When 16-year-old Adam McCalmont first complained to his parents about an aching jaw, they hadn’t thought it was anything to be worrying about – until the pain came to be so much that it interfered with McCalmont’s sleep and forced his mom to quit her job just to tend to her teenage son.
At McCalmont’s first visit to the doctor, he was prescribed antibiotics. But after McCalmont took the medication for a month, the whole left side of his face swelled up in one night.
His parents rushed him back to the hospital, which is when the doctors finally gave McCalmont the proper diagnosis: He had an aggressive form of jaw cancer that was growing rapidly.
McCalmont underwent a biopsy, which allowed his doctors to determine that he had mesenchymal chondrosarcoma, a type of cancer that most often grows within the bone and spreads with shocking speed.
Given the position of McCalmont’s tumor in his jaw, in close proximity to his brain, his doctors worried that delaying any form of treatment would give the tumor ample time to either paralyze McCalmont for life, or take his life.
In the months following McCalmont immediately entered six rounds of chemotherapy treatment to control the tumor until it was better positioned for doctors to remove through surgery.
To everyone’s relief, the tumor began responding after the second round of treatment by gradually reducing in size. Once doctors determined it was small and safe enough to operate, they performed a 19-hour surgery on the teen to remove his orange-sized tumor and repair the muscles and arteries in his face that had been destroyed by the disease.
McCalmont’s doctors wanted to fully repair the function and mobility of McCalmont’s face, so they took bone, muscle, and artery grafts from his leg to supplement the region of his jaw that had been affected.
Right now, it’s still too soon to say how well McCalmont will recover – he’s still struggling to move the left side of his face – but he and his family are hopeful.
The teen’s mother said, “Compared to what I'd prepared myself for, he looks really well. … I don't even think you could start to describe what this has been like, but I've got my strength from Adam.
“There's no point in sitting there feeling sorry for ourselves. I'm sure every family with a child with cancer thinks, "why us" but we just have to get up and get on with it.”
