Updated: 10:40 a.m. Friday, May 26, 2017 | Posted: 12:33 p.m. Friday, May 19, 2017
The most astounding part of my cancer story might be that I’m still alive to tell it.
For nearly 10 years, doctors misdiagnosed my persistent jaw pain and trismus as temporomandibular joint dysfunction, or TMJ. Nerve damage to the side of my face was deemed a pinched nerve. Sadly, I believed the doctors and learned to live with the pain. That is, until I woke up one evening with such excruciating, stabbing pain in my face that I finally became my own advocate.
An immediate appointment with a neurologist led to an MRI and subsequent biopsy. The results came back quickly and were as severe as my physical discomfort: I had Stage IV adenoid cystic carcinoma, an extremely rare head and neck cancer that affects roughly 1,600 people in the U.S. each year.
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