Source: Sunday News (www.stuff.co.nz/sundaynews)
Author: Cath Bennett

Adrian Pilkington places his finger over his tracheostomy opening in the Ministry of Health advertisements, before giving audiences the grim warning: “It’s not worth it, eh.”

The south Auckland mechanical engineer knows how tragically true his message is his 30-year, 20-a-day habit led to the mouth and lung cancer which will probably cost his life by Christmas.

“My life has been ruined because of this but others can learn from my mistake,”

Adrian, 52, told Sunday News: “Getting cancer from smoking is something that always seems to happen to someone else you don’t expect it to affect you.

“If people knew the horror of what I’ve been through the radiation, the pain they wouldn’t smoke.

“I didn’t even realise I could get mouth cancer from smoking before.”

The once-fit gym-going, karate black belt’s future went up in smoke after he discovered a mouth ulcer 18 months ago.

His weight plummeted 24kg and the ulcer was diagnosed as mouth cancer leading to a 12-hour operation to remove his entire tongue.

It was replaced with a flap of skin and muscles from his stomach, leaving him unable to eat, drink or swallow ever again he is fed liquid nutrition through a tube in his stomach.

In March this year, matters got even worse when he was told the cancer had spread to his lungs and he had only six to 12 months to live.

“It came as a shock I couldn’t believe it,” Adrian said. “How could I be dying?”

Now a born-again Christian, Adrian is on a mission to ensure others don’t lose their lives to nicotine.

“I’d like to go and speak to schools and say, `Hey, smoking caused this’,” he said.

“I think that could really stop them starting.

“The only thing that would have made me give up before would be seeing the full horror it causes if I had gone to a cancer ward I think I would have stopped.”

In May, Sunday News revealed how the “brain damaged” woman in the Land Transport Safety Association TV car airbags ads was a healthy Australian actress.

Adrian now recognised from his own TV ads is upset many think he is also an actor.

“It’s quite annoying, because no one could act what I’ve got,” he said.

“How could you fake this?”

About 20 percent of New Zealanders aged 15 and over smoke around 619,900. One out of every two smokers will die of a smoking-related illness.

Around 80 percent of throat cancer sufferers are smokers. Adrian’s surgeon Mark Izzard performs around two major mouth reconstructions a week, in what he describes as a “horrific procedure”.