A British woman is urging people to be aware of the symptoms of oral cancer, after she was told to get orthodontic work instead of tested for the rare illness.
Charlotte Webster-Salter, who was working as a flight attendant at the time, recalled having frequent mouth ulcers before she was diagnosed. She blamed her busy travel schedule.
Webster-Salter — who does not smoke and is active in the gym — said she initially wasn’t concerned, but decided to get the ulcers checked out when they didn’t go away.
“I wasn’t worried about them at first because I do get run down. I was jet-lagged and flying all the time with my job and often ulcers are sign of celiac disease, which I have, so I put it down to that,” she told South West News Service.
Webster-Salter described the ulcers as being “bigger patches” in her mouth, noting they started to turn white with red around them.
“They looked quite inflamed. I thought maybe it was a bit of an infection or something,” she recalled.
“They came and went, but always in the same area. They never fully went, but they used to flare up like if I was run down.”
Webster-Salter — who is now training to be a midwife — said she went to the dentist’s office, where she was told the ulcers could be from her teeth rubbing. She said she was advised to get her teeth straightened and her wisdom teeth removed.
“So, I did that. I paid for braces, got my wisdom tooth taken out and had really great teeth, but still had the ulcers,” she explained.
When the ulcers continued to get worse, Webster-Salter went to her doctor, who took a biopsy of the area.
“I went in for the results, and he asked, ‘Have you got anyone with you today?’ I looked at him and said, ‘It’s not good, is it?’ He replied, ‘No, it’s not. I’m really sorry. You’ve got cancer,’” she said.
“I remember saying to him, ‘What do you mean? Surely not,’ and I think I almost laughed. It was such a shock because I’m otherwise a healthy person.”
Webster-Salter said she underwent a 9 ½ hour surgery to save her life and remove the cancer. Doctors had to remove part of her tongue and replace it with muscle from her leg.
Doctors also biopsied part of her lymph node to make sure the cancer hadn’t spread — thankfully, it had not.
After her surgery, the now 27-year-old said she had a tracheostomy tube fitted for a week to help her breathe, as she was so swollen from the procedure.
“I remember the first time they tried to take it out. They covered this hole so I could then breathe through here and it wouldn’t, it just couldn’t. I think my body wasn’t ready because it was like being suffocated because I couldn’t breathe through my mouth,” she recalled.
“It was like I had a mouth full of, like, straw or hay. It was just so hard, so husky, so stuck. And I remember the panic, I was like, no, I can’t, so they tried again the next day and then every day it just got a bit better and better.”
Breathing wasn’t the only thing she had to retrain herself to do, she said, recalling that she had to re-learn to talk, eat and walk through speech and physiotherapy.
Now she’s urging people to be vigilant about their health, reminding them anyone can get mouth cancer.
“People think you have to be like a really old man that smokes 50 [cigarettes] a day, but you don’t,” she said.
“There is a stereotype for mouth cancer. I was told, ‘Oh, you’re too young.’ ‘God, it won’t be that.’ But it really can happen to anyone, not just smokers.”
According to the Oral Cancer Foundation, nearly 54,000 Americans are diagnosed with oral or oropharyngeal cancer each year. The death rate for oral cancers is higher than other cancers because they’re often discovered late in their development.