Only five months after giving birth to our third (and last) child in 2015, my wife experienced something strange: her smile became twisted.
The appearance did not matter, of course. It was just different enough to be noticeable and worrying, like this new taupe that you should probably have to check.
In the coming months, well-intentioned doctors have treated the bump on its right jaw as something other than cancer, because it is always something else for a non-smoker in the thirties. This changed when a head and neck surgeon is put on a glove, pushed the back of my wife's throat and said that one of her tonsils felt unfortunately.
It was almost certainly a tonsil cancer, she said, and the growth of my wife's jaw indicated that she had spread. Biopsies, surgery and analyzes have confirmed the doctor's suspicion.
We also learned something else: if a new vaccine had been available when my wife was younger, everything she was about to go through daily radiotherapy, hospital stays, chemotherapy infusions, infections, famine and constant pain, without assurance that all of this would have been working – could have been avoided.
My wife's cancer was caused by the human papillomavirus, which almost every person will contract at some point in their life, because almost every person is sexually active at some point in their lives. The vast majority of us never know that we have HPV; However, each year, around 47,000 of us in this country develop the cervical, the throat and other forms of cancer associated with the virus.
My wife was one of those people. He was just her and not me or no one else lucky enough to never know that they had HPV.
I share this story now, more than eight years after its diagnosis, because a notorious vaccination skeptic could soon lead the American department of health and social services. The choice of president elected Donald Trump for this work, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., previously continued the manufacturer of the vaccine against HPV GardasilThe appellant “dangerous and defective” and saying that he had caused “serious injuries and who change life”.
Many scientists and other journalists have checked complaints widely disseminated against Gardasil and found them exaggerated or downright false; I will not reproduce their work here. What I want to transmit is some of the “serious injuries and that change my life” to treat a type of HPV cancer that vaccination can prevent.
My wife was diagnosed in June 2016. Our twins had recently had 4 years and our youngest was 9 months old. Although survival rates for GTP -related throat cancer are relatively high, hearing your children's mother has about 1 in 7 chance of dying within five years focuses on a thing to the detriment of all the others: survival.
Doctors have warned my wife that her treatment would be brutal: her five doses of weekly radiation over two months would burn her skin, make food and intolerable water and potentially damaging her salivary glands for years or even the rest of her life. It all turned out to be true. My wife desperately wanted to eat and drink, but the wounds in the mouth and the throat made her impossible.
Imagine that: hungry even if the food is easily available, you want to eat this food, and everyone begs you to eat this food, as if it was a question of will and not the constant burning sensation in your mouth and throat.
It is in good health now, but each throat ailment or extended gland – both the characteristics of the cold and the coco -19 – sparkles the return of the Big C. It lives the verification assessment, alternating between the relief of the most recent “clear” with bubbling anxiety when approaching the next appointment. She lives with a constant dry mouth and more frequent (and frightening) suffocation spells.
The financial consequences have also persisted. Our health insurance worked as expected, but cancer put my wife's plan to go back to work after maternity leave. Go without income for twice as long as we intended to put ourselves in a deep hole and last for years.
By most external appearances, we are back to normal now. For this, we have the blunt instruments of chemotherapy and radiation – and the lasting determination of my wife – to thank. But the generations of children who become in adulthood could have a much better tool to thank, which can allow them to never know the reality of my wife. The plans known as the HPV vaccine should really be called cancer vaccine.
And yes, for what it is worth, my three children will get their cancer vaccine.
