Episode 30-
Scott Eidson
Oral Cancer Awareness Month: Dr. Scott Eidson
When we think of oral cancer, we often picture a seasoned smoker or a long-time tobacco user. But did you know that a growing number of cases are affecting young, non-smokers?
Over 20% of oral cancer diagnoses occur in people under 55, and the culprit might not be what you expect. The rise in instances is linked to Human papillomavirus (HPV) from unprotected oral sex, not tobacco.
During Oral Cancer Awareness Month, we want to take some time to spotlight the extraordinary dentists and practitioners who have taken on this little-understood cancer and are survivors.
Today's guest is Dr. Scott Eidson, a Clinical Associate Professor at the UNC Adams School of Dentistry. Before Scott found a lump on his neck in 2019, he didn't know all that much about head and neck cancer. Nothing makes you an expert in something more quickly than lived experience, and he set out to find out everything he could about the different types of treatment available to him. What followed was a long and painful journey. Additionally, Scott was diagnosed with prostate cancer soon after.
Resources
Follow your curiosity, connect, and join our ever-growing community of extraordinary minds.
Dr. Michael R. Sesemann on LinkedIn
Dr. Scott Eidson UNC Adams School of Dentistry Profile
Oral Cancer Resources
Dr. Scott Eidson Interview - How Clinicians Can Combat One of the Fastest-Growing Cancers
Dr. Michael R. Sesemann’s Neck Lymph Node Exam Video
Head & Neck Cancer - Insights from Dr. Mike Milligan
The Oral Cancer Foundation Website
Head and Neck Cancer Alliance Website
The American Cancer Society - Seeking a Second Opinion
The American Cancer Society - Dealing with Chemo Brain
CariFree Anticavity Fluoride Tooth Gel
CariFree Moisturizing Oral Spray
What's In This Episode
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How Scott’s diagnosis came out of the blue.
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How side effects are sometimes lifelong.
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The importance of a supportive survivor community.
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How having cancer changed Scott’s perspective on his life.
Transcript
Dr. Scott Edison:
Everybody talks about your birthday, but something that you don't know that's equally or more important is your death day. When your health is really good, you don't ever even think about it, but as soon as you get a cancer diagnosis, or maybe it could be heart failure or whatever it is, and then you got a timeline on it or a possible timeline, boy that just changes your whole mind. But you can't let it rule your life. You've still got a life to live. Nobody knows how long they're going to live.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
On Contrary to Ordinary, we explore the motivations, lives and the characters of innovators who see limitless potential around them. The people behind some of the largest paradigm shifts in the practice of dentistry and beyond. My name is Dr. Kim Kutsch and I spent over 20 years in dentistry before creating CariFree. We offer a range of dental products to the industry and the public that promote the health and wellness of people suffering from the disease of dental caries.
When we think of oral cancer, we often picture a seasoned smoker or a longtime tobacco user. But did you know that a growing number of cases are affecting young non-smokers? Surprising right? Over 20% of oral cancer diagnoses occur in people under the age of 55, and the culprit might not be what you expect. The rise in instances is linked to the human papillomavirus, HPV from unprotected oral sex, not tobacco. It's time to challenge our assumptions and raise awareness. Oral cancer can affect anyone regardless of their smoking history. During Oral Cancer Awareness Month, we want to take some time to spotlight the extraordinary dentists and practitioners who have taken on this little understood cancer and survived. Today's guest is Dr. Scott Eidson, clinical associate professor at the University of North Carolina, Adams School of Dentistry. Before Scott found a lump on his neck in 2019, he didn't know all that much about head and neck cancer.
Nothing makes you an expert in something quicker than lived experience, and he set out to find everything he could about the different types of treatment available to him. What followed was a long and painful journey with the added complication that Scott was diagnosed with prostate cancer soon afterwards. To round out Oral Cancer Awareness Month, I'm excited to share Scott's journey of courage and hope with you today. But before we get into that, I want Scott to tell you a little bit about what he was doing long before his diagnosis right at the start of his private practice journey.
