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Enhancing the Mind and the Body: Knowledge, Exercise Keys to Scientist’s Difficult Cancer Journey
Feri Farassat believes in education: He has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s and Ph.D. in aerospace engineering. As an aeroacoustics scientist at NASA Langley Research Center, Dr. Farassat works on reducing the noise of all kinds of aircraft. For his efforts, he’s won awards from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics as well as from NASA.
But some of the most important knowledge he’s ever acquired, he says, is the information he armed himself with to beat cancer of the head and neck.
 “Knowledge helps you keep fighting,” he explains. “You can find solutions for most of the problems you have. Just be ready to study.”
Farassat researched his symptoms, his diagnoses and his treatment options. He even researched the physicians who took care of him at the Sentara Cancer Institute at Sentara CarePlex Hospital in Hampton. Today, he praises the treatment he received at Sentara CarePlex, including his physicians, his oncologists and his nurses. He had known from the beginning that with his positive attitude and their collective knowledge, his prognosis was excellent.
“I never once thought I was going to die,” he says, “even when the cancer started to spread.”
Listening to His Body
As a daily exerciser, Farassat has been healthy all his life and rarely visits the hospital. But the 62-year-old Hampton, Virginia, resident does keep track of his own health by knowing and listening to his body. So when he experienced burning from an irritation inside his mouth, he didn’t hesitate to see a physician.
He knew the irritation in his right cheek and gums was lichen planus, an inflammatory disease that usually causes no pain. On rare occasions with smokers and drinkers, it could turn into cancer, but Farassat didn’t smoke and only drank moderately. In September 2004, he felt a pea-sized spot on his gum burning, and upon inspection, noted its bright red color. “I immediately called my friend and oral surgeon Dr. Jack Mrazik.”
Diagnosis: Fast-growing Cancer
Dr. Mrazik removed the affected areas with a laser and biopsied a sample, which came back as precancerous. Since the infection had been completely removed, no one expected what happened next.
Farassat returned to Dr. Mrazik when the area was not healing or producing scar tissue as it should. He also was experiencing pain under a tooth in the affected area.
“Dr. Mrazik didn’t like the look of it at all,” he says. The doctor pulled one tooth and removed more tissue for the pathologist. The prognosis came back: It was cancer, and it had spread. Dr. Mrazik decided to remove four more teeth and tissue until he hit healthy tissue.
Between September and December 2004, Farassat had four oral surgeries. In February 2005, Farassat noticed two lymph nodes on the right side of his neck growing — and they were painful, he remembers.
A PET scan revealed the cancer had spread to the lymph nodes in his neck; it was classified as stage three. Geoffrey Bacon, M.D., an ear, nose and throat specialist, was brought in. Both physicians were shocked by the spread of the cancer, says Farassat. In April 2005, Dr. Bacon and his partner, Michael Jacobson, M.D., removed 31 lymph nodes in his neck and chest in an almost three-hour surgery. Only two lymph nodes came back cancerous. But since the cancer had spread far quicker from the mouth to the neck than in normal cases, Elizabeth Harden, M.D., an oncologist, recommended a regimen of radiation and chemotherapy. Farassat was ready.
Challenging Treatment Regimen
In May 2005, he started his six weeks of radiation with a chemotherapy treatment at the beginning, middle and end of those six weeks. Even with his large doses of chemotherapy, Farassat says for him, the radiation treatment was the worst of the two. He suffered lesions in the mouth and uncomfortable neck and jaw aches, in addition to losing totally his sense of taste.
“Radiation destroyed my taste buds, and for about four months, even water tasted extremely bad,” he says. Today, he estimates that 95 percent of his sense of taste has returned.
It was a brutal regimen, he says, but again, knowledge helped him through it. His radiation oncologist, Scott Williams, M.D., had explained all possible side effects and how to deal with them, including exercising the jaw and neck, taking medications and making nutritional adjustments. “First thing every morning, I exercise my jaw and neck,” he says. “It hurts to do, but I don’t think about the pain. I just do it.”
Living Through the Hard Parts
Through it all, Farassat kept exercising — walking three miles a day. The support of his friends at NASA Langley and his family, including his wife and four children ranging in age from 15 to 31 at the time, was crucial to his recovery. And so was the support of his nurses at Sentara CarePlex Hospital, he says.
He explains: For his radiation treatment with the linear accelerator, Farassat had to be placed in a tight mask bolted to a hard bed — “terrifying,” he says — to keep his head and neck in the same position so the treatment would not damage his teeth and vital tissues in the neck. The nurses operating the equipment took turns checking on him through that difficult portion of his treatment.
“Without my four radiation nurses and my chemo nurse, I could not have done it,” he says. “They were just an important part of my recovery.”
Solution for Everything
Today, Farassat has to have regular checkups for recurrence, which so far have been negative, and he says he feels great. Although it was a challenging time, he is grateful for the treatment. “I was lucky right from the beginning,” he says.
He advises others with difficult diagnoses to continue asking questions and searching for answers.
“I believe there’s a solution for everything. You just have to ask,” he says. “There is a tremendous amount of resources out there to help you, including your family, friends, nurses, the doctors and the Internet.”
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