Just five months after giving birth to our third (and final) child in 2015, my wife experienced something odd: Her smile became crooked.
Appearance didn’t matter, of course. This was just different enough to be noticeable and concerning, like that new mole you should probably have checked out.
Over the next few months, well-meaning doctors treated the bump on her right jaw as anything but cancer, because it’s always something else for a nonsmoker in her 30s. That changed when a head-and-neck surgeon put on a glove, poked the back of my wife’s throat and said one of her tonsils felt concerningly hard.
It was almost certainly tonsil cancer, she said, and the growth on my wife’s jaw indicated it had spread. Biopsies, a surgery and scans 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 radiation therapy, hospital stays, chemotherapy infusions, infections, starvation and constant pain, without assurance that any of this would work — could have been avoided.
My wife’s cancer was caused by the human papillomavirus, which nearly every person will contract at some point in their lives, because nearly every person is sexually active at some point in their lives. The vast majority of us never know we have HPV; however, each year about 47,000 of us in this country develop cervical, throat and other forms of cancer associated with the virus.
My wife was one of those people. It just happened to be her and not me or anyone else lucky enough to never know they had HPV.
I’m sharing this story now, more than eight years after her diagnosis, because a notorious vaccine skeptic may soon lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for that job, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has previously sued the maker of the HPV vaccine Gardasil, calling it “dangerous and defective” and saying it had caused “severe and life-changing injuries.”
Plenty of scientists and other journalists have fact-checked the widely circulated claims against Gardasil and found them to be exaggerated or outright false; I won’t duplicate their work here. What I do want to convey is some of the “severe and life-changing injuries” from treating one kind of HPV cancer that vaccination can prevent.
My wife was diagnosed in June 2016. Our twins had recently turned 4, and our youngest was 9 months old. Though survival rates for HPV-related throat cancer are relatively high, hearing your children’s mother has a roughly 1 in 7 chance of dying within five years focuses you on one thing at the expense of all others: survival.
Doctors warned my wife that her treatment would be brutal: Her five weekly radiation doses over two months would burn her skin, probably make swallowing food and water intolerable and potentially damage her salivary glands for years or even the rest of her life. All of this turned out to be true. My wife desperately wanted to eat and drink, but sores in her mouth and throat made it impossible.
Imagine that: Starving even though food is easily available, you want to eat that food, and everyone is begging you to eat that food, as if it’s a matter of will power and not the constant burning sensation in your mouth and throat.
She’s healthy now, but every sore throat or enlarged gland — both features of colds and COVID-19 — sparks worry of the Big C’s return. She lives checkup-to-checkup, alternating between relief from the most recent “all clear” to bubbling anxiety as the next appointment approaches. She lives with constant dry mouth and all-too-frequent (and frightening) choking spells.
Financial consequences also lingered. Our health insurance worked as intended, but cancer put my wife’s plan for returning to work after maternity leave on hold. Going without an income for twice as long as we intended put us in a deep, years-long hole.
By most outward appearances, we’re back to normal now. For that, we have the blunt instruments of chemotherapy and radiation — and my wife’s enduring determination — to thank. But generations of children growing into adulthood could have a far better tool to thank, one that may allow them never to know my wife’s reality. The shots known as the HPV vaccine really should be called a cancer vaccine.
And yes, for what it’s worth, my three children will be getting their cancer vaccine.
