Source: kaaltv.com
Author: staff

Fighting cancer is not easy. Chemotherapy, radiation and surgery can be very hard on your body. Take head and neck cancers, for example. These tumors are often hard to reach. Doctors have to cut through bones such as your jaw to reach them.

Now, doctors at Mayo Clinic are using robots to access these cancers leaving face bones intact. Roger Combs may be having a tough time beating his wife Gloria at a game of gin rummy. But he’s winning a much tougher battle; a fight against cancer that formed at the base of his tongue.

“I really didn’t feel badly. I had some difficulty swallowing,” he says.

Roger’s doctors told him the cancer had to be removed.

“But the tongue and tonsillar area is a very hard area to get to,” says Dr. Eric Moore.

Dr. Moore says traditional surgery often involves splitting the jawbone open to access the tumor.

“And obviously that’s disfiguring, interferes with speech and swallowing and it takes a lot of time to recover, ” he says.

So instead, Dr. Moore used a robot to remove Roger’s cancer.

The operation involves lowering the robotic equipment through Roger’s mouth to the site of the tumor.

While seated at a control panel Dr. Moore then guides the robot as it removes the cancer without damaging surrounding structures.

After Roger healed from the operation, he went through radiation and chemotherapy – both of which were not easy.

“We’ve had some ups and downs as you might expect,” says Roger.

But having had a minimally invasive surgery first made the process much more tolerable.

Now, about eight months after surgery, Roger continues to win his fight against cancer. Roger says the only major issue after his operation is that it’s taken him a while to be able to eat everything he likes. He says he’s looking forward to gaining back the weight he lost.