AMMAR | Dx Age 19 | Parotid Gland
In the middle of 2006 when I was 19 years old I started to feel that I was always tired and then I started to see something showed up behind my left ear. It didn’t hurt but what was hurting was I was always feeling something stressing near my ear bone. I told my Mom that I felt something wrong around my left side of my ear. Then we went to a doctor and at first the doctor they said it was nothing and gave me some medicine.
I felt that my situation was becoming worse. Then we decided to go another doctor and he said we have to do scans to see what’s going on. After the scans the doctor reviewed them and said it was a tumor and we have to do a surgery because they didn’t know yet what it was. After doing the surgery they took a biopsy and the doctor told me to my face, it’s ACC “adenoid cystic carcinoma in the parotid gland”.
I was shocked when I listened but my family was supporting me a lot to get through this. Then we searched for the next steps We found one of the most reputable oncology doctors here in Egypt and he decided to follow the surgery with 28 radiation sessions.
From then up until the middle of 2011 things were good, but then the tumor came back. It was around the location where surgery was originally done. At that point I had another surgery followed with another 28 radiation sessions.
Again, things were good until October 2016, where after 10 years, and now I was 29, my follow-up scans showed a recurrence back again in the parotid gland plus two lung mets. This time it was the hardest because of the limitations of treatment as I took the high dose of radiation and did two surgeries all of this in the same area already.
After searching for a long time, we decided to take two Gamma Knife sessions to treat the parotid gland and to wait and watch the lung mets. At this point I’ve treated the parotid gland by the Gamma Knife but I still have a 2CM tumor it could not reach in my left jaw, and we are monitoring the lung mets.
Thanks for taking the time to read my message.
Regards, Ammar (2017)