Dr. Scott Edison:
I ran into a high school classmate of mine who was a dental hygienist in a small town and she said, "Oh, I worked there and the guy that's below me, he wants to go back in the army. He's only had his practice for a couple of years, so he's trying to sell it." So I went there, visited him, we talked and I was like, wow, this could be a good opportunity. And there were three other dentists in the building, so I kind of had some support. So we had four guys in our building. We were all independent. So I was there for 29 years before I had a big career change and went to the dental school, started teaching there full time.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
So what triggered that decision? What was the story behind that?
Dr. Scott Edison:
So both my kids went to UNC. My daughter ended up going to dental school. My son's a computer guy, but my daughters ended up being an orthodontist. Like you, I was always interested in caries and figuring out why in the heck is this happening? So when she was in school, I started going part-time. I had always worked Monday through Thursday and took Fridays off. So I started going to the dental school on Mondays and then I did that for a while and then Ed Kanoy, they were going to change the clinic and implement a group practice model there.
So that would've been after I think about 2006, he said, "We'd love to get you to go full time. Is that something you would consider?" And let me back up and say too, in the meantime, I met this guy, Roland Arnold. He was a biochemist and the caries guy, and we started talking. I started helping him on some of his research.
So I got real interested. I thought, wow, I wish I could spend more time with that. So then I had this kind of disparity where I was kind of involved with that, kind of teaching one day a week and I'd go back to my practice and that was another world. So then when they asked me if I wanted to do it, I said, "Well, I sure would like to do that. But my wife and I, we had just spent about a year remodeling our house and where we lived at, had lived for a long time," and I said, "I'm really thinking about going to dental school." She said, "Hope it's really nice for you. Come back and visit me on the weekends. I'm not leaving our house." I just spent too much time doing this. So I was like, "Okay, well I got to think about it."
So I didn't do it for about six months. Then they had this clinic rolling out and they were like, "Okay, we'd like you to be one of the group directors if you would be interested." So ended up going up there, which turned out to be financially probably not a great decision. You go into academics, you're definitely going back in the world. But I had some great help along the way from I'd gone to PANKY too and Mike Schuster. I went to his center for professional development and I had planned pretty good and I'm not a big spender, so I don't live a fancy life. It was plenty for me. So I did that and I never looked back. It was probably one of the best things I've done. And I did get to work some, worked with your group a lot with CariFree. We brought a lot of your stuff onto the school and,-
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Oh, yeah.
Dr. Scott Edison:
Which in academics changing anything, it was like pulling teeth. That's for sure. You got to figure out a way to make it think it's somebody else's idea and not yours. That's how that's got to work. So I think that started in 2008. I ended up retiring in I guess about a year and a half ago now. Now I'm still filled in. I'm like a substitute teacher. They were like, "Hey, can you come and teach every Monday?" I said, "At this point, I don't want to be anywhere on every anything." I said, "I'm happy to, if you got an issue and you need somebody, give me a call."
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Yeah.
Dr. Scott Edison:
But I don't want to be anywhere,-
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Having a schedule. Yeah.
Dr. Scott Edison:
Yeah. That's the whole purpose of retiring.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
And it's that flexibility and freedom I think that I appreciate the most and not willing to give that up.
Dr. Scott Edison:
Yep. Once you get a taste of that because that's what I was telling them. When you're a dentist, you run a schedule and then especially if you're doing things on the side or you're doing Kois or you're doing CariFree and all that, your time is maxed out. And at the dental school they, I'll just say it, in education, they have no respect for your time. So you're signed up to work 40 hours, but they're happy for you to work 60, 80, whatever you want to.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Yeah.
Dr. Scott Edison:
As long as you keep answering emails, they'll keep throwing things at you, they'll throw you on committees and everything else, so.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Yeah. You know what? Scott, you make a really good point. When I would go on vacation when I was practicing and running a company at the same time, we'd go on vacation and the first thing I would do is take my watch off.
Dr. Scott Edison:
Yeah.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
And I would not wear it for a week. Dana would be like, "Why are you doing that?" And I'm like, "When I'm at work, I'm scheduled in 10 minute increments. Every 10 minutes I've got to be someplace and my life revolves around 10 minutes. And right now I don't want any increments for a week. I don't want know what time it is. I don't care." And that's the way to get away from it all. And I think that, yeah, I get that. I get that Scott.
