressive. Midway through, I met my radiation oncologist, and I said, ‘This is not sustainable. I can’t do this anymore.’ I really wanted to give up. I had blisters in my mouth, I had to stop eating and I was on a liquid diet. I lost 40 pounds and I had to go on anti-anxiety medicine.”
Burton’s husband, John, recalls how hard the radiation treatments were on his wife. “She wore a mask — kind of like a Hannibal Lecter mask — and they ran a laser over her face…
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