He has lost one-third of his tongue, one-half of his jaw, multiple lymph nodes and much of the connective tissue on the right side of his neck, but Rick Bender still spends his years traveling, talking and teaching.
His speech is somewhat slurred, and due to nerve damage in his right arm, his movements are shortened, but Bender drives his point home just by standing before crowds of teenagers, because his appearance alone tells a story.
Go ahead, take my picture, said Bender, 40, addressing a group of 10th-grade health class students at the Ballston Spa Central School District.
With his disfigured face, Bender doesn’t mind being the poster child for the chilling dangers of tobacco. In fact, he wants all teenagers to keep in mind the damage done by the oral cancer he contracted after chewing tobacco for 10 years, starting at age 12.
`I started using ‘spit tobacco’ because of peer pressure because I didn’t want to smoke cigarettes, and because I wanted to be like the pro baseball players,` said Bender. `My parents taught me that smoking gave you lung cancer, and I thought tobacco could only harm you if you smoked it. All the ads said, ‘Take a pinch instead of a puff.’`
By February 1988, as Bender’s habit led him to go through a tin of tobacco a day, he discovered a small white spot on the side of his tongue. After ignoring it for months, he had the site biopsied, and was diagnosed with oral cancer. He was 25 years old.
`I had a very aggressive, fast-growing cancer, and I was told there was no remission; it wouldn’t stop until it was cut out,` said Bender, who was wearing a `no snuff` T-shirt and baseball cap.
Advised his surgery would take two hours, Bender woke up more than 12 hours later with a huge chunk of his face missing. As it turned out, the dime-sized bump was just the tip of the iceberg: the cancer had burrowed down into his lymph glands.
`I remember my father sitting by my bed in the hospital crying,` said Bender. `There wasn’t anything left for them to cut out. I lost such an enormous portion of my tongue; I can’t even lick my lips. They gave me two years to live.`
Against the odds, Bender did survive, and now travels the country hoping to scare teens straight.
`I don’t care if you roll it into a cigarette, stuff it into a pipe, or chew it ` it’s still tobacco,` said Bender. `The younger and healthier you are, the faster the cancer grows. I’ve met people who got oral cancer under the age of 30 in all these years speaking to groups, and there are only 11 of them still alive in this country.`
The 1.2-ounce tins of chewing tobacco Bender once used hold the equivalent of 4-6 packs of cigarettes.
`If your body absorbed all the nicotine in this tin at once, you’d be dead on the spot,` said Bender, waving a colorful green can. `You’d die of an overdose.`
Bender’s presentation also included graphic slides of irreversible damage to the lips, teeth and gums, including leukoplakia, a pre-cancerous state found in 60 to 78 percent of spit tobacco users.
`Spit tobacco has dirt, sugar and salt in it,` said Bender. `That’s in addition to benzene, lead, acetone, formaldehyde and about 30 other ingredients that belong in a car or in paint remover, but not in your body.`
The sobering presentation was brought to the high school by the Saratoga County chapter of Reality Check, a teen-launched campaign against the tobacco industry’s misleading and false ads about tobacco use, and in particular, the ads that appear to be aimed at teenagers.
`The companies need kids to start smoking, or they’d go out of business,` said Nikki Fuller, a 10th grader at the high school and member of Reality Check. `We want to bring out into the public what’s really going on.`
Although most of the high schoolers gathered in the assembly were savvy about the dangers of tobacco use, they admitted some of their peers aren’t being so wise.
`Kids do smoke and chew,` said Matt Strait, a 10th grader. `You can’t buy it until you’re 18, so they get older kids to buy it for them.`
`That’s the problem with teenagers in general; they believe they’re invincible,` said Lauren Rowland, extension community educator for Reality Check. `This is why we bring the personal stories to them. When they see someone visually damaged, it has a deeper impact than someone preaching to them.`
For information about Reality Check, log onto www. realitycheckny.com. “