Early detection is the key to beating oral cancer
5/14/2007 Westchester, NY Linda Lombroso Gannett Co. Publishing It was nearly five years ago that Margaret Belair received chilling news: The sensitive spot on her tongue was far more than a pizza burn or a cold sore. It was oral cancer. Belair, who'd just given birth to a baby boy, was stunned. "It didn't look or feel hard,'' says the 41-year-old mother of two, who lives in Somers. "It was just a weird irritation of the tongue, just slightly discolored, and it felt like a big canker sore.'' Despite the shock of the diagnosis, Belair was fortunate. After an operation to cut out a portion of her tongue - and the precautionary removal of several lymph nodes in her neck - all she needed was eight weeks of speech therapy (to relearn how to pronounce certain sounds) and eight weeks of physical therapy (to build up the strength in her neck). For Brian Hill, the news was not as good. By the time his oral cancer was caught in 1997, it had metastasized to his lymph nodes. Nobody expected him to survive. Although the treatment was brutal - including radiation that destroyed his salivary glands and surgry which removed a portion of his neck - Hill ended up beating the odds. He has since founded the Oral Cancer Foundation, a national nonprofit research and advocacy organization, and has become an outspoken champion for early detection of the disease. One of the problems in catching oral cancer early, say experts, has [...]