Dr. Scott Edison:
I was just going to say, and my daughter who's an orthodontist now in practice, and her husband's an orthodontist, so they have two practices and anytime they take time off, she said, "Dad, did you ever get the Sunday night?" She said, "I call them the Sunday night heebie-jeebies." And I said, "I've been off for a week and I come back and oh, I just get the butterflies almost going in practice." I said, "Yeah, every time I took a week off."
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Oh, yeah.
Dr. Scott Edison:
Because you come back, you know there's going to be stack of papers and things you got to deal with.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Yeah.
Dr. Scott Edison:
And so you're never really totally off.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
It doesn't stop while you're gone, right?
Dr. Scott Edison:
That's right.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
The busy nature of my life forced me to break my schedule up into 10 minute slots. Still, it's well documented that using chunks of time to work on certain tasks helps with productivity, especially if you're struggling to get started on something. The Pomodoro technique, for example, was developed by the author Francesco Cirillo in the 1980s and involves working at a high and focused intensity for 25 minute intervals. In his blog Zen Habits, author Leo Babauta also suggests that productivity is about breaking down large tasks into smaller chunks, making whatever you're doing seem less intimidating. When you have chemotherapy, an unintended side effect can be brain fog or chemo brain. This causes cancer survivors to struggle with memory retention and often makes everyday tasks challenging. The National Cancer Institute has a great resource that goes into more detail about chemo brain and offers some tips on how to approach breaking down everyday tasks when you're going through treatment. We'll put a link to that resource in the show notes. Scott has always led a busy professional life and like our other guests, finding out he had cancer came as a shock.
Dr. Scott Edison:
It is a stealthy kind of cancer. For me in particular, I really had no symptoms. I didn't have any of the sore throat or earache or anything like that that you look at for the typical. So by that time I was the clinical director for the fourth year clinic. I was in a meeting with my four group directors and we'd been sitting there for a couple hours talking and at the end of the meeting, one of the guys says, "Scott, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?" I went, "Sure." I had no idea what he was going to say. He said, "You've got a little bit of a swollen lymph node on your neck right there." And he pointed, touched it, and he went, "Right there. Has that been there before?" And I went, "No, I don't remember seeing that." So I went in the bathroom and took a look and I went, "ooh geez." Because I knew at that point in time that for an old guy like me to have a lymph node, wasn't a good thing.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
That's not a good sign. Yeah.
Dr. Scott Edison:
So I went down to the faculty practice and I had a good friend, he's oral pathologist and he was in the faculty practice. I knew he was there and he was seeing patients and his name was Ricardo Padilla. And I said, "Ricardo, if you got a second, can you take a look and see what you think?" And so he felt around and there was other nodes there by that time that you couldn't quite see. And he said, "It's probably nothing Scott," but I could just tell. He said, "But do you mind?" And he said, "I'm going to give my friend Trevor Hackman over there a call. He's the ear, nose and throat, head and neck cancer specialist. Let me see if he can work you in."
So he went into another room and came back. He said, "Well, he'll see you this afternoon at two if you can go." So here I was, I was in a meeting at nine o'clock till I'll say 11 o'clock, went down there 11:30, 2 o'clock I go over next door to the cancer center. So he felt my neck. And one thing I emphasized to dentist when I talked to him, oropharyngeal cancer is not easily seen like when you're doing an exam for tongue cancer, gingival cancer, anything, that type of... He pulled and tugged and looked down at my tonsil and base of my tongue. Went about halfway down my throat. He said, "Do you want me to really be honest with you?" He said, "You're a healthcare professional." I said, "Sure, yeah, that'll be great." He said, "You've got squamous cell carcinoma, you're tonsil." He said, I don't have a biopsy. He said, "But I'm pretty sure of it." And I went, "What?"
So he said, "We can go ahead and do a needle biopsy of your nodes now." And he said, "I can take some samples of your tonsil." So they numb me up, clipped off some of my tonsil, did some needle biopsies and that was Martin Luther King weekend. I remember because the lab was closed on Monday, so I couldn't get my results till the next week. Sure enough came back, squamous cell carcinoma, HPV positive type-16, which he celebrated as a good thing. I was bummed at the whole deal of having cancer.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Oh, right.
