A quick Timeline to follow

My dad found out he had cancer under his tongue in the spring of 1996. Nobody wants their tongue "removed" so in the summer he had radiation treatments to try to kill the cancer. Gamma radiation kills all cells, not just the cancerous ones, and the consequences of the radiation were bad enough, but it didn't get the cancer. So by the end of the summer, the skin on the outside of his cheeks looked like a burnt marshmallow stretched over a raw tomato. His salivary glands had been destroyed, so that "cotton mouth" feeling we all have when we wake up in a house with low humdity was his fate forevermore. And the radiation has an effect on how things heal - not as well as they would have otherwise.

So right after Christmas in 1996 they perform the surgery. You could not make this up:

The cancer was in the bone, so they removed his jaw bone from his chin to his right ear. The right side of his face looked like a Salvadore Dali painting.

Cut the tongue in half lengthwise from the tip back down into the throat - remove.

Take the pectoral (chest) muscle, and cut it lengthwise into four strips, leaving all of them anchored at the sternum.

Take 1/4 of the pectoral muscle, detach it at the shoulder, and and sew the free end to the remaining half of the tongue.

Leave the bottom 1/4 anchored at the shoulder as it was, and hope it can operate the arm at 25% capacity.

Take 1/4 of the muscle, detach it at the shoulder, and use it to fill in along the side of the mouth where the jaw bone was.

Use the last 1/4 of the muscle, detach it at the shoulder, and fill in the remaining hole at the back of the throat.

Raw muscle cannot be exposed to open air, so a skin graft must be taken from the inside of the thigh to cover the new "tongue" (old chest) muscle. The skin is taken from the thigh because there is not much hair there, nevertheless, hair will grow on this skin, which is now in the mouth. This can be removed by laser treatments, but some of it will still grow.

And there he is; if he picked up his arm, his mouth would open. But he learned to eat soft food, he loved his breakfast, and he got on with his life. He even got back to smoking. He told me that he woke up in the middle of the night and said his legs were kicking. So after four months of being a non-smoker, he lit one up and said it solved his problem.

Without because there was still a hole in the back of his mouth, they re-cast the upper plate of his dentures to be about an inch longer, with a "finger" that covered the hole. This was called an "opturator" (look it up, it means to "cover a hole")He had to hold his cigarette between his pinky and his ring finger of his left hand, and use his thumb and index finger to hold his nostrils closed.