My first visit to a tattoo parlor reinforced the certainty that I would never get inked up.
I was there with my wife (getting her third) and my son, supposedly getting his first tattoo, a Christmas present I agreed to buy after much haranguing.
“Dude,†said the tattoo guy, using the name he seemed to think we all were born with. “You want me to touch up your other one while you’re here?â€
He was talking to the 19-year-old, whose face, along with my wife’s, turned ashen.
They were busted. Turns out the new stepmom helped direct the teen stepson to the tattoo parlor a couple of months earlier, with the anti-tattoo father kept in the dark.
I have never been back to a tattoo parlor, but last month, I got my first ink.
As I lay on a movable table connected to a CT scan in the David C. Pratt Cancer Center at Mercy Hospital, a nurse stuck a pin with a single drop of ink into the center of my chest.
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It’s my cancer tattoo.
Every Monday through Friday morning, the therapists at Mercy use my tattoo to line up the lime-green mesh mask that covers my head and shoulders as I receive my daily radiation dose.
All of a sudden, I get the tattoo fascination.
My single dot of ink puts me, with my new friends Stephie and Jim, in a club whose members await radiation about the same time I do. With the cancer patients all over the city and state and nation who march into such centers every day seeking life-saving treatment. With actor Michael Douglas, who created quite a stir a couple of years ago when he announced that his throat cancer had been caused not by smoking but by the human papillomavirus.
I have the same malady.
So do an increasing amount of men my age, in their 40s and 50s, who don’t smoke, the traditional suspect in throat cancers. It’s why researchers like Dr. Brian Nussenbaum at Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine are trying to increase educational efforts about HPV-caused cancers.
While most tobacco-related cancers are decreasing in prevalence because of reduced smoking rates, HPV-related cancers, particularly head-and-neck cancers in men, are increasing. The Centers for Disease Control reports about 33,000 HPV-related cancers per year. In women, the virus generally leads to cervical cancer.
Nussenbaum says that between 70 percent to 80 percent of people are likely to have HPV at some point. It’s a naturally occurring virus that is transmitted into the mouth primarily through oral sex. But most people don’t even know they have it. In probably about 95 percent of the cases, people’s bodies clear the HPV virus naturally.
A tiny percentage find a home in tonsil or tongue base cells, and they can sit dormant for a decade or longer before turning cancerous.
It’s disconcerting to find out a sexually transmitted disease caused your cancer. But it’s also reality. And once you are sitting in the doctor’s office and hear the “c-word,†not much else matters.
The prognosis for many HPV-caused cancers (including mine) is significantly better than similar tobacco-related ones.
As I write this, I’m about four weeks through a six-week regimen of radiation and chemo treatments. The toughest weeks are ahead, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. This will be my last column for a few weeks. Now you know why.
The good news is that like many cancers, when caught early, many oral cancers are completely treatable. So to turn the tide on their spike in recent years, doctors are urging more screenings, by both dentists and family physicians, whenever they have a patient who has a swollen gland or other symptoms.
Also, researchers are urging more parents to have their pre-teen children, boys and girls, inoculated with the HPV vaccine. Unfortunately, use of the vaccine hasn’t caught on in the U.S. in they way that cancer researchers would like to see.
“It probably has something to do with the stigma of it being related to a sexually transmitted disease,†Nussenbaum says.
It’s time for America to get over that stigma. Cancer is cancer.
My youngest children have now seen up close the damage HPV can do. They will be vaccinated.
But I’m still keeping them away from the tattoo parlor as long as I can.