Dr. Scott Edison:
And you go in there and your typical response is, especially if you're in academics, you hit PubMed and you start looking up all these things and,-
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
By the time a week goes by, you're totally freaked out.
Dr. Scott Edison:
Totally freaked out. And my wife was freaked out. My kids were freaked out. I mean, I've been fortunate. I've always been a pretty healthy guy, never really had any major problems and,-
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Yeah.
Dr. Scott Edison:
All of a sudden here you are facing this. I started talking about looking at different types of radiation treatment and even now even that's changed even in the five years since I've been treated for that. At that time though, there was photon radiation and then there was proton radiation. Proton radiation was a little bit newer, and our dean was from Pennsylvania, so he had called up there and they recommended I come talk to them. So at that time, we've had a place in the Cayman Islands for close to 40 years now. We were supposed to go down with John Durango and his family down in Cayman, and this was in January. He said, "Come on down."
And so I called them, I said, "Look, I was supposed to go to Cayman. What am I need to do?" They said, "You know what? It's going to take a while to get all these samples run and what we're going to do and all that kind of stuff. So go down there, enjoy yourself." So I went down there. I mostly sit down there and couldn't even think and prayed a lot and freaked out a lot. But I had a friend down there, a neighbor who was a lawyer who had retired from law practice and had gone back to divinity school. So we were sitting there talking and she said, "Scott, I really think you need to go to MD Anderson." She said, "I live in Houston there. They have proton radiation." And she said, "You really need to go there. At least get a second opinion." She said, "So I called them at UNC." They said, "We're perfectly fine with you getting a second opinion."
And I thought, you know what? This was like, I'll say a Wednesday. And so I said, "I don't even know how to get in there." So I'd gone to the grocery store and Cayman in and looked up the number on my phone and called them and the guy said, "You know what? We've got an opening next Thursday. Could you be in Houston next Thursday?" I said, "Well, I can. One way or another, I'll be there."
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Yeah. So you picked the proton therapy, right, radiation. Did they do any chemo?
Dr. Scott Edison:
Yep, I did chemo, I did cisplatin and I'll just say quite honestly, probably and Michael Sessman will tell you the same thing. Probably the hardest thing I've ever done in my life is the chemo and the radiation combined.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Combined.
Dr. Scott Edison:
And what they do now in all the studies mostly are looking at can they de-intensify? What's the dose that really needs to be done? And then now the stereotactic body radiation therapy, SBRT or CyberKnife, that's come on a little bit in head and neck. So that's a real interesting process too, the proton therapy because, so what it does, the way proton, they can dial it in to hit the cancer and then it stops there for the most part where photon radiation will go through and that's why you end up having a lot more damage to the salivary glands and dry mouth and things like that with the photons. Both of them were effective. They told me that at MD Anderson, they said, "Both of them are effective, but we do feel like you'll have less side effects with the proton radiation."
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
How often was the proton therapy radiation and how long were you on the chemo?
Dr. Scott Edison:
First of all, I'll say with the proton radiation, one thing that they do at first is they do a calibration and they make a face mask for you. I don't know if you've ever seen one of those, but,-
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Yeah, I actually saw yours. Yeah, I saw the photo of yours. Yeah.
Dr. Scott Edison:
Yep. So that pins you to the table there. So in my case, in head and neck cases there, at that time it was 33 treatments. So I went for five days a week for a little over six weeks, and then I had one treatment that they weren't sure about, so I ended up doing 34. Then the chemotherapy was once a week for six weeks and we go in there and that would take about four hours to do that. That cisplatin is, they're so paranoid about that. When they come in there, they have two people bring the bag in, both of them have to verify and sign off that's what it is. They change gloves about four different times. You have to witness it each time because it's so poisonous. Then they start the IV. Once they start it, somebody has to watch you the whole time.
So they come by every 30 seconds or so looking. Somebody will change. And so you do that. They were good there, but that's still pretty hard because by the time you get IV started 150 different times, your veins get pretty well depleted and I didn't have a port and then at the end they flush it out, but.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
So what kind of side effects did you experience, Scott, while you were going through all that?
