skp,

I had a very similar situation to the one you are describing involving your husband. About a month prior to my Dx of Base of Tongue right side, I had undergone a major dental project involving the replacement of a lower right side 4 tooth bridge with my wisdom tooth serving as the rear anchor. Several months following my Tx I began to experience very slight pain from the area around this wisdom tooth. I went to my general dentist who in his 30 plus years of practice had had very little experience with a head/neck cancer patient and the resulting problems from treatment. He did take an xray and was shocked to see that there was virtually no bone present holding the widsom tooth. He said probably the forward anchor tooth was all that was actually holding the entire bridge in place. This is then when the headaches began.

Bottom line, I went under the care of an Oral Surgeon who was very familiar with the situation and he prescribed that I undergo 20 HBO treatments prior to his removing the wisdom tooth followed by 10 more afterwards. It was explained to me that this would lessen the possiblity of contracting ORN from roughly a 25 to 30% chance to less than 5%. It just so happened that I ended up falling into the aforementioned 5% with ORN after all. Not only that but the HBO treatments caused permanent damage to my previous perfect distance vision but corrected my near vision to where I no longer need magnifier reading glasses. I had been using 2.50 power readers for several years.

I guess I have mixed feelings regarding the results I received from the HBO treatments although my Oral Surgeon seems to think we have the ORN under control and that it could have been worse without the HBO treatments. I guess there is no way to know for sure.

Bill D.