Face of anti-smoking campaign hopes to warn others

WHEN ADRIAN Pilkington wants to say something, he takes a breath through a small tube inserted in his windpipe, covers the opening with his right thumb and begins to talk.

It's hard work. Last year surgeons removed his tongue, part of his oesophagus and his lymph glands, after he was diagnosed with mouth cancer caused by 30 years of smoking. In a gruelling 12-hour operation, they took muscle from his stomach and constructed a new tongue so he could talk. But he can't eat, drink or swallow. When his throat gets dry he gargles water and spits it out.

He has been given six to 12 months to live.

From today, Pilkington, 52, will be the face of a new advertising campaign designed to personalise the graphic warnings on cigarette packets in particular that smoking causes mouth cancer.

Latest figures show 19.9% of New Zealanders smoke. Although this is a record low, Associate Health Minister Damien O'Connor says many of the 619,000 New Zealanders who light up are unaware of, or underestimate, the serious health consequences of smoking.

Pilkington says living with the consequences is terrible. "Cancer is a horrible disease. It's hideous."

But he says if he can stop other people from smoking it will be worth it.

"I hope that people will look at those ads and learn from my mistake. It's bad living like this."

Before his illness, Pilkington worked as a mechanical engineer, went to the gym four times a week, jet-skied, and held a black belt in karate. He tried to quit smoking many times and for the past 10 years he cut back to just four cigarettes a day. Now he spends most of his time at his Papakura home. He has naps to combat low energy and feeds himself liquids through a tube that goes directly through his abdomen wall into his stomach.

He says he knew about lung cancer but didn't realise he was at risk of mouth cancer.

The first sign that something was wrong was low energy and a loss of appetite. When a mouth ulcer didn't clear up, his sister Alison, an intensive care nurse, told him to go and see a specialist. He was diagnosed on March 5 last year.

"It was my birthday," says Alison. "It was the worst day of my life." She says it's been devastating watching her brother get sick.

Pilkington's surgeon Mark Izzard says head and neck cancers kill more people than cervical cancer. Throat cancer is the most common and 80% of people who get it are smokers.

Pilkington just wants to stop anyone else going through what he has experienced.

"All my life I never considered myself a gambler. I haven't gambled on horses or pokies or casinos but I took the biggest gamble of my life and that was my health. And I lost."

- © Fairfax NZ News