The effects of radiation will continue for the life of the patient. In my case, they got to the point that I can’t eat food like a normal person of my age, which is mid-60s. I have to take antibiotics to mitigate the risk of osteoradionecrosis and I believe this is also why I stopped getting aspiration pneumonia.

The xerostomia never gets better and the trismus (lockjaw) also gets progressively worse. A new patient can probably mitigate trismus just by forcing their mouths open as physical therapy. I wish I had done this because now my teeth are in terrible shape and I can’t get dental work done because my mouth will not open more than a centimeter or so.

An old ENT doctor told me that in the early days of radiation therapy they would remove a patient’s teeth before starting radiation on the head-and-neck area. I was supposed to put fluoride on my teeth at bedtime for my entire life, but I was a teenager and didn’t think I would survive very long anyway, so I blew it off. Eventually I lost most of my teeth.

Another thing that I was not warned about is the risk of severe nosebleed. Doctors call it epistaxis. I had a completely unexpected nosebleed that put me in the hospital for nearly a week. The emergency room treatment for this kind of epistaxis is a form of torture that involves shoving something like a condom into the nostril and filling it with water. It was possibly the worst pain I have ever experienced and that includes a radical neck dissection. The pain was so bad that I kind of went into shock and thought incorrectly that I had gotten a shot of morphine or Demerol. But anyway, be careful about taking aspirin if you are using nasal steroids.

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