THANK YOU WITH A SMILE
A personal battle with mouth cancer
By Christine Dunningham
Trafford Publishing. 86 pages. £7.99
ISBN 978-1-4251-7080-6
Profits go to The Facial Surgery Research Foundation, London EC1A 7BE
Available from most Christian bookshops, Amazon or from 01932 883219
Nearly 5,000 people are diagnosed with mouth cancer in the UK every year, and in 2003 Christine Dunningham was one of them.
She had been married for over 40 years, had raised four children and was enjoying her grandchildren and a new hobby of ‘sugar crafting’ when the blow inexplicably fell. A vicar’s daughter who gave her life to the Lord at a Billy Graham Crusade in the 1950s, Christine did not smoke, drink, eat dangerous foods or do anything to excess, but the cause of mouth cancer, as with many other others, isn’t yet known. Christine’s main treatment was 14-hour surgery, followed by radiation. She also needed a tracheostomy and a permanent feeding tube into her stomach. The most gruesome treatment, to my mind, was the post-surgical radiation, which she received over a six-week period. A special mask was made to cover her face and, once in place, was screwed to a wooden board so that it was impossible for her to move. She writes: ‘I couldn’t move, I couldn’t swallow, my back hurt and I panicked. The thought of that radiation being beamed into me in a room where I was completely on my own was almost too much to bear’. She and her family appealed for prayer and she became calm enough not only to endure, but to use the time praying for other people. The outcome was good, in that she has lived to tell the tale, and the very latest techniques have given her strong teeth to replace the ones that had to be extracted — hence the ‘With a Smile’ of the title.