Dr. Scott Edison:
So there's the side effects that happen during treatment, then there's the short-term or about six-month side effects that happen after treatment. And then there's the lifelong side effects that you kind of learn to live with. And John Durango came down to visit. He came down I think after about the second week. So first week, I don't know if you know much about Houston down there, but they have a rodeo down there every year.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Oh, yeah.
Dr. Scott Edison:
They have all these, it's real fun and have all these concerts every night. So the first week I was doing it, I was like, oh man, this is not all that bad so far, but they'd been telling me everything. I think after about three treatments, then it starts to kick in. And then I went for my first chemo and I'd made the terrible mistake of going to eat barbecue that night before. So that next day after my chemo, I thought I was going to die then for sure. I was like, this is the end of it. But you just feel, if you've got the flu times three, I guess is the way I would say once you get rolling with the chemotherapy.
And then the radiation, the goal is because I remember at first I was asking, "So you don't feel like you really have to do surgery and take out the tonsil or do anything like that?" And he was like, "Not really. The way this radiation works." And I come to understand that what that means is they're just literally going to burn the tonsil off so they don't have to cut it off. They'll just burn it off and leave you with no tonsil, a scar there. So same thing gets accomplished.
I would say during treatment, then you start noticing your taste is going away. And you were very nice to send me a lot of CariFree products. I was using that oral spray 50 times a day and as long as I could, I did the treatment rinse, trying to keep the mucositis from coming on. And I did this stuff called Helios and magnesium, and now I think they even do low-level laser treatments to try to keep it, you can help it a little bit, but it's eventually going to do its thing and yeah. So as you lose taste, then you can't eat. And that's what everybody was, I didn't understand that at the beginning, was like talking about putting a feeding tube in and did I want to do a feeding tube? I was like, ah, I don't think I want to do a feeding tube or anything.
But after about there toward the end and also creates, I mean a little bit you can eat. It makes you really constipated and you're supposed to eat, normally I can live on two, I've got a low metabolism. I can live on a couple thousand calories a day easy. I was taking in about 3,500 calories with protein shakes and Wendy's frosties, and that's about all I could eat. I would do 3,500 calories a day and I was still losing about a pound a day. Ended up losing about 20 pounds I guess. Something like that.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Hey, Contrary to Ordinary listeners. If you or someone has been affected by any of the issues raised in this podcast, head over to the Oral Cancer Foundation's website for help and support. You can find a link to that in this episode's show notes. At CariFree, we have several products that have been mentioned throughout Oral Cancer Awareness Month that can help cancer survivors alleviate some of their symptoms. We've also included some links in the show notes for a few of these products. Thanks so much for listening. And now back to our conversation. What are the long-term changes for you, Scott?
Dr. Scott Edison:
So I got a nice little radiation scar right there.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Right. Right.
Dr. Scott Edison:
But mainly, so use form scar tissue, and I did stretches, I did massage, everything like that, and I got a saggy neck anyway, but this side is real soft. This side feels like a sheet of cardboard in there. So I have a lot of cramps in my jaw. I have shoulder pain sometimes. I have to get massage for that because it just pulls on the muscle that way. And again, this is, definitely don't want to sound like I'm complaining, but this is just how to, if you're dealing with a patient and they say, well, my treatment's over just as a dentist, but you got to know that the first few months, you want to really see them. And that's what my periodontist, I went to see him every three months.
I actually went every two months for the first six months and then just be cognitive that it never really goes away. My swallowing, if you wanted to kill me, the easiest way to kill me would be to get a biscuit and make me go in a room and eat it without any water and have to swallow a biscuit or a roll or a piece of bread. That would probably,-
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Something dry.
Dr. Scott Edison:
Something dry would be, nah, ain't going down. But I don't feel like I have really bad xerostomia, but I just can't swallow very well.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Do we get taught well enough to screen for this in school? Are we doing enough? As an educator, what are your thoughts on this, Scott?
Dr. Scott Edison:
I think for sure this type of cancer, oropharyngeal cancer in the past has not been taught well enough. We definitely get a lot of training for how to look under the tongue, pull the tongue out, look at the gingival tissue, look for leukoplakia, any things like that. I didn't know much about it myself, so that was something that we worked hard to change at UNC. But in general, I still think that because there's not a lot of physical signs that you're going to be able to see, the most thing that we really stressed at UNC and when I go speak to a group of dentists or whatever, is to really do a thorough lymph node exam. I think that is the one thing that, you're going to find most of the time, that's the one thing that you're going to find that's going to lead you to this. And we didn't have this on our medical history, the questions like a sore throat that doesn't go away, trouble swallowing, you have any trouble moving your tongue.
