Followers of Rambaldi

thebrightoptimist:

Mary was diagnosed with Stage 3 squamous cell carcinoma (tongue cancer) in July of 2009. As a non-smoker her entire life, this came as quite a shock. She had half of her tongue removed and remade from from a skin graft in her arm.

A month after her surgery, she began six weeks of daily radiation treatments and chemotherapy. She lost sixty-five pounds but managed to keep most of her hair, which she considered a fair trade-off. Unfortunately, the radiation also took a heavy toll on her mouth, killing most of her salivary glands. Without the use of saliva, a person’s teeth tend to go bad in less than a year and this is what’s happened to Mary.

Her surgeon and her dentist both told her that dentures and implants are they only way to fix this problem.

As it stands, she’s already broken off one tooth in the front of her mouth and before she could have the others removed, she spent forty hours in a hyperbaric tank - another side effect of the radiation treatment. After her teeth are removed, she will spend another twenty hours to help heal her mouth before she can continue the process… which will take an entire year.

The State of Washington will cover the extraction, but not the dentures OR the implants. This is why we’re trying to raise $30,000 in three 10k spurts.

PLEASE REBLOG