Figure 5: Excision of a tongue tumour and reconstructive surgery
From: Making oral cancer screening a routine part of your patient care, Part 1
Images courtesy of Dr Fayette Williams DDS MD. Dr Williams explains: ‘This is one of the bigger tongue cancers I've seen. Unfortunately many people wait until it's too late to do anything simple. This lady's entire tongue was cancerous and it was eating into her right mandible. I did a total glossectomy, partial mandibulectomy, and bilateral neck dissection. Her cancer was so big that I did a “mandibular swing” to open her mandible up like a book to get access to the base of tongue area down by her larynx. Her tongue was reconstructed with an anterolateral thigh free flap. The skin and muscle from her leg is isolated on a pedicle of the artery and vein that supplies the graft. The vessels are clamped and re-anastomosed to vessels in her neck under a microscope using 9-0 nylon sutures. This is a transplant within her own body so that the new graft is viable and living just like it was at her leg so that it withstands radiation therapy very well.’