The other most common symptom is ear pain that doesn't go away for two or three weeks. If you got an earache and it lasting a couple of weeks, then that's not a good thing. But it's really hard. If we really did an exam to look for the physical sign of what I had or base of the tongue, you can't see it.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
I've been looking at some statistics and I think it's like 73% of oropharyngeal cancers are diagnosed from lymph node. That's the first symptom or the first sign is a swollen lymph node. So it's really, I think, imperative on us as a profession to make sure we're doing those lymph node exams.
Dr. Scott Edison:
Yep. I think that's it.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
And teaching people and hygienists. They're the first line provider that a lot of times they're doing the head and neck cancer exam and just how important that lymph node exam is.
Dr. Scott Edison:
Yep, exactly. And think about this too, Kim, when's the last time you went to your primary care physician and he did a lymph node exam of your neck?
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Never. You know what? Never.
Dr. Scott Edison:
Yeah.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
You get the full exam, but it doesn't include that.
Dr. Scott Edison:
They're checking your heart and your stomach and everything like,-
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
They take the tongue to your pressor blade and say ah, they look in your mouth and they check your reflexes on your knees and they check your prostate. But I can honestly say I've never had a head and neck lymph node exam from a physician.
Dr. Scott Edison:
Yep. I agree with you.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
In 2024, there are over 18 million cancer survivors in the United States, and that number continues to grow with each passing year. This is a huge achievement worth celebrating. However, we also need to think about improving the quality of life of those people whose lives might look very different now. For Scott and many others, having other cancer survivors to speak to became a real lifeline during and after their treatment.
Dr. Scott Edison:
If you want to see somebody come out of their shell, if they're a cancer survivor, just have them meet another person who just got diagnosed with cancer. I'm in a little support group that when somebody gets diagnosed, they'll give us a call and then I follow up. I followed up with a lot of those folks even a couple years later and they're like, the best thing for me to do is to talk to somebody who's just been diagnosed. That really helps me more than anything because I feel like I can help them to understand what they're getting ready to go through, and it helps me to understand what I'm going through, still going through and all. It is amazing, like say if you got a red car, all of a sudden, it seems like everybody on the road's got a red car, but I have had people either through the Kois Center or through friends that are dentists or just not even that, the youngest I've had, I had a pediatric dentist here in Charlotte, 40 years old, a little bit younger than my daughter.
He called me. He said, "Somebody said you had tonsil cancer." I said, "Yeah." And he said, "I do too." He said, "I can't believe it." And he was the same way. Somebody saw a lymph node and he was like, "Can I keep working?" I mean, when you're that age and you're got a busy practice and you're trying to figure out how you're going to do all this treatment, that's a whole nother issue there for folks that are going through this. There's so much support. That's the other thing that we as dentists, I think when we do have patients that are going through any kind of cancer treatment, is to be nice to them, help them out, see what you can do a little bit extra for them when they come in the office, maybe give them some free CariFree or something.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Yeah. Well, I try to do that.
Dr. Scott Edison:
Well, I know you do. Yeah.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Yeah. Scott, you're a real, happy, positive person, right? What did you do personally just to stay positive through that whole experience?
Dr. Scott Edison:
The cancer nurse that was there at MD Anderson, he was a guy, he had been doing it for, I think he retired after I was done. I think he had done it for 30 years. And he said, "During this treatment," he said, "You're not going to like any of this." He said, "You got to be tough because you'll find out how tough you can be when the only choice you have is to be tough." He said, "Positive attitude is a lot in the battle and getting out." And they told me, go out and walk as much as you can. So we got out every night, even though I didn't want to, didn't walk. And I think maybe playing sports helped a little bit as far as knowing that you got to just bear it and get with it and everything like that.
Had somebody tell me something interesting that we were talking and they said, "Everybody talks about your birthday, but something that you don't know that's equally or more important is your death day." When your health is really good, you don't ever even think about it, but as soon as you get a cancer diagnosis, or maybe it could be heart failure or whatever it is, and then you've got a timeline on it or a possible timeline, boy, that just changes your whole mind. But you can't let it rule your life. You've still got a life to live.
Nobody knows how long they're going to live. And you have to really just say, look, I do affirmations every morning, and my major affirmation is, I am so glad to be here today. I'm going to do what I can and make this day be a happy day. I'm going to do what I can to help somebody. I want to make somebody's life better by me being in this world, whatever it is, if it's just something little or if I can't, I don't want to cause any trouble for anybody. It's got to be a choice, but it's not an easy choice to do things like that.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Having support is, I think is so important. Yeah.
Dr. Scott Edison:
Yep. Family can help you and it sometimes needs to be broader than just your family.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Scott, is there anything that you would want our listeners to know, anything that we didn't talk about that they should be aware of or you'd want them, any message you'd want them to know?
Dr. Scott Edison:
Know that this is the fastest growing cancer, and be aware of that. And like we were talking, do your lymph node exams. Take those seriously. Take 30 minutes to go back and look at the signs and symptoms of oropharyngeal cancer, and then be an advocate for all your patients going through cancer treatment. That's the other thing, is don't just assume that they're doing great. As a healthcare professional, we can ask a lot of questions and we're trained at the Kois Center to ask a lot of follow up and detailed questions. I think this is an area there when you've got somebody that's going through any kind of cancer treatment is, "How can I help? What kind of problems are you having? What kind of dental problems are you having? Is there anything mentally that I can help you with or any areas like that?" I was surprised even at the dental school in our clinic when we would have some of these folks that come through and we would start doing that. People love their dentist, lots of times more than their primary care doctors. And they would unload on us.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Oh yeah.
Dr. Scott Edison:
And just start talking. "My family just doesn't understand. I'm not the same," and things like that. So I think that's the points that I would say is to just be aware that your patients may need you more than just dental, but they definitely need you dentally too.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Yeah. Scott, I made this comment to Michael Sessman when we did the interview and oral cancer, oropharyngeal cancer, and it's abstract and out there, and then it hits somebody close to you, like people you know, like you and Michael and Mike Milligan. Suddenly it's like all these people that I know have had oropharyngeal cancer. And I think for me, it was a huge wake-up call, particularly with you and Michael. It was like, oh my God, this is real. And this is happening to not just to the old truck driver that was a heavy drinker, smoker, whatever kind of, we used to catch to that kind of profile.
Dr. Scott Edison:
And that was the stereotype.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
That was the stereotype and profile, and now it's not. Right. And this happening to anybody and everybody, and it suddenly became, for me, it solidified and became this is real. And I think that it's really important for us to get that message out to our profession and to the public to be aware. People can do self exams.
Dr. Scott Edison:
Yeah. Yep. You can. You can definitely do a node self exams. And then we, so that's the other thing that we started doing in our papers that we give out to new patients at the dental school, is we put a little sheet on there about feel your nodes and the things about having an earache that doesn't go away. If you ever have these symptoms, you notice these symptoms, they are related dentally to or to your mouth, let us know. And then we try to follow up with those kind of questions. But I think that's something, and I think that's an area we need to improve in, in dental practice because I think that is a very much overlooked area.
And we don't know what percent of people we're missing that we could help, and maybe they get eventually diagnosed. I'm sure they do eventually, but like I say, by the time it gets to stage two, stage three, stage four, I had a guy in treatment with me down there doing the proton therapy. It was a recurrence, and he had his voice box taken out. He had part of his jaw resected away, and it was all from tonsil cancer. Same thing that I had. He just ignored it for two years.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
As Oral Cancer Awareness Month draws to a close, I want to once again point you toward the extensive resources in this episode's show notes. Oral cancer is so easy to miss, but dentists have a unique opportunity to screen their patients quickly and efficiently. Catching any cancer early could mean the difference between life and death. Thank you so much Dr. Scott Eidson for joining me today. And thank you for going on this inspiring journey with me. Around here we aim to inspire and create connections. We can't do it without you. If this conversation moved you, made you smile, or scratched that little itch of curiosity today, please share it with the extraordinary people in your life. And if you do one thing today, let it be extraordinary. Bye for now.