• 7/10/2007
  • Albany, NY
  • Cathleen F. Crowley
  • FireRescue1.com

High school photos of Greg Burgoon on the basketball court show a young man with muscular legs who stood a head shorter than any player on the court. Though only 5 feet 6 inches tall, he had a 34-inch vertical leap and a gutsy spirit that won him a starting position on the 1967 Voorheesville varsity team in his sophomore year.

Burgoon always was a fighter.

So, when his mouth cancer came back in May 2003, just three months after surgery to remove it, he geared up for a battle.

Burgoon broke the news to his family and they hugged, all of them crying. Then he jumped up on the couch and punched the air like Rocky Balboa.

“I’m going to beat this! I’m going to beat this!” he repeated with each jab, tears streaming down his face.

“It’s the only time I saw him cry,” said his sister, Sherry Burgoon, a school teacher who helped care for him.

Burgoon was 49 and a volunteer firefighter for the Voorheesville Fire Department. He had risen through the ranks at Albany Truck Sales since he began working there at age 18, to become parts manager. A hard worker with a vast knowledge of obscure parts for old Mack trucks, Burgoon was loved and respected by his co-workers. His boss told him he’d have a job, no matter what.

Burgoon lived alone in Voorheesville, down the road from two of his sisters. His son, Matthew, 18, lived with his mother in Texas and spent summers with him.

Burgoon was a smoker until his first cancer operation. He threw his last pack of cigarettes into the trash as he left his house on the way to surgery.

Smoking increases the chances of developing squamous cell carcinoma, which was Burgoon’s cancer, but people who don’t smoke can get it too.

His cancer returned. A tumor sprouted from the bottom of his mouth, just behind his bottom lip. A picture of Burgoon at Matthew’s high school graduation shows him clenching his mouth shut, hiding the tumor.

Surgeons in Albany said they couldn’t do anything for him. The squamous cell carcinoma was Stage 4, too aggressive and already penetrating his lower jawbone and the tissue of his mouth.

Burgoon and his sister consulted Dr. Mark Urken at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. Radical surgery was scheduled for three weeks later, on July 6, 2003.

The cancer continued to mushroom. Tumors pierced through the skin of Burgoon’s chin.

“He’d develop bumps and tumors over his face, literally overnight,” Sherry Burgoon said.

Urken aborted the surgery 30 minutes after starting because the cancer had spread to the lymph nodes. The surgeon suggested they find an oncologist willing to try an aggressive round of chemotherapy.

Matthew started calling oncologists. The thin teenager, short like his dad, impressed the family with his poise.

“He saw that Greg was strong, and he was, too,” Sherry Burgoon said.

Matthew found Dr. Nini Wu of New York Oncology Hematology. The doctor told Burgoon chemotherapy might not work, but he convinced her to try, pointing to his son and saying, “He is why I want to live.’

Burgoon underwent three 72-hour sessions of chemotherapy with a few weeks of rest between each one.

It nearly wiped him out. He vomited frequently and couldn’t sleep. His weight dropped from 188 pounds to 117 pounds. He never complained, his sister said.

With the first treatment, however, the bumps on his face melted away. Each round of chemotherapy weakened him, but it shrank the cancer.

Still, Urken was reluctant to operate. During a two-hour meeting, the doctor explained every complication: a painful recovery, a higher degree of discomfort from re-radiating the area, and most importantly, only a slim chance the surgery would eliminate the cancer.

Urken said the alternative was palliative chemotherapy to keep Burgoon comfortable until he died, likely within four to six months.

Burgoon refused and told the doctor he had to perform the surgery.

“I’m not ready to die. I want to see my son graduate from college,” he said. The 12-hour surgery on Oct. 22, 2003, removed 80 percent of Burgoon’s lower jaw, most of his tongue and all of the soft tissue, skin and muscles from his lower lip to halfway down his neck. Three teams of doctors participated.

They removed Burgoon’s fibula, the small bone in his lower left leg, cut it into pieces and bolted it back together to remake his lower jaw.

Muscles from Burgoon’s left torso and pectoral were transplanted to his neck and jaw so he could hold his head up, and skin from his right thigh was grafted onto his chin and neck.

He couldn’t swallow, so he received nutrition through a feeding tube. He drooled uncontrollably. And he had to learn to speak again.

While his vocal cords were strong, the muscles that manipulate the sounds of the alphabet were gone.

And so was the cancer.

In Urken’s experience, and in the memory of his colleagues, Burgoon is only the second patient to have been cured of this aggressive and late-stage cancer. PET scans taken every six months since the surgery show Burgoon is cancer-free.

“Greg’s outlook is superb at this point,” Urken said. Since the “big surgery,” Burgoon has undergone 13 or 14 other operations – he lost count – to improve the appearance and function of his lower jaw. Insurance covered his medical costs.

One operation created a dam in his mouth to prevent him from drooling.

To match the skin tones on his face, doctors made new skin on his shoulder. They placed an expander – a sack of saline to force the skin to stretch – under the skin of his left shoulder. Then they cut a flap of skin loose from his back and literally flipped it, like a door on a hinge, to his chin and neck.

Flaps of skin from the sides of his nose re-created a bottom lip.

Burgoon grew a mustache peppered with gray. His jaw juts forward as a thick, bulbous mass, and dents on the side of his jaw accentuate the missing bone.

His sister understands most of what he says, and Burgoon said that if he didn’t talk so fast, almost anyone could understand.

“I have to slow down and enunciate, but it’s hard for me because I’m always on the go,” he said.

As his boss had said, a job was waiting for Burgoon when he was ready to return.

Burgoon walks across the cracked asphalt of Albany Truck Parts at a clip, leaning forward as if bracing a strong wind. He wears black jeans, a maroon shirt with his company’s logo, and a baseball hat from Texas.

The company carved out an office among the metal shelves and created a new position. Burgoon still tracks the 16,000 truck parts, but the new job limits his interaction with customers.

“This is his career,” said Tom Marquit, director of product support at the company. “He treats this like it’s his own little business. He works Saturdays. He works late. He has a different work ethic than most.”

Marquit wishes he could bottle Burgoon’s spirit.

“You’d love to think that you’d have the same strength, that you could handle it like he handled it,” he said. “He’s probably one of the strongest guys I’ve ever known.”

Burgoon went to his son’s graduation from the University of Texas in May. Matthew, who was in ROTC, earned an engineering degree and was commissioned into the Army as a second lieutenant.

“Now that he’s graduated, I want to see more,” he said.

Burgoon still plays golf and bowls, but his stomach tube keeps him from going out for dinner and drinks with friends.

“Working, believe it or not, is the best thing for me now,” he said. “I just cannot envision spending the rest of my life just sitting around, living off of Social Security, which I could have easily done.”

No, life is too precious for that, he said.

“I came up with a motto a while back which says it all, and it goes: `Today could be the last day of the rest of my life.’ So, I live day to day and enjoy everything that comes my way.”

And, if he has to, he’s ready to fight for it.