The smile

The photo on this blog is me at 14. We had just moved from Indianapolis to Corpus Christi a few weeks earlier, during hurricane Carla. I was not in high school, as I would have been in Indiana; Texas had junior high - grades 7, 8, and 9. I was never to be a freshman in high school.

However, I was more popular in 9th grade, attracting boys, which was totally different from back home in the Hoosier state. (Frankly, I have never considered Texas my home, no matter how many years I have lived here.) I went on my first date with some tall boy. We walked from my house the six blocks to the bowling alley. He never asked me out again because by some freak of nature I bowled 219.

Anyway, the lady next door complimented me one day. "You have the prettiest smile."

No one had ever complimented me before. Not about my all A's or my swimming medals or my writing. I have always remembered that first compliment, but it is a sad memory now.

My smile has become grotesquely warped. Parotid (salivary gland) cancer slowly paralyzed my seventh cranial nerve over a forty-year period. This was due to radiation treatments to my left ear, when I was nine, in an effort to stop my chronic ear infections. It worked, but the radiation mutated the parotid cells until they enveloped and strangled the nerve.

Back in the fifties radiation was a new and exciting cure for just about everything. Those of us who were treated with it have developed various cancers all over our bodies. They stopped these treatments on children in 1959, because the scientists finally realized there might be damaging side effects. Duh!

I was 27 when I first noticed a slight difference in my facial muscle. My mouth didn't seem to be symmetric as I was making faces for my new daughter. I looked in the mirror and didn't really notice any change in my smile. Five years later I went to an ophthamologist, because my left eye seemed to be bulging. He sent me to a neurologist, because he thought I had a tumor. The neurologist checked me out and gave me some exercises to do, just saying that I had a degenerative condition.

Over the next 18 years, I went to several doctors for answers. No one could explain what was happening. Bell's palsy usually only lasts 6 months.

Finally, when I was 50, I decided to have some reconstructive surgery done to try and correct my smile. Tests showed there was a slight nerve reaction and that a nerve transplant might work. However, during that surgery, a strange pulpy, gray mass was found. It was excised and sent to the lab. The doctor did not tell me the results until three days later. He could not reassure me that the smile would return. It was cancer, localized. No one had found it before; no one even considered that it might be cancer.

I went online and looked up salivary gland cancer on the American Cancer Society website. There, as plain as could be, was the number one cause of this cancer: childhood radiation treatments! I was furious, because I told every doctor I ever consulted that I had radiation treatments as a child.

Here's the kicker - I didn't need chemo, but the oncologist wanted to radiate me again to make sure that no microscopic cells could traverse the nerve into my brain. Because of that small possibility I let him and underwent 33 treatments, which was like receiving 5500 sunburns. Some of my hair fell out, my neck turned purple, and I completely lost hearing in my left ear. This last side effect I was not warned about.

Although this happened 10 years ago, I quit smiling for cameras fifteen years ago. I hate having my picture taken - and my family is one heck of a picture-taking group. I look like I have had a stroke or Bell's palsy. Kids are never shy about staring at me or asking me what's wrong. I just say my smile doesn't work anymore.

It still feels strange to be happy and laugh, then see a snapshot of me unguarded - I look like a freak.