>> You're watching "Head and Neck Cancer: A Matter of Facts" on ABC 27, brought to you
by Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center.
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Welcome back.
A Lebanon County professor thought she just had a sore throat, but she soon found out
it was much worse.
Lebanon Valley College is an institution in Annville, and part of that institution is
Marie Bongiovanni.
Some of the examples we'll look at today -
For nearly 25 years, Marie has taught here.
She's chair of the English department and is the advisor for the study abroad program
-
I've always loved teaching.
It's an enormous part of my life -
But a couple of years ago, Marie's love was put on hold.
It was summer of 2009, and it started with a sore throat that persisted for weeks.
We traveled south, and her throat was bothering her.
So when we got back, I said we'll get it checked again.
After a couple of rounds of antibiotics, Marie and her husband went to see an ear, nose,
and throat specialist.
The ENT doctor said that I should, that I would need to get my tonsil out and that I
might need radiation thereafter.
And we went and did the tonsillectomy and then while she was recovering, he called me
in and said that there was a tumor.
That it had to be dealt with.
The question was do you want to tell her, or do you want me to tell her.
And I said, well, I'll tell her when she wakes up.
I think she just looked at me, and she said it's a tumor isn't it, and I said yeah.
That's what they found.
There was a tumor clearly growing.
You could see it.
I mean, like, when I looked in my mouth, I could see the thing was there, and it wasn't
supposed to be there.
Honestly, whether it was naivety or ignorance or optimism or faith, I just assumed that
everything would be OK, but I was clearly, I mean, jarred.
Numb probably is the best way to explain it.
Marie and her husband turned to Penn State Hershey Cancer Institute for help.
I told her that she had a locally advanced cancer of her tonsil which spread to the neck,
and that it was relatively advanced.
Over here, you can see that there's an enhanced circle that you see only on the right side,
but not on the left side, and adjacent to that, there's another little circle with multiple
different colored greys in there, and those two actually represent both her primary cancer
and the metastatic disease in her neck.
I explained to her that there were treatment options, good treatment options.
This is not the end of the world, and it's not a death sentence.
In general, with a locally advanced tonsil cancer, we'll do radiation with chemotherapy,
and in most cases, we get complete responses, and then we're just able to follow the patient
closely.
I guess we'll consider the options.
I can either allow this tumor to keep growing in my head, or I can have radiation and chemo.
It actually didn't seem like a hard decision.
In my family, knock on wood, cancer hasn't been an issue.
So I'm not that familiar with it.
So it just seemed like, OK, that's the treatment.
So we'll do it.
Not we, [laughs] she'll do it.
The radiotherapy was given once a day, five days a week for seven weeks.
So it was 35 treatments total.
She had three rounds of chemotherapy.
The chemotherapy started in the very beginning of the radiation, then it was given three
weeks later, and then three weeks after that.
So the first few weeks, it was not actually that bad, and then after about three weeks,
you know, they had to burn the tissue in my mouth to get, eradicate the tumor.
And so after a certain period of time, it starts to be painful.
And by the time it got to week five or week six, it was, like, I don't know if I can keep
doing this, and I said you're going to do it.
There's no alternative.
You sort of feel helpless because you know that she's not feeling well, and you know
that the chemo is making her sick, and you know the radiation is burning her throat,
and there's nothing you can really do.
So that's the roughest part.
There's no way you can relieve it.
There's no way you can help.
It's just, you have to keep being a cheerleader and saying you've got to do this.
Support from her husband, colleagues, friends, and students got Marie through some of the
most difficult times.
People sent cards.
Things would appear on our porch.
One person sent me a card every day for a year.
She's a trooper.
She never faltered through this.
Her husband's great.
He was there with her every step.
And there were many steps, but each one paved the way to a successful ending.
The proof was in the pictures.
You can see here this white structure is the lower jaw.
You can see teeth, and you can see the floor of the mouth and the tongue, and it's perfectly
symmetric on the left and the right.
The tumor is completely gone, and you notice also that the tumor is completely gone from
the neck.
You do not see any mass or any circles that don't belong there.
She had a complete response, which means at the first point where we formally assessed
with a new PET scan and also with a scope exam, she had no evidence of cancer.
He said I don't usually say cured, but this time I think it's cured.
And your reaction?
Oh, relief.
Certainly.
Clearly, after a scan, when the results are good, that makes me happy, but I always had
faith that the treatment was going to work.
I never really spent time in a zone that that wouldn't be the case.
Marie took a year off teaching to fully recover.
Now she's back at school, and she couldn't be happier.
Chuck.
Thank you, Debra, and we continue to talk with Dr. Goldenberg.
Now, Marie didn't have surgery.
Talk about some of the treatment options for this type of cancer -
Head and neck cancer treatment is individualized, and it really does depend on the patient,
the site or subsite of the cancer, the stage of the cancer, and the patient's wishes, but
overall, we offer patients surgery where we remove the cancerous tissue surgically together
with healthy tissue around it.
We also remove lymph glands from the neck.
Other options are radiation and chemotherapy.
Now, when you talk about the prognosis, somebody is diagnosed with this, what's the prognosis
with head and neck cancer?
If patients come in in early stages, the prognosis is excellent.
Unfortunately, up to 50 percent of the patients come in with advanced disease.
That's not good news, but you're working at it all the time.
All the research going on.
Thank you, doctor, and Debra Pinkerton.
We'll be back with more viewer questions right after this.
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