The glands in your throat and mouth that make your saliva are called the salivary glands. To begin the process of destroying consumed food, enzymes found in your saliva perform this process and have the added advantage of helping to prevent infections that may occur in the throat and mouth. Growths or tumors can occur beneath the lips, hard and soft palate and inside the cheeks and lips.
Instructions
1. Understand that exposure to certain types of radioactive items, along with occupational risks of working with things such as silica dust or alloy made of nickel will increase your risk for developing salivary cancer, as well as smoking, a diet that may be low in vegetable content and high in animal fat.
2. Think about all of your options for treatment as you may have more than one choice available to you. It is important to know the stage of your cancer, your overall care and health and the effect that the treatments will have on your activities of living such as chewing, speaking, swallowing, etc. In most cases, there are 3 types of treatment therapies you can undergo--radiation, chemotherapy or surgery. You may also need a combination of these to help treat your cancer.
3. Surgically remove all of the cancer that is found in the lymph nodes and in small glands. Your doctor can do this by doing a surgery called a neck dissection. This removes the tumor that may be in the salivary glands and the parotid gland which is near the salivary glands. With any surgical consideration, comes the need to know what type of things will affect your recovery needs. Things that may occur can include infections or bleeding or difficulty with swallowing or speaking.
4. Become knowledgeable about radiation therapy which is a high energy type of x-ray that shrinks or kills many types of cancer cells. For salivary cancer, a type of radiation called "external beam" radiation is widely used for treatment of this and treatment done for 5 days a week for about 6 weeks. Radiation is also used after surgery to assist with easing symptoms of bleeding, pain and difficulty swallowing.
5. Prevent the spread of this type of cancer by undergoing chemotherapy if your doctor recommends it. These are medications used to kill cancer and are also used widely to prevent the spread of cancer to any other areas of the body not controlled by having surgery or radiation. These medications help to shrink the size of tumors and used in conjunction with other therapies such as radiation or surgery.
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