Smoking can change your life tremendously. There are many different cancers smoking causes and we will
mention as many as we can. Laryngeal cancer is one of them. It affects the larynx, which is part of the throat.
Once you have this cancer, if can be treated by two methods: x-ray therapy, and surgery. In the case of surgery,
you may have partial or total loss of your larynx. Serious changes in speech will happen if the entire larynx is
removed. One, you will have to learn a new method of speech if you want to be able to communicate with the world.
Of course, most people do, and they will have to learn to swallow air and bring it back up. In other words, you will
have to burp and form words with the sound. If for some reason you can't master this, tissue will be replaced in
order to gain back your speech.
When we were in seventh grade, we met people that had this happen to them. Three people visited our school.
They were called 'The Lost Chords'. Two of them had to use the method of bringing air back up. The other one had
a kind of microphone that he pressed to his throat. Then he would try to speak and the electro-larynx would bring
up his voice to a louder volume. He sounded like a computer! All three of them had a small hole in their throat, (a
tracheostomy), for they didn't use the upper part of their throat to speak. They don't breath through their nose,
either. They can't swim, and they have to be extremely careful when they take a shower, because they could easily
drown if any water gets in the tracheostomy. If you think about this in the big swing of things, they were lucky.
They are still alive and can tell us why we shouldn't smoke. When they spoke to us about what had happened, we
almost ran out of tissues. It was so sad what they had done to themselves by sheer ignorance. They didn't know
that smoking could easily kill them. Scientists were just learning about the horrible effects. And they turned out to
be very horrible indeed.
Don Young's Gripping Story is about how he survived laryngeal cancer. He too had a tracheostomy. Every
morning he has to swallow a two foot long tube so he can eat breakfast. This sad but true story will tell you about
the horrors of smoking